Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here. February 11, 2024 |
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On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET: This week, congressional Republicans shot down a Senate compromise on immigration. Fareed argues it would've made meaningful progress toward fixing a broken US asylum system. The problem with US immigration is the law itself, Fareed says. Migrants can enter the country, claim asylum, and remain while their cases are adjudicated by backlogged courts. By raising the bar for asylum claims, and by allowing the president to deny entry to migrants if border apprehensions hit certain numbers, the bill would have begun to address the heart of the problem, Fareed says. What's more, Fareed argues, Republican criticism of the bill appeared to be disingenuous, as some GOP lawmakers reversed their previous views on whether US immigration law needs to change. "The most obvious proof that (former President Donald) Trump realizes that this bill would give the administration powerful tools to address this crisis is that he is so dead set that it should not pass," Fareed says. "Were it to pass, it might well solve large parts of the border problem—which would not serve him politically. He wrote on social media, 'This Bill is a great gift to the Democrats.' The rest of the West is facing a similar challenge and is grappling with how to adjust immigration and asylum laws. Many countries have taken significant steps. Yet in America, one of its major political parties is determined to inflame the crisis rather than douse it, fiddling while the country burns, hoping that at least it can inherit the smoldering ruins."
After that: a shakeup in Ukraine—and what it will mean for the war. After President Volodymyr Zelensky replaced his top general this week, Fareed talks with Wall Street Journal Chief Foreign-Affairs Correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov about Kyiv's strategy from here on.
What are Israel's plans for Gaza? As the war against Hamas grinds on, Fareed talks with Aluf Benn, editor in chief of the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz, about practical realities and the political pressures on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Joe Biden. Then: America's new problems in Iraq. After an Iran-backed Iraqi militia killed three US soldiers in a drone strike in Jordan two weekends ago, Washington struck back, killing the commander it said was responsible—and causing a row with Baghdad. Fareed talks with Randa Slim of the Middle East Institute about the complicated internal politics of Iraq and the fine lines Washington has walked. The stock market is high, unemployment is low, and inflation has slowed. So why do Biden's poll numbers look so bad? Fareed asks New York Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn. Finally: How do you move on after holding the most powerful office in the world? Donald Trump is running for it again, but Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, and Howard Taft became chief justice of the Supreme Court. Fareed talks with Jared Cohen, author of "Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House." |
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Sizing Up the US–China Risk |
There are plenty of problems in the world, but as Fareed noted recently, perhaps the most dangerous potential flashpoint looks reassuringly calm. Tensions between the US and China, which some fear could spark World War III, have lowered significantly in recent months. Both Washington and Beijing seem to have realized the danger and charted a more diplomatic course. Despite the improvement, some observers still worry. At East Asia Forum, UC Berkeley's Yuhan Zhang writes that the two superpowers will continue to depend on each other economically and will likely cooperate on climate change. China is poised to open its markets further to US businesses. And yet, the US election year could toughen America's tone, and the tech rivalry will continue. In a Foreign Policy essay, Michael Beckley and Hal Brands identify broader-based escalation risks: "First, the territorial disputes and other issues China is contesting are becoming less susceptible to compromise or peaceful resolution than they once were, making foreign policy a zero-sum game. Second, the military balance in Asia is shifting in ways that could make Beijing perilously optimistic about the outcome of war. Third, as China's short-term military prospects improve, its long-term strategic and economic outlook is darkening—a combination that has often made revisionist powers more violent in the past. Fourth, (Chinese leader) Xi (Jinping) has turned China into a personalist dictatorship of the sort especially prone to disastrous miscalculations and costly wars. … Wars are more like earthquakes: We can't know precisely when they will happen, but we can recognize factors that lead to higher or lower degrees of risk. Today, China's risk indicators are blinking red." |
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Has Ukraine Disproved the Value of Conventional War? |
Russian President Vladimir Putin hasn't yet been compelled to stop waging war on Ukraine. Still, victory has eluded him, as Ukraine has stymied Russia's much-larger army. That lack of victory tells us something about modern warfare, Andrew Maher of Arizona State and UNSW Canberra writes for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's The Strategist blog: "The first lesson we might discern from this past decade" of Russia's assault on Ukraine, which began in 2014 and only escalated with Russia's full-blown invasion in February 2022 "is that today's evolved character of war has already adapted to Putin's escalation in 2022. It punishes the overt employment of conventional warfighting methods thus rewarding political and irregular warfare methods that operate below the threshold of conventional responses through relevant populations, using a mixture of violence and non-violence. A second lesson of the Russia-Ukraine war is that conventional warfare is risky; almost too risky to be a useful tool of statecraft. … As (American Enterprise Institute senior fellow) Kori Shake states: 'Russia has been taken off the board as a major adversary of the United States'" by Putin's resource-sapping Ukrainian escapade. |
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Is Senegal's Democracy in Danger? |
When Niger's president was overthrown over the summer, it marked the ninth "coup or attempted power grab" in just over three years in the West and Central African region known as the Sahel, per Reuters' Bate Felix. Will Senegal make it a 10th? Some worry that it will, after President Macky Sall this month delayed the next presidential election, in which he is not running (his second and final term runs out in April), citing disputes over the list of approved candidates. In an editorial, Le Monde describes a complicated and combustible situation: "An incumbent president is using MPs to question the judges responsible for validating candidacies to succeed him. By triggering this institutional crisis in defiance of the separation of powers, Sall claims to be trying to avoid the unrest that could result from a disputed election result. At a time when the country is on edge, due to his actions and an increasingly radical opposition, in a context of endemic poverty where young people are left with no prospects other than emigration, in reality he risks generating such unrest himself." Senegal has been known as a bastion of functioning democracy in West Africa, but The Economist writes that faith in democracy has been declining there. Along with the current political turmoil, the magazine warns, "That places Senegal at the sharp end of a wider decline of faith in democracy in Africa, and a growing appetite for military rule. A coup was once unthinkable in Senegal. No longer." |
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An Ideological Portrait of Putin's 'Russkiy Mir' |
What is Russia, as an idea? Different answers have arisen throughout history, in the 1800s Pan-Slavic movement, Bolshevism, Stalinism, and Russian President Vladimir Putin's aggressive territorial expansionism. But there's also been another idea, "Eurasianism": a form of ideologically infused nationalism that separates Russia from the West. The concept arose among exiled post-revolution intellectuals in the early 20th century and endures today in Putin, Gary Saul Morson writes in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. According to the Eurasianist view of the 1920s, Morson writes: "Above all, this 'Russian world' must acknowledge that its greatest enemy is and always will be Western liberalism. The Bolsheviks mistakenly adopted Western, atheistic Marxism, but they correctly established total control over individual lives in the name of a higher ideal. 'Modern democracy must give way to ideocracy,' (Eurasianist author Nikolai) Trubetskoy argued (in 1925 in "The Legacy of Genghis Khan"), referring to rule based on abstract ideals. Pluralist democracy entails no all-encompassing and uniform philosophy of life, but ideocracy does. … From the start, Eurasianism was not an alternative to totalitarianism but a different form of it. … To an extent Westerners have not appreciated, concern with national identity has shaped Russia's foreign policy over the past decade and accounts for the dramatic shift in its behavior … Since Putin resumed the presidency in 2012, Eurasianist vocabulary has populated his speeches, newspaper articles, and television appearances. Russia's elites have embraced Eurasianist concepts defining Russia as a distinct 'civilization.' The West has become the liberal 'Atlantic' intent on destroying Russian culture, while Russian patriotism is now a matter of 'passionarity,'" a kind of vital energy supposedly derived from geography and ethnicity. |
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