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. April 12, 2024 | |
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Fareed: Biden Might Regret Keeping Trump's Tariffs |
We complain a lot about inflation, and for good reason—higher prices hurt everyone. In his latest Washington Post column, Fareed points out that both the Trump and Biden administrations have employed a policy that makes the problem worse: tariffs. Former President Donald Trump levied tariffs on certain imports from China and Europe, railing against the offshoring of US jobs to China and offering up protectionist trade barriers as a remedy. As a candidate, President Joe Biden criticized those policies, but as president, he has largely kept them in place. Some recent conventional wisdom has argued in favor of protectionism, but Fareed contests it. Noting the impression "that America hollowed out its manufacturing base by embracing globalization and efficiency, which in turn led to the rise of right-wing populism," Fareed points out: "[T]hat argument doesn't stand scrutiny because countries like Germany and France, which protected workers and invested massively in retraining, have also seen right-wing populism boom. … People around the world, especially in America, have gotten used to the dramatic declines in cost that globalization has brought them over the past three decades. … And when people are forced to bear the costs of higher prices, they tend to lash out at those in power. What an irony it would be if policies designed to keep populists at bay end up punishing mainstream politicians instead." |
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The 'Vibecession' Persists |
On an array of metrics, the US economy is doing well. And yet, to many, it doesn't feel that way. The economics commentator Kyla Scanlon captured this phenomenon by coining the neologism "vibecession": Regardless of the economy's statistical performance, the term suggests, the vibes can still be bad. And indeed they are. Wall Street Journal Chief Economics Commentator Greg Ip recently noted that many Americans have misperceived not just the economy's overall state but a very important aspect of it. "In The Wall Street Journal's latest poll of swing states, 74% of respondents said inflation has moved in the wrong direction in the past year," Ip wrote. "This assessment, which holds across all seven states, is startling, sobering—and simply not true." The New Yorker's John Cassidy suggests the news media might be part of the problem, pointing to research that argues coverage of the economy has been too negative. Cassidy also wonders if near-full employment and strong job security will change perceptions. "Despite the recent change in the tone of economic news coverage, the broad narrative of the past few years is arguably still awry," Cassidy writes. "[Aaron] Sojourner, who is a labor economist, and worked at the White House Council of Economic Advisers in 2016 and 2017, certainly thinks so. He pointed to recent trends in job security, which depends, at least in part, on the threat of getting laid off. Up until the pandemic, he told me, the lowest monthly rate of layoffs and firings was 1.1 per cent, but since January, 2021, when Biden became President, the layoff rate has been at or below 1.1 per cent nearly constantly." |
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Autocrats are cooperating these days, Western foreign-policy analysts have noted. In a Foreign Affairs essay in February, Oriana Skylar Mastro wondered if China, Russia and North Korea could form a tripartite alliance against Western-aligned liberal democracies, noting Pyongyang's provision of needed artillery shells to Moscow for the latter's war on Ukraine. More recently, Alexander Gabuev wrote in the same magazine that Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be serious about looking to China for support and partnership as he squares off with the West. In a reversal since the Cold War, China clearly appears to be the senior partner in the relationship, but Gabuev argued that despite the risk of becoming a Chinese "vassal"—and the risk that the Russian–Chinese partnership will fray if Beijing begins exerting its leverage and dictating terms to Moscow—Putin would prefer that form of diminution to what he sees as a Western liberal assault on traditional Russian culture. In a late-March Foreign Affairs essay, Hal Brands offered guidance to Western capitals as they watch their autocratic rivals team up. These alliances may not look like the codified, out-in-the-open alliances that Western democracies maintain, Brands wrote: "Some alliances are nothing more than nonaggression pacts that allow predators to devour their prey rather than devouring one another. Some alliances are military-technological partnerships in which countries build and share the capabilities they need to shatter the status quo. Some of the world's most destructive alliances featured little coordination and even less affection: they were simply rough agreements to assail the existing order from all sides. Alliances can be secret or overt, formal or informal. They can be devoted to preserving the peace or abetting aggression. … That's the key to understanding the relationships among U.S. antagonists today. These relationships may be ambiguous and ambivalent. They may lack formal defense guarantees. But they still augment the military power revisionist states can muster and reduce the strategic isolation those countries might otherwise face. … [I]t wouldn't take an illiberal, revisionist version of NATO to cause an overstretched superpower fits." |
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What Does It Mean to 'Destroy' Hamas? |
Hamas is a terrorist organization that has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007. But it's also a movement, predicated on the idea of armed, Islamist conflict with the state of Israel. So, is it really possible to "destroy" such a movement, as the Israeli government has promised to do in the current war? On Sunday's GPS, Fareed heard former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's answer: that forcing the remnants of Hamas to abandon Gaza and take refuge in Qatar, for instance—and revamping media and education in the Strip to avoid the inculcation of hate—would constitute an Israeli victory over the terrorist group. |
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When Mexicans vote on June 2, they're very likely to elect their country's first female president, Nicolás Medina Mora writes in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. The odds-on favorite to win is Claudia Sheinbaum, former Mexico City mayor and heiress to the MORENA party launched by popular current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO). Trailing her is another woman, the businesswoman and former senator Xóchitl Gálvez, who is backed by a coalition of opposition parties. Sheinbaum's policies and inclinations may differ from AMLO's, Mora writes: She's an environmental scientist, but given AMLO's support for her candidacy and broad popularity, Sheinbaum may find it difficult to downplay or undo his moves to elevate oil as a key part of Mexico's economic future. Reflecting on what has changed since the "Democratic Transition" in 2000—when Mexico elected the conservative President Vicente Fox and broke a streak of single-party dominance—and how AMLO has spurred that change along, Mora writes: "At the level of material reality, Mexico remains for the most part the same country that it was in 2018. By some measures (labor rights, the minimum wage), it is slightly better off; by many others (violence, democratic integrity), things have gotten much worse. … Then again, there's one sense in which López Obrador has, in fact, transformed Mexico. He rose to power on the masses' rejection of the regimes of the Democratic Transition, which were controlled by neoliberal economists and law-and-order reactionaries and kleptocrats in well-cut suits. Now there's no going back. After López Obrador, even the right wing has found it necessary to nominate a woman." |
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