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 28, 2024 | |
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What Can NATO Do for Ukraine? |
As some observers expect Russia to launch a new offensive in Ukraine this year, a Wall Street Journal headline earlier this month characterized Kyiv's current strategy: "dig, dig, dig"—as in trenches, to defend. "As spring turns to summer," The Economist writes this week, "the fear is that Russia will mount a big new offensive, as it did last year. And Ukraine's ability to hold it off this time looks much less sure now than it did then. That is why it urgently needs to mobilise more troops and build more robust front-line defences." A muddy spring makes troop movements difficult, the magazine writes, but after that, the risk will rise. "The blocking of the Biden administration's $61bn military-support package by pro-Donald Trump Republicans in Congress has had direct consequences," the magazine writes elsewhere. "So has the failure of the European Union to come up with more than half of the million shells it had promised to deliver by this month." Kyiv bears responsibility, too, The Economist writes: It could have moved faster to fortify its front lines, and it must decide on a policy regarding new conscription to replenish manpower. In light of these circumstances, discussion of Ukraine's needs has intensified. At Project Syndicate, Harold James calls on European (and US) leaders to get their acts together, noting reluctance to supply more and longer-range weapons: "Politicians in the 1930s at least had good excuses for their weakness. Their countries were exhausted and depleted from the Great Depression, and many of them vividly recalled the appalling sacrifices and losses of World War I. Today's isolationists have no such frame of reference." In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Andriy Yermak, head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's office, calls on the US (and its oil-producing allies) to pump more crude, flood global oil markets with product, weaken prices, and thereby diminish Russia's oil revenues. In a Foreign Affairs essay, Ivo Daalder and Karen Donfried try to answer the question holistically. They advocate deliveries of more-advanced Western weapons, NATO taking the reins to coordinate Western assistance to Kyiv, and a clear pathway for Ukraine to ultimately join NATO—ideally offered at this summer's NATO summit in Washington. After fighting with Russia stops, they argue, NATO's Article 5 collective-defense provision could apply to areas of Ukraine that Kyiv controls. "The day Ukraine formally joins NATO will be Russia's ultimate strategic defeat—and Ukraine and all of Europe will be the safer for it," they conclude. |
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Is China's Economy Heading in the Wrong Direction? |
China's economy has disappointed since early 2023, when a hoped-for, post-Covid-19-lockdown boom never materialized. Weak domestic demand, many have written, is the main culprit. In a Foreign Affairs essay, Daniel H. Rosen and Logan Wright argue China is doubling down on the problem.
"After over two decades of strong investment-led growth, China now needs consumption-led growth," they write. "Further investment will have diminishing returns unless China can consume more at home." And yet, the recent National People's Congress indicated Beijing intends, instead, to lean into investment—boosting production just as world governments have grown skeptical of cheap Chinese goods and are erecting protectionist barriers to block them.
"Worsening trade conflict is an inevitable outcome of current Chinese policies, and it will not be limited to China's relationships with advanced economies," they write. "While developed and developing economies alike push back against China's high export volume, Beijing appears to be simply ignoring the problem. And as Chinese overcapacity drives foreign governments toward ever-harsher countermeasures, the resulting confrontation is something neither the Chinese economy nor the global trade system can afford." |
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A Long Case Against Netanyahu |
In recent weeks, international criticism has rained down on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After Hamas's brutal Oct. 7 massacres, Netanyahu's Israeli government incurred expected ire from the Arab world as it prosecuted a war of retaliation against Hamas in Gaza that killed Palestinian civilians and generated a humanitarian crisis. When the White House recently began calling for a ceasefire, that criticism took on a more universal flavor. "(H)ow do you turn a just war into global isolation and widespread condemnation?" Haaretz columnist and former Israeli consul general in New York Alon Pinkas asks in a Guardian op-ed. "Just ask Benjamin Netanyahu. He has the patent." Netanyahu still towers over Israeli politics, and he—and the ongoing war effort—have fierce defenders. "Who exactly are these leaders preaching to?" Yaara Segal asks in a Jerusalem Post op-ed, of criticism by the US and other Western countries. "Who is it that needs to agree to a ceasefire? The answer is not Israel." Arguing similarly that Hamas is the problem, David Brinn opines in the same paper, on the notion that if only Netanyahu would step aside Israel would coalesce around a softer war plan or perhaps a ceasefire: "What a crock." In a New York Times column, David Brooks argued Israel has no workable alternatives to the war it's currently waging. But in The Atlantic, Anshel Pfeffer—the Haaretz columnist, correspondent for The Economist, and (unofficial) Netanyahu biographer—makes a long and detailed case that Netanyahu is Israel's worst-ever prime minister, for actions taken both before and after Oct. 7. "Netanyahu placed extremists in positions of power, undermined confidence in the rule of law, and sacrificed principle to power," Pfeffer argues. "Little wonder, then, that last summer, tensions over the role of Israel's judiciary became unmanageable. The crisis underlined all of these reasons that Netanyahu should go down as Israel's worst prime minister. … No matter how the war in Gaza ends, what happens in its aftermath, or when Netanyahu's term finally ends, the prime minister will forever be associated above all with that day (Oct. 7) and the disastrous war that followed. He will go down as the worst prime minister because he has been catastrophic for Israeli security." |
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