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 25, 2024 | |
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On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET: A world in crisis: As war rages in Gaza and Ukraine, Fareed says the West is treating these threats as one-offs to be dealt with individually, before normalcy returns. But that's misguided, Fareed argues, as "conflict is the new normal." In this context, Fareed argues, it's all the more concerning that Europe lacks a more robust military-industrial complex and that congressional Republicans "have decided to return to isolationism, hoping that they can bury their heads in the sand and the problems will somehow go away. It should be noted that contrary to popular belief, ostriches do not bury their heads in the sand to escape threats. In fact, it would lead to their asphyxiation. Maybe the birds understand something congressional Republicans don't." After that: US aid to Ukraine is drying up, former President Donald Trump has threatened under-spending NATO allies, and Europe is on edge. Fareed talks with Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski about Ukraine, Europe, NATO—and returning to power in Poland after a right-wing populist government that drew criticism for its democratic record. Until recently, El Salvador was a violent country overrun by gangs. Today it boasts a lower murder rate than the US. That's the work of President Nayib Bukele—the self-proclaimed "world's coolest dictator" whose broad anti-gang crackdown has drawn sharp criticism over alleged civil-rights abuses. Fareed discusses Bukele's enormous popularity and authoritarian bent with Americas Quarterly Editor-in-Chief Brian Winter. Antisemitic incidents have soared since Oct. 7, and some of America's top universities have struggled to cope. Fareed talks with author Dara Horn, who has examined the lives of Jews among non-Jews and who lays out the current problem and its deep historical roots in an essay for The Atlantic. Finally: A former general with a controversial past won Indonesia's recent presidential election, raising fears of authoritarian backsliding in the world's fourth-most-populous country and most-populous Muslim country. But he did so with some tacit support from the current president, popular democratic reformer Joko Widodo. Fareed examines this intriguing turn and what it says about democracy globally. Tonight on CNN and CNNi: Tune in to watch Fareed's latest special report, "Why Iran Hates America," which details the hostile US–Iran relationship that is now central to fears of a wider Middle East war, examining what started it and why it has persisted for four decades. |
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A New Anti-West Partnership? |
Does the West face a new "tripartite pact" of adversaries as Russia, China, and North Korea warm to each other? Beijing has been reluctant to back Moscow's struggling war on Ukraine, but North Korea has provided artillery shells and may be receiving missile technology in return, Oriana Skylar Mastro writes for Foreign Affairs. While Russia and North Korea are buddying up less abashedly, Mastro writes, "Beijing still sees real, if limited, benefits from its relationships with North Korea and Russia, but it is clearly concerned that Moscow and Pyongyang's actions will do China more harm than good." Russia and Iran, meanwhile, have been driven closer together by Moscow's war on Ukraine, through evident weapons deals. At the European Council on Foreign Relations last fall, Ellie Geranmayeh and Nicole Grajewski identified a fundamentally altered, and deepened, relationship. Russia is more active in the Middle East than is often remembered, and a Foreign Affairs essay by Hamidreza Azizi and Hanna Notte points out that Russia has loosely aligned itself with the Iran-backed "axis of resistance," the network of militias and proxies that is now enmeshed in regional tensions with Israel and the US. Active in Syria, Russia would probably defend the Iran-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah if war broke out with Israel, they suggest. "Moscow does not welcome the axis's disruptive actions simply because they distract from Ukraine, and the axis is not pro-Russia purely because the Kremlin offers assistance," Azizi and Notte write. "Rather, the two entities view each other as comrades-in-arms in a broader effort to weaken the West's dominance. If Washington is serious about disrupting each one's schemes, it must stop them from working together." |
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Europe's Future: Macron or Meloni? |
French President Emmanuel Macron has been a bold leader in Europe, steering the continent toward "strategic autonomy" on the global stage. And yet, as Fareed noted on GPS recently, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is enjoying a turn in the spotlight. After stirring fears by becoming Italy's first far-right national leader since World War II, hailing from a post-fascist party, Meloni has ensconced herself in the mainstream of Europe's political right. As continent-wide European Parliament elections loom in June, whose vision will prove more popular? "Populist radical-right parties are expected to win big," writes Célia Belin of the European Council on Foreign Affairs, while depicting Macron as scrambling to reinvigorate his French presidency. At the World Politics Review, Alexander Clarkson examines Macron and Meloni as alternative options for Europe's future. He warns of what bearing Meloni and other conservative-populist leaders might have: Even as they adapt to EU structures and seek to wield more power in Brussels, Clarkson writes, "their pursuit of discriminatory policies toward migrants and LGTBQ+ communities at home is an indication that they have not abandoned an authoritarian vision for Europe's future that could put the rule of law at risk." It's up to the Macrons of Europe, in Clarkson's telling, to shape the EU into the "tolerant federation" they envision. Of course, not everyone is so afraid: The Economist recently reveled in Meloni's softer edges, as she has supported Ukraine and eschewed euroscepticism. |
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Get Ready for Chinese EVs |
In the US, at least, Tesla remains the most visible electric-vehicle maker. But this year, commentators have noted that Chinese EVs are poised to flood global markets. Per the International Energy Agency's most recent global EV outlook, Chinese EV giant BYD overtook Tesla as the world's largest EV maker by volume in 2022, although Tesla remains much more highly valued as a company. With global EV sales trending upward, BYD hopes to double its sales in Southeast Asia, as Nikkei Asia's Dylan Loh detailed last month. At the MIT Technology Review, Zeyi Yang writes that global demand has led BYD to enter the cargo-shipping business itself. As for how Chinese EVs have vaulted so forcefully onto the global scene, Yang writes: "Several experts tell MIT Technology Review that the government has long played an important role—propping up both the supply of EVs and the demand for them. As a result of generous government subsidies, tax breaks, procurement contracts, and other policy incentives, a slew of homegrown EV brands have emerged and continued to optimize new technologies so they can meet the real-life needs of Chinese consumers. This in turn has cultivated a large group of young car buyers." Noting that last year China overtook Japan as as the world's largest auto exporter, Edward White and Peter Campbell wrote in a Financial Times feature last month that Chinese EVs present an economic challenge for the West. "A flood of cheap Chinese car imports could be disastrous for Europe's incumbent carmakers, with the EU already considering import tariffs to limit the damage," they pointed out. |
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The New Yorker's Adam Gopnick writes that we're still searching for meaning in the Covid-19 plague year, noting that a "non-crazy case" can be made that 2020 changed everything, but also that it didn't. Reviewing Eric Klinenberg's "excellent" book "2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed," Gopnik questions this search for meaning by comparing 2020 to another year: "Did 2020 change everything? Perhaps those big, epoch-marking years are tourist traps of a kind. The year 2001 may, in historical retrospect, be remarkable first as the year when, at last, more American homes had Internet access than did not. A terrorist attack came and went, was grieved and then memorialized, but big terrorist attacks will happen every generation or so. On the other hand, a life spent online is a permanent feature of our modernity. Those few who proposed that the wisest thing to do after 9/11 was to mourn and move on were excoriated, but they may have been better guides than those who insisted that a new age of militance and counter-militance had arrived, and that a global war on terror had to be unleashed. There is nothing to do with a day except to live it, a great poet wrote, and there may be nothing to do with an epochal year except to remember it." |
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