Today's guests and topics, plus: a looming change for South Africa?; and whence vegetarianism came …
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. May 5, 2024 | |
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On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET:
Some prominent Republican voices—like that of former high-ranking Trump aide Matt Pottinger, from whom Fareed heard last week—say it's time for Washington to take a more confrontational approach to Beijing. Fareed argues that would be a mistake.
Pottinger and others suggest China is already waging a cold war against the US—and that Washington should try to win, as it did in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Fareed says the situation today is different: Unlike the USSR, today's China has a high-tech economy and trades heavily with the US and its Western allies. Hoping for the Chinese party-state's eventual collapse reminds Fareed of calls for regime change in Iraq two decades ago—a sign that it's worth pausing and reflecting before hurtling down an aggressive path.
After that: Protests on college campuses have reached a breaking point, as police make arrests and shut down encampments. Can school communities (and the rest of us) find a way to disagree productively? Fareed talks with two Dartmouth professors who co-teach a class called "The Politics of Israel and Palestine": Canadian-born Israeli scholar Bernard Avishai and Ezzedine Fishere, a former Egyptian diplomat who worked on UN efforts to broker Israeli–Palestinian peace in the early 2000s.
What will AI mean for warfare? As military experts brace for the arrival of autonomous drone swarms, Fareed talks with retired US Navy Admiral and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe James Stavridis, whose latest novel, "2054" (coauthored with Elliot Ackerman), envisions a future in which technology has transformed war and geopolitics alike.
How can you smuggle a person into or out of any building in the world? Can a mask be so realistic it fools the president? How far has the intelligence community come toward gender equality? Fareed talks with one of the women who broke the CIA's glass ceiling: former agency chief of disguise Jonna Mendez, author of the new book "In True Face: A Woman's Life in the CIA, Unmasked."
Finally: Europe's power is shifting east, away from Britain, France, and Germany. Fareed examines the rising political and military clout of Poland and the Baltic countries, as NATO faces down an aggressive Russia. |
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A Looming Change in South Africa? |
South Africa will vote at the end of this month, and The Washington Post's editorial board writes that the African National Congress (ANC), the party of Nelson Mandela that has dominated South African politics for 30 years, may be on its way out of power.
"That would be a good thing," the paper writes. "What happens after the election will be a crucial test for the country's young democracy and will have implications across the continent for other struggling democracies. South Africa has no experience with a coalition government." The return of former president Jacob Zuma to ballots (under the banner of a different party) is worrisome, Melanie Verwoerd writes for Bloomberg Opinion, but the Post sees an opportunity for a fresh start in the ANC's decline. The Economist examines the trends that have led to this point, citing pessimism in South Africa about both democracy and the quality of life. "These attitudes are the product of South Africans' material circumstances," the magazine writes. "Democracy has been a game of two halves: the first 15 years saw widespread improvements in people's lives, but the latest 15 have been grim. Unemployment has risen from 20% in 2008 to 32% today. GDP per person is lower than in 2008 after adjusting for inflation. The murder rate is at its highest in 20 years. Last year saw record power cuts. … All these frustrations explain why the ANC will struggle to retain its parliamentary majority for the first time since 1994. " |
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| Whence Vegetarianism Came |
In the current issue of The New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh reviews three books on ethical problems with eating meat in the era of factory-farming: former George W. Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully's "Fear Factories," an update since his 2002 "Dominion" that reflects greater comfort with the "rights" of animals as a way of arguing against cruelty; philosopher Martha Nussbaum's "Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility," which argues against "anthropocentrism" and advances the case that animal feelings matter as human feelings do; and philosopher Peter Singer's "Animal Liberation Now," a revision of his influential 1975 book "Animal Liberation," which (Sanneh notes) introduced many Americans to the concept of animal cruelty, the valuing and exploration of the sentience of animals that humans eat, and the existence of tofu. Sanneh's conclusion: "I'm not eager to be at the leading edge of the vegan revolution, which may yet succeed, but neither would I wish to be at the tail end of the meat-eating resistance. … A weekend with the work of Singer, Nussbaum, or Scully will likely make your next trip to the supermarket significantly more uncomfortable, and probably that's as it should be. But these advocates also, in different ways, remind us that important causes have a way of redrawing ideological lines, turning some of our opponents into allies, and some allies into opponents. It is not easy to think carefully and consistently about what we do to animals. If the people who try often end up endorsing proposals that make us recoil, this may say as much about us as about them." |
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