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 19, 2024 | |
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On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET: US President Joe Biden is right about the war in Gaza, Fareed argues, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wrong.
The two leaders have split over Israel's prosecution of its military campaign against Hamas. Most immediately, Biden opposes a planned Israeli invasion of the Gazan border city Rafah, which Netanyahu wants to carry out. More broadly, Fareed says, Biden is right to call for a workable postwar plan for Gaza: a political solution that would provide for Gaza's reconstruction and future governance.
Netanyahu doesn't have such a plan, Fareed says, and some Israeli military officials are rumbling about the need for one. Netanyahu's own postwar future is bleak, Fareed notes, as a likely corruption prosecution hangs over him once he leaves office. (Netanyahu has denied wrongdoing.) Netanyahu's strategy in Gaza, Fareed suggests, benefits his own future more than Israel's.
After that: Will Israel face the same problems in Gaza that the US faced in Afghanistan and Iraq? As the Israel Defense Forces seek to clear and hold territory, Fareed talks with the architect of modern counterinsurgency strategy, retired US Army Gen. David Petraeus. Having recently returned from a trip to Kyiv, the former CIA and CENTCOM chief also discusses the likely future of Ukraine, as its forces are stretched thin across a long front and were left under-equipped by the long delay to additional US military aid.
Will India ever overtake China as a global economic powerhouse? Can it lift itself out of the doldrums of a jobs crisis? Fareed talks with Raghuram Rajan, a former chief of India's central bank and coauthor of the new book "Breaking the Mold: India's Untraveled Path to Prosperity."
Few have careers as harrowing as journalist Nicholas Kristof's, which has featured surviving a plane crash in the Congolese jungle, coming face-to-face with gunmen in Ghana, dodging bullets in Tiananmen Square, and interviewing Darfuris fleeing genocide. Kristof discusses his experiences and how he maintains optimism in his new memoir, "Chasing Hope." |
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Could the US become a dictatorship? Some say yes—imminently.
In a Washington Post essay last November, Robert Kagan argued that a dictatorship under former (and perhaps future) President Donald Trump is looking increasingly "inevitable," as checks and balances may struggle to constrain him if he wins the White House again. American democracy has already approached a breaking point: When Trump sought to overturn the 2020 election, it was a collection of career government officials—Justice Department staff who threatened to resign and state election workers, most notably—who ensured the vote result mattered. But the "price of stopping Trump has risen higher and higher" at each turn, Kagan wrote. On last Sunday's GPS Kagan elaborated, arguing Trump may not have any calculated plan to become a dictator—but would be one simply because he "wants what he wants when he wants it and how he wants to get it."
The current issue of The Economist takes up the same topic, producing a similar answer. For one thing, the magazine writes, consensus on the democratic transition of power has eroded: "Each candidate for president this year has accused the other of trying to destroy American democracy. But [President Joe] Biden is an institutionalist, with reverence for the old ways of politics. Mr Trump, who has mused about being a dictator, if only for a day, is different. His refusal to concede in 2020 led to the attack on the Capitol on January 6th 2021, and it prompted a record number of lawmakers to oppose certifying the vote. Now Mr Trump's suggestion that he may reject another loss has raised the risk that congressional Republicans try to block certification. For their part, some Democratic representatives have suggested they might not certify a Trump victory, believing that he disqualified himself from the presidency by taking part in an insurrection. Thus can one president's disregard for a norm erode the pillars of the system as a whole."
Elsewhere, the magazine explores in greater detail the various checks and balances that could fail. The Economist notes, disturbingly: "The Brennan Center, a think-tank at New York University, has identified 135 statutory powers that accrue to the president when he declares a national emergency. These include things like the power to freeze Americans' bank accounts or, under a law giving the president emergency powers over communications that was passed in 1942, to shut down the internet (which thankfully would be pretty hard in practice). In theory Congress is meant to review and potentially revoke the president's declarations after six or 12 months. In practice it is casual about curtailing them. Over 40 emergencies are currently in force. Some of them are more than a decade old." |
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The Problem of 'Zombie Salmon' |
An Icelandic activist's photo of a farmed salmon, its face apparently eaten away partially by sea lice, has heightened concern about the humaneness and safety of salmon farming, Jan Petter writes for Der Spiegel. The activist calls the photographed fish a "zombie salmon," the topic of the article. Problems extend beyond the health of farmed salmon to include their escape from netted enclosures in the sea—and what happens when they breed with wild salmon. "Once they have mated with a wild salmon, the young fish that result are unable to find their way back to their spawning grounds," another activist says.
Petter writes: "Nowhere, it seems, is the debate over the mass-breeding of salmon as bitter and polarizing as it has become in Iceland. Many Icelanders are concerned that sickly, diseased and fattened farm fish could do permanent damage to the country's ecosystem by causing irreparable harm to the native wild salmon population. … Protests have been held in the capital city Reykjavík, and the singers Björk and Rosalia even dedicated a song to the salmon. The founder of the U.S. outdoor brand Patagonia even visited Iceland in an attempt to personally convince the president to put a stop to the farming." |
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