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. July 26, 2024 |
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Fareed on Biden's Presidency, in Tentative Retrospect |
It's too early to judge President Joe Biden's legacy, Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column, as six months of it remain. But an early assessment must acknowledge major accomplishments.
Biden should be held accountable for inflation—the result of both the pandemic and the administration's infusion of cash into the US economy—but he also oversaw an economic revival for which he has received "almost no credit," Fareed writes. In foreign policy, Biden "has addressed the challenges presented by the return of Russia and a rising China, but not through solo actions or one-shot deals. The administration has strengthened America's alliance system, bolstering NATO and adding two new members to it."
Domestically, Biden redirected US policy away from its main thrust in recent decades. From Reagan to George W. Bush to Trump, Fareed writes, "the defining fiscal policies of our times have been tax cuts." Biden changed that, drastically: "He used the resources of the federal government to make large investments—in infrastructure, child care, manufacturing and energy. These investments won't pay off anytime soon; many of them have just begun. But the United States is now undergoing the largest upgrade of its transportation infrastructure since the 1950s … It is seeing a boom in manufacturing investment and employment that reverses a decades-long trend. Green energy is booming, too."
Biden also "returned the presidency to an office of sanity, decency and dignity, ushering out the dangerous demagoguery and anti-democratic rhetoric and behavior that preceded him," Fareed writes. "Joe Biden feels that he has been underestimated all his life. Judging by his tenure in the White House, he's right." |
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What did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu achieve yesterday when he addressed the US Congress, and what did we learn from his speech?
Netanyahu forcefully made his case that the US and Israel share values and enemies, The Wall Street Journal's editorial board writes. (Protesters in DC helped him deliver the point, the paper argues.) At The Times of Israel, Ruth Lieberman writes: "[O]ur prime minister has just reminded the free world that we Jews are no longer the victims" but rather protagonists in a larger fight. At Haaretz, columnist Anshel Pfeffer writes more critically that Netanyahu offered "not even the slightest hint … of how he plans to extricate Israel from the tragic impasse in which it's trapped … Netanyahu may have won 52 standing ovations … but his rhetoric that so impressed the natives in Washington offered nothing for Israelis watching back at home."
Writing for Foreign Policy, Aaron David Miller and Adam Israelevitz of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace find a practical lesson: "What we call the U.S.-Israel operating system is, well, still operating. U.S. domestic politics and policy are still shaped by a profound commitment to the security of a Jewish state in a hostile neighborhood, a reality that sustains Israel's leverage on the United States and reduces the United States' on Israel. But that system is under severe stress as Netanyahu's Israel has become a deeply partisan and divisive issue in U.S. politics. Whether a putative Harris administration would adopt a tougher approach toward Israel, especially regarding its policies toward Palestinians, remains to be seen. But for Netanyahu, who has allied himself with the Republican Party, repairing his ties to Donald Trump has become more important than ever." (As Axios' Barak Ravid reported in 2021, that relationship appeared to have been strained by Netanyahu's video message thanking Trump for his policy decisions as president and congratulating Biden on his 2020 election win.) |
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Will Russia's War Machine Roll On? |
Russia's military is mired in Ukraine, but some fear it is eyeing new targets already.
The small, NATO-member Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have long worried about Russian aggression, and Moscow's current war has heightened those concerns considerably. At Foreign Policy, Amy MacKinnon wrote in March of Baltic warnings that Russia may be preparing its military for a larger clash with NATO.
Many analysts have observed that Russian President Vladimir Putin has converted Russia to a "war economy," boosting defense spending while his Defense Ministry has implemented military reforms in light of the Ukraine war. As Foreign Policy's MacKinnon noted, Estonian intelligence warned in January that through those efforts, Moscow could be gearing up for a longer fight with the West.
