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 28, 2024 | |
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On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET:
Plenty of foreign-policy disputes have been taken up by college students, from the Vietnam War to the invasion of Iraq. So why has the Israel–Hamas war spun campuses into such dramatic chaos?
It has to do with community, Fareed says. Especially since the arrival of Covid-19, communal connection on university campuses has eroded—exacerbating the trend noted famously in Robert Putnam's 1995 essay "Bowling Alone" (which pointed out more Americans were bowling, but fewer were bowling together in leagues). The current degree of isolation, Fareed argues, is making campus political debates more vitriolic and less introspective.
After that: The campus protests, and universities' responses to them, have raised big questions about open debate, freedom of speech, and what constitutes a threat or harassment. Fareed hears two opposing views: those of Columbia University English professor Bruce Robbins and New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.
Israel has said it can't eliminate Hamas without invading the southern Gazan town of Rafah. The Biden administration has expressed humanitarian concerns and opposes such an operation. So, will Israel go ahead with its plans? And what would that mean for US–Israel relations? Fareed talks with Michael Oren, who served as Israel's ambassador to the US under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from 2009 to 2013.
This week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to China and met with leader Xi Jinping. Although things have been quiet between the two superpowers lately, the US–China relationship remains tense. Fareed talks with Matthew Pottinger, a point person on China policy in the administration of former President Donald Trump, who says a cold war is already underway—and that the US should play to win.
Finally: Mexico has struggled with narco-violence for much of the last decade. Fareed hears from "Exit Wounds" author Ieva Jusionyte about something that has made the problem worse: guns smuggled into Mexico from the US. |
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How solid, stable, and truly in-command is Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime? That question has been debated a bit more intensely since Wagner paramilitary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin mounted a failed rebellion last spring. Writing at Foreign Affairs, Maksim Samorukov sees weakness: "Putin's regime, a highly personalized system run by an aging autocrat, is more brittle than it seems. Driven by Putin's whims and delusions, Moscow is liable to commit self-defeating blunders. The Russian state effectively implements orders from the top, but it has no control over the quality of those orders. For that reason, it is at permanent risk of crumbling overnight, as its Soviet predecessor did three decades ago."
Taking the discussion in a different direction, Stephen Kotkin writes in his own Foreign Affairs essay that the West can't really hope to steer Russia's future, so it ought to prepare for whatever Russia becomes when the 71-year-old Putin eventually departs.
Kotkin foresees five possibilities: Russia could become something like France, a responsible global stakeholder that emerged from a "fraught revolutionary tradition" and a monarchic system, which still retains an ideologized vision of itself. It could retrench, pulling back from foreign adventures. It could become a Chinese vassal or a rogue Chinese ally, one with more independence, like North Korea. It could also devolve into chaos. "In the event that Russia does not become France any time soon," Kotkin writes, "the rise of a Russian nationalist who acknowledges the long-term price of extreme anti-Westernism remains the likeliest path to a Russia that finds a stable place in the international order." |
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'The World's Worst Forgotten Conflict' |
Sudan remains mired in civil conflict. Two generals—one leading the Sudanese army (SAF) and another leading the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—have fought for control of the country since April 2023, as Ken Opalo examined in detail in his An Africanist Perspective newsletter in January. As of mid-April, the UN estimated nearly 8.7 million Sudanese people had been forcibly displaced.
At the Middle East Institute, Jehanne Henry writes that "with scant global attention or outcry, the Sudanese war has quickly become the world's worst forgotten conflict. … The belligerents have disregarded the laws of war, using explosives in residential areas and occupying civilian structures like apartment buildings, hospitals, and schools. Both sides routinely employ inhumane tactics for which they have become best known—RSF fighters plunder, pillage, and rape, and the SAF drops barrel bombs in civilian-populated areas. … [R]ecently, there have been signs that international actors are growing more serious about Sudan. … A serious obstacle, however, is a handful of external actors' continued provision of arms and materiel to the warring sides." |
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In The New York Review of Books, John Washington reviews two books that warn of heat and fire, as humans burn more fuel and as the world gets hotter: John Vaillant's "Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World," which details a catastrophic blaze that engulfed Canadian oil-industry hub Fort McMurray, and John Goodell's "The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet," which offers a broader look at the threat of heat and wildfires in the global-warming era.
Needless to say, the review is cautionary. Washington writes: "What is decidedly not the ultimate answer to being fried in your own city is air-conditioning, Goodell reports. In the summer of 2018, the same season that temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona, crested at 116 degrees—by now this is expected weather—the utility provider Arizona Public Service cut off power to Stephanie Pullman, a seventy-two-year old woman who lived alone with her cat, Cocoa. At the end of August, the company had written her a warning letter, requiring that she pay the $176.84 she owed in the next five days. Pullman, who had been stretching less than a thousand dollars a month in social security payments, paid $125 after receiving the letter, but she was still in arrears. As for many people in Phoenix and the American West, for Pullman air-conditioning was a survival tool. After the utility company turned off her electricity, she died of heat." |
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