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 18, 2024 |
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On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET: The reported death of anti-corruption crusader Alexey Navalny, announced Friday by Russia's prison service, has reverberated around the world. What does it mean for Russia? What does it say about Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime and its brutal intolerance of dissent? About the state of free speech around the world? Fareed talks with The New Yorker Editor David Remnick, who covered Russia as The Washington Post's Moscow correspondent in the late 1980s and early 1990s and whose book about the Soviet Union's last days, "Lenin's Tomb," won both a Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk Award. Former President Donald Trump has heightened fears in Europe by saying he would encourage Russia to "do whatever the hell they want" to NATO members that haven't met defense-spending benchmarks. How damaging was that comment, and what are European leaders thinking about the possibility of a second Trump term? Fareed asks former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt. Israel's push southward in Gaza continued this week, while ceasefire talks are ongoing through US and Qatari intermediaries. How does this war end, and what are the prospects for a lasting peace in the region? Fareed talks with the Council on Foreign Relations' Richard Haass. Is Giorgia Meloni the new de facto leader of Europe? The Italian prime minister raised concerns when she took office in October 2022, as she hails from a post-fascist political party and became Italy's first far-right national leader since World War II. But since then, as Fareed details, Meloni has fit right in with Europe's political mainstream. It's hard to win an election from jail, but that seems to be what happened in Pakistan this month, as The Washington Post wrote in an editorial. Candidates linked to Imran Khan, the popular former prime minister currently jailed on a series of charges and convictions, won the most seats in Pakistan's parliament despite their party being all but disbanded. Fareed talks with Aleema Khan, sister of the former prime minister who has been visiting her brother in jail, about the vote and what it means for Pakistan. Finally: Tucker Carlson's misguided affinity for Moscow. The former Fox News host conducted a long interview with Putin, and while on his trip to the Russian capital, Carlson praised Russia as superior to the US in several ways. Fareed explains why Carlson is wrong, noting American conservatives' growing, disconcerting sympathy for authoritarians. |
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Can Europe support Ukraine without the US? After former US President Donald Trump promised at a campaign rally that, if elected again, he would encourage Russia to "do whatever the hell they want" to NATO allies that haven't met defense-spending benchmarks, that has become a newly urgent question, as eight coauthors detail in a Der Spiegel feature. "Should the Russians attack a NATO partner in the Baltics, for example, the plan consists of German forces delaying deployment until the U.S. sets its military machine in motion," they note. "There is no proviso for a scenario in which the cavalry from across the Atlantic doesn't come." As for what Ukraine itself is facing on the battlefield, journalists and commentators have noted a shortage of ammunition that could seriously limit Ukraine's ability to defend itself, if Western allies don't help Kyiv reload. Adding to that observation, some have commented that Russia has caught up to Ukraine, in terms of battlefield innovations, as retired Australian Army Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan wrote for Foreign Affairs. Russia's war machine has ramped up, and Moscow's own ammunition stores have been replenished by North Korea. Pointing to all of the above in an essay for the London Review of Books, James Meek also identifies a two-pronged strategy employed by Russia, which "has prosecuted its invasion of Ukraine with two armies in one: an old-style Soviet wartime army of minimally trained soldiers, massed artillery and mechanised divisions, backed up by production lines in the hinterland able to churn out shells by the hundreds of thousands; and a new, emergent Russian army of professional soldiers and relatively small numbers of high-tech weapons which aim to achieve their effect, à la Nato, through precision rather than volume. By cleverly dodging sanctions on imported electronics and machine tools through networks of intermediaries in friendly third countries like China and neutral countries like those in Central Asia; with access to vast reserves of raw materials, which it can use to feed its defence industry and export to fund spending; and by risking the long-term health of its economy by staking everything on a short-term dash for arms output, Russia has been able to keep both armies going." |
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Inside Iran: Resistance and Crackdown |
