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. March 7, 2024 | |
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The Middle East's 'Interregnum' |
No one is calling the shots in the Middle East these days, Gregg Carlstrom argues in a Foreign Affairs essay, detailing a power vacuum in which no country—within the region, or outside it—is dominant and in which no clear order has emerged. The US and USSR jockeyed for influence during the Cold War, and Russia and China have made inroads of late—especially the former, joining Syria's civil war in 2015—but Washington has been viewed as a regional security guarantor in recent decades. That influence has been declining for some time. Before Oct. 7, as Albadr Alshateri detailed in The Cairo Review of Global Affairs last year, erstwhile Middle East rivals had begun cooperating and working out problems among themselves, in part due to America's pullback. As the veteran former US diplomat in the Middle East Martin Indyk noted in a recent Foreign Affairs essay, today "Washington enjoys far less influence and credibility in the region than it did in the 1990s, when, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the U.S.-led eviction of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait, the United States kick-started the process that eventually led to the Oslo accords" on Israeli–Palestinian peace. Today, Carlstrom argues, the "United States' influence is undeniably on the wane, but China and Russia are not yet Middle Eastern powers." Russia's intervention in Syria, Carlstrom writes, appears in hindsight to have been the recent "high-water mark" of Moscow's Middle East influence. As a whole, Carlstrom writes, the region "finds itself in an interregnum. Forget talk of unipolarity or multipolarity: the Middle East is nonpolar. No one is in charge. The United States is an uninterested, ineffective hegemon, and its great-power rivals even more so. Fragile Gulf states cannot fill the void; Israel cannot, either; and Iran can only play spoiler and troublemaker. Everyone else is a spectator beset by economic problems and crises of legitimacy. That was the reality even before October 7. The war has merely swept away illusions." |
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China Plans Economic Growth. Is That Its Top Goal? |
At their current National People's Congress, Chinese officials have set an ambitious goal of "around 5%" GDP growth for 2024, as Simone McCarthy reports for CNN Business, and have signaled a desire to transform China's economic-growth model after a disappointing year. (Despite expectations that China would boom after lifting Covid-19 lockdowns in late 2022, its economy has lagged in 2023.) The goals may be lofty, but CNN's McCarthy writes that they were not accompanied by any major stimulus plans. On that front, the "figures disappoint," Bloomberg's Shuli Ren writes, noting that a 3% official budget deficit remains on par with last year's—hardly a bonanza of spending. Bloomberg News identifies the new buzzwords, a staple of major Chinese policy gatherings. For instance, "new three" growth drivers include electric vehicles, batteries, and solar-energy products, exports of which grew 30% last year, Bloomberg writes. "Ultra-long special central government bonds" are the form new debt financing will take. "Worry-free" consumption responds, as a slogan, to China's slumping domestic demand. But despite recent economic troubles, growth still isn't the main priority of China's leaders, Diana Choyleva argued in a recent Nikkei Asia op-ed; it's "security." In the Chinese official lexicon, that word can mean several things, including financial and economic security. But it mostly means regime stability and control. "(T)he nature of the system," Choyleva writes, "favors eliminating threats rather than welcoming opportunities." |
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President Joe Biden is 81 years old, and even as he runs against 77-year-old former President Donald Trump, the age of the sitting commander-in-chief has become a major focal point in the 2024 election. It might or might not hurt Biden significantly at the polls, Patti Waldmeir opines in the Financial Times: Surveys indicate strongly that voters are concerned, but some observers argue "Biden's mental wobbles are, to some extent, already in the price." In the current issue of The New Yorker, a long feature by Evan Osnos delves into Biden's presidency and his decision to run for reelection, despite the reservations of some Democrats. "He's not the only option that we had," Sen. Sheldon White House (D-R.I.) tells Osnos, who notes that other high-ranking Democrats told him the same. "But, once he'd made the decision to go, he became the only option that we have." As for Biden and his motivations, Osnos writes: "Given the doubts, I asked, wasn't it a risk to say, 'I'm the one to do it'? (Biden) shook his head and said, 'No. I'm the only one who has ever beat (Trump). And I'll beat him again.' For Biden, the offense of the contested (2020) election was clearly personal. Trump had not just tried to steal the Presidency—he had tried to steal it from him. 'I'd ask a rhetorical question,' Biden said. 'If you thought you were best positioned to beat someone who, if they won, would change the nature of America, what would you do?'" Biden "has not addressed the matter of age as forthrightly" as John F. Kennedy addressed his then-controversial Catholicism as a presidential candidate, Osnos writes, "even though it is a topic that might resonate with Americans, especially those who have suffered the condescension and dismissal that rankle him. Yes, he might stumble at the microphone, but he might also convince skeptics of the power in his patience, institutional memory, and experience. His campaign, at least, has evidently decided that the issue can't be avoided entirely." |
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