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 14, 2024 | |
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On GPS, at 10 a.m. ET: As expected, Iran has retaliated. For two weeks, observers have wondered about a potential Iranian strike on Israeli targets, after an April 1 suspected Israeli strike killed Iranian military commanders in Damascus. Last night, the response came: Tehran launched a barrage of drones and missiles at Israeli territory—an attack that has raised fears of an all-out regional war. Assessing this dangerous and dramatic series of events, and what could come next, Fareed talks with noted Iran expert Vali Nasr of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and New York Times White House and National Security Correspondent David Sanger. After that: This week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was in China to stress that Washington doesn't seek to decouple from Beijing. But she also went to press China about what she calls its "unfair" trade practices, like flooding the global market with cheap, subsidized products. Fareed asks Yellen what she achieved on her trip and where it leaves US–China relations. In a state visit to the US, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida met with President Joe Biden at the White House this week and warned publicly that "Ukraine today may be East Asia tomorrow." As tensions with China simmer, Fareed talks with US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel about regional dynamics and America's relations with Japan. |
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Iran Retaliates, Pushing Middle East to the Brink |
The region and the world had been waiting for Iran to respond. On April 1, a suspected Israeli strike on an Iranian consular building in Damascus killed Iranian military commanders. After two weeks of observers nervously waiting and wondering, last night Iran retaliated, launching hundreds of drones and missiles at Israeli territory. Israel said 99% of them were intercepted mid-air. Now, the question is what comes next. An Israeli strike on Iran? The wider regional war many have feared since Oct. 7? Days before last night's barrage, Bilal Y. Saab wrote for the British international-affairs think tank Chatham House that Tehran wants to maintain a strong regional position, but it does not seem to want to spark an all-out war with Israel and/or the US. Today, The Economist writes: "The optimistic case is Iran is clumsily attempting a 'calibrated' response that satisfies its pride and supporters. … Yet because a direct Iranian attack on Israel crosses a new line, Israel will probably be forced to retaliate: any normalisation of direct strikes by Iran is intolerable to the Israeli public and leadership." That puts the region on high alert. As Middle East Eye reports, Iran has already warned that if Israel strikes back, Iran will launch an even larger attack in response. CNN's Tamara Qiblawi sums up the dangerous state of affairs: "the scale of the launch and its transnational route have already brought the region to the brink, and any misstep could have cataclysmic consequences." |
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Germany has strong historical reasons for supporting Israel. In fact, support for the Jewish state is deemed a "Staatsräson"—or "reason of state," an existential precondition for Germany itself. But as Israel incurs tragically voluminous civilian deaths and casualties in Gaza, where it is waging war on Hamas in retaliation for the terrorist group's Oct. 7 atrocities, Marina Kormbaki and Christoph Schult write for Der Spiegel that German officials have expressed increasing frustration with the dire situation in the Strip. The German government, they write, is suffering its own damaged standing in international circles as it stands behind Israel. Meanwhile, a disturbing wave of open antisemitism has swept over the country. In Berlin, Jason Farago writes for The New York Times, an acute problem has arisen with the clash between public criticism of Israel's prosecution of the war on Hamas and Germany's strict aversion to undermining the Jewish state, born out of its perpetration of the Holocaust. Known globally as a center of artistic experimentation and free expression, Berlin is losing that luster amid institutional disapproval of artists who've criticized Israel during the war. "Prizes have been rescinded," Farago writes. "Conferences called off. Plays taken off the boards. Government cultural officials have suggested tying funding to what artists and institutions say about the conflict, and media—both traditional and social—bubble with public denunciations of this writer, that artist, this D.J., that dancer. The disinvitations have brought counter-boycotts. And a climate of fear and recrimination has put Berlin's status as an international cultural capital in greater hazard than at any time since 1989." |
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'Shipping's Shadow World' |
A massive cargo ship's deadly March 26 collision with Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge, and the bridge's subsequent collapse, has been the biggest story concerning US infrastructure in years. (A 2007 bridge collapse in Minneapolis was similarly terrifying.) Even more so, it's a story about shipping. At The New York Review of Books, Vanessa Ogle writes that the disaster "is a global story. The Dali"—the ship that lost electrical power and collided with the bridge—"was on its way to Sri Lanka with a cargo of around 4,700 containers, including some with hazardous materials. It was chartered to the Danish shipping giant Maersk, flew the flag of Singapore, and was managed by the Singaporean company Synergy Marine. Its owner, the Singapore-based entity Grace Ocean Private Limited, is in turn a subsidiary of Grace Ocean Investment Limited, registered in the British Virgin Islands." The Baltimore collision also reminds us of the wrinkles in a weakly regulated global industry, Ogle writes, a sector that features (among other less-than-savory elements) "ghost ships" that turn off their transponders to go dark, evade tracking, and skirt international sanctions. "Shipping is an opaque business," Ogle writes. "With their owners hidden behind shell companies and their flags registered to tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions, vessels regularly dodge sanctions, skirt labor laws, avoid taxes, trade in illicit goods, and flout safety standards. The industry is also dirty: observers have estimated that it produces almost 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. That global shipping is in such a mess can in some part be put down to dysfunction at the UN-affiliated International Maritime Organization (IMO), which designs and oversees the industry's regulations but lacks enforcement mechanisms of its own. Instead it depends on the governments of member countries to implement and enforce its rules." |
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