Iran's late-2022 protest movement, sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after her arrest by the country's "morality police," faded from the headlines last year after a government crackdown. At The Washington Post, Jason Rezaian wrote early last year of show-trials of protesters: "These macabre rituals, culminating in inevitable yet arbitrary executions, are the product of a state killing apparatus charged with keeping the regime in place." But the widespread demonstrations revealed deep fissures in Iranian society, as women went with their heads uncovered in open defiance of the clerical regime and the dress code that had apparently cost Amini her life. At American Purpose, Jeffrey Gedmin writes that, today, "(t)he battle of wills in Iran between rulers and ruled is becoming extraordinary. The pro-democracy protests that rocked Iran in 2022 continue across the country's thirty-one provinces. In December, a viral dance campaign frustrated authorities—and inspired the country." Gedmin also writes of a 34-year-old woman sentenced to 74 lashes due to a photograph of her walking in public without a headscarf. Gedmin quotes the woman on the punishment she endured: "The man began striking my shoulders, my back, my hips, my thighs, my legs. I lost count of the blows. Under my breath, I was reciting: In the name of woman, in the name of life, the garments of slavery were torn apart. May our dark night turn into dawn." |
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Darfur's New Chapter of Violence |
Often overlooked as wars rage in Gaza and Ukraine, Sudan's civil conflict continues. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), under the leadership of Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, is fighting for control of the country (and capital) against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti—the group viewed as a successor to the notorious Janjaweed militias accused of committing atrocities in Darfur in the 2000s. As Ken Opalo wrote in his An Africanist Perspective newsletter late last month, the latter seems to be winning, and the conflict could be poised to get more violent. "Following continued violence since April of last year," the International Rescue Committee warns, "Sudan now faces the most severe hunger levels ever witnessed during what should be the harvest season." At the Stimson Center, Michael Curtin writes that Sudan is becoming a "forgotten war." The state of affairs is particularly grim in West Darfur, Jérôme Tubiana and Joshua Craze write in The New York Review of Books. In December, Maggie Michael reported for Reuters on allegations of a campaign of murder and rape waged against members of the Masalit tribe. In their New York Review essay, Tubiana and Craze write: "As (former Sudanese dictator Omar al-) Bashir had done in 2003, the RSF has denied what happened or blamed it on forces outside their control, which in turns raises questions about whether one can even speak about Hemetti's army as a single entity. Much of the media coverage of the war has turned it into the fight between 'two generals.' But the RSF has heavily recruited from local militias over which Hemetti does not have total control. They have looted cities and resold the spoils at so-called 'Daglo' markets: stolen goods emporiums, named after Hemetti's family, that have sprung up across the country. In (West Darfur capital) El-Geneina, militia forces used RSF logistical support and material to pursue their own agendas, settling old scores. Some of the forces fighting on the RSF's behalf have inherited the Janjaweed's Arab supremacist agenda. … Meanwhile, Darfur is largely cut off from the outside world. … The suffering inflicted on Darfur will not heal quickly." |
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| How Finland Is Beating Homelessness |
A new right-leaning government has pursued austerity measures that have slashed some relevant subsidies, Jan Petter writes in a Der Spiegel feature, but Finland has managed impressive success in the fight against homelessness, with a "Housing First" program that provides homeless people with apartments in special housing developments. "Whereas the number of homeless people has been skyrocketing in Europe in recent years, Finland is the only European Union member state to have almost completely eliminated the problem," Petter writes, before detailing the program and profiling a housing community. "Only around 3,600 people in Finland are currently without a roof over their head, and the country is aiming to make long-term homelessness a thing of the past by 2027. In the capital of Helsinki, it is to vanish by 2025. … Harri Ollinen has a fair amount to say about it. A social worker, Ollinen is head of the residential area on the northeastern outskirts of Helsinki … The estate is made up of 70 small apartments, previously home to university students, where formerly homeless people now live. There is a community hall and a sauna, but they come with clear rules: No violence, and no drugs or alcohol in community spaces." |
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