In the current issue of the Hoover Digest, former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul raises the same point. "After meeting with Lithuanian officials, government representatives, and experts from countries in the region, I was struck by the urgency of their long-term thinking about the Russian threat," McFaul writes. "The Russian military-industrial complex today has more resources to build more tanks, artillery, and drones than at the start of the [Ukraine] conflict, as [former Google CEO] Eric Schmidt writes. After re-election, Putin will also conscript more soldiers. One colleague in Vilnius warned that the war machine always takes time to get going, but once it does, it rolls with great momentum, as it did with Napoleon and Hitler. As for the intentions of this war machine, some Russian government officials are already threatening to deploy these resources to rebuild not the Soviet Union but the Russian Empire, which of course included Poland, Finland, and the Baltic countries."
As has been widely noted, whatever happens with Russia, Europe may need to deal with it alone. In a recent paper for the European Council on Foreign Relations, Camille Grand wrote that former US President Donald Trump's potential return to the White House, and the rise of other global priorities for the US, mean Europe must plug gaps and become more independent in order to defend itself. |
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"Huge protests across Bangladesh escalated into deadly violence this week with clashes between students, pro-government supporters and armed police fueling widespread anger over civil service job quotas opponents say are discriminatory," CNN's Samra Zulfaqar, Helen Regan and Andee Capellan report. What's fueling the anger? Job quotas reserved for "freedom fighters"—veterans of Bangladesh's 1971 war of independence—and their families, scrapped in 2018 amid protests but reinstated by the country's high court in June.
High unemployment, especially among young people, appears to undergird the discontent. Not long ago the small, historically impoverished South Asian nation of 173 million was making strides in health, education, GDP growth, and sharing that growth inclusively, former World Bank chief economist Kaushik Basu wrote for Project Syndicate in 2018. Today, the story is the opposite, M. Niaz Asadullah of the Global Labor Organization, the University of Reading and North South University in Bangladesh writes for the same outlet.
"Bangladesh needs to absorb millions of unemployed and underemployed young people into the labor market," Asadullah writes, noting that "roughly 40% of Bangladeshi youth—twice the global average—are not in education, employment, or training." Likening Bangladeshis' frustration to the Arab Spring, Asadullah suggests the protests "could become a critical turning point for Bangladesh, precipitating a return to electoral democracy." But as the Arab Spring showed, protest movements don't always work, "and failed revolutions can lead to more repression and political unrest. A destabilized Bangladesh may have several important regional implications: it could complicate ongoing efforts to settle the Rohingya humanitarian crisis in Myanmar, push Bangladesh closer to China, and hinder India's trade with its landlocked northeast states." |
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'Mauritania's Secret to Stability'? |
In recent years, the African region known as the Sahel—which stretches from the Atlantic in the west to the Red Sea in the east, just south of the Sahara—has seen the emergence of jihadist groups and a spate of anti-democratic coups. Mauritania, writes Der Spiegel's Fritz Schaap, is a notable exception.
Some believe the country reached a non-aggression pact with Al Qaeda when it was led by Osama bin Laden, Schaap writes. But implausible as it might sound, Schaap suggests Mauritania's secret to success might be (in part, at least) its Méharistes, a "National Guard that patrols the desert on the border to Mali on camelback" with about 300 members.
Patrolling with a group as they deliver medicine to a village, Schaap writes: "The most important thing, [Brigadier Mbeirik Messoud] says, is that all the soldiers who belong to the Méharistes are men of the desert. That they have had the same experiences as the people who live in the region they are trying to help. That they bake their bread in the sand according to the same regional tradition, hang the goats in the thorny trees to drain them of blood and smoke dried tobacco from old goat bones. 'We only recruit nomads. They know the desert and the dromedaries. They meet the people as equals,' says Messoud. Several years ago, he says, half of a village fled in fear when the army approached in pickup trucks. … Messoud is certain that there was never a deal with al-Qaida. He thinks that the Mauritanians are protected by their faith. 'The people know the Koran well. It is difficult to convince them of more radical interpretations.'"
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