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. August 6, 2024 |
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"The Middle East is today the closest it has ever been to an all-out multi-front regional war," writes The Middle East Institute's Randa Slim, as the world waits to see how Iran and its proxies might respond to a series of recent assassinations.
Last week Israel struck a senior Hezbollah commander deep in foreign territory: the southern part of Lebanon's capital, Beirut, a stronghold of the Iran-supported Islamist militia. Israel has not claimed credit but is widely believed responsible for the subsequent assassination in Tehran of Hamas' political leader. Israel also announced it had killed a Hamas military leader in a Gaza strike last month.
Warnings like Slim's have proliferated. The Middle East has seen its share of conflicts in the 102 years since the Ottoman Empire's collapse, including several multi-party wars involving Israel and Arab rivals. Today, the nightmare scenario is one sketched by former Obama administration aide Ilan Goldenberg in a 2019 Foreign Affairs essay: a potentially region-engulfing conflict featuring Iran and its array of allied groups that make up a so-called "axis of resistance" against Israel and the West. Those include Hamas in Gaza, the heavily armed Hezbollah in Lebanon, Yemen's Houthis, and the Tehran-backed government in Syria. The US, as Israel's committed ally, could easily be drawn in. That's a major concern, of course. As Foreign Policy's Jack Detsch writes, the US military is already stretched thin by other global priorities.
If this sounds familiar, it is: After Israel struck Iranian commanders at a diplomatic facility in Syria on April 1, the region similarly held its breath. Iran retaliated, launching hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel—almost all of which were intercepted, allowing the situation to cool with pride and deterrence upheld on both sides. "Just over three months later, here we are again," writes Financial Times cntributing editor Kim Ghattas. "This choreography of missiles and death is dangerous. These are not war games, but real life."
One question is why Israel has been so willing to escalate. The recent strikes followed a particularly gruesome but potentially accidental incident in the Israel-claimed Golan Heights, a disputed territory that sits between Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. A rocket fell on a soccer field there last month, killing children; Hezbollah was accused but denied responsibility. At the Financial Times, former MI6 chief and UK ambassador to the UN John Sawers writes that the Golan strike wasn't enough to prompt this round of Israeli escalation, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows any US leader will face intense pressure to come to Israel's aid if a wider war breaks out, and he likely wants to see former President Donald Trump returned to office. (A campaign-season war could "reignite divisions within the Democratic party" and cost Vice President Kamala Harris a critical state like Michigan in November, Sawers suggests.) As it did three months ago, the Biden administration will work frantically to prevent a larger war from unfolding.
In a Foreign Affairs essay, regional expert Dalia Dassa Kaye seeks to answer the question of Israeli strategy in broad terms, writing: "Israel may be pushing the limits in its regional actions not because it feels strong but because it feels weak. Fundamentally, it is bringing little long-term strategic calculus to its decisions. Hamas's October 7 attack dealt a devastating blow to its deterrence posture. Now, willing to assume greater risks and absorb higher costs, Israel seeks to take tactical advantages when it can in a frenetic attempt to restore deterrence." |
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The Dow plunged more than 1,000 points on Monday, and David Goldman of CNN Business writes that last week's dreary US jobs numbers (unemployment jumped to 4.3%, cutting against positive post-pandemic trends) had prompted "worries about a recession, concern that the Federal Reserve has failed to act promptly enough and a belief that big bets on AI may not pay off." At the Atlantic Council, Josh Lipsky argues that the risk of a larger Middle East war may have factored in. The Wall Street Journal's editorial board warns that the sell-off may have been a correction after the long era of "cheap money."
Japan saw the worst of it, with its Nikkei index suffering its biggest drop since Black Monday in 1987. Japanese markets have since regained some ground. What's behind the location of the frenzy? "Japan is where the investment world comes to punish risk," one head of trading tells the Financial Times' Leo Lewis. Lewis continues: "The Japanese market, because of the very wide range of industry types, and exposures to different themes, is often described by investors as a 'warrant on global trade'. The world generally buys Japan when conditions seem upbeat and when there are plenty of big themes—such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence— where Japanese companies are strongly exposed to those. … [T]he Japanese market offers global investors a very wide range of ways to express a very wide range of worries, whether global or Japan-specific. Unfortunately for Japan, the current situation simultaneously provides both global reasons for de-risking and domestic ones: a combination that has not occurred for a long time." |
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'Britain's Weekend of Violence' |
A stabbing attack on children in Southport, UK, followed by disinformation falsely claiming the suspected attacker was an asylum seeker, prompted weekend riots spurred by far-right agitators. Reaction to the stabbing attack was laced with anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric and involved at least one call for disruptions at Muslim centers, as CNN's Kara Fox reports. Some of the violence targeted mosques and left some British Muslims fearful. "To the rioters, it doesn't matter that the suspect in the murder of three girls at a holiday dance camp in Southport came from a practicing Christian family, or that he was born in Cardiff and is a British citizen," Duncan Gardham writes for The Spectator. "It meant nothing that his hardworking parents had fled the aftermath of a genocide in Rwanda that led to an estimated 800,000 deaths. That the police had decided there was no political, religious, racial or ideological motive to the killings also meant nothing."
The weekend's violence carried one silver lining, Gardham writes: Police could "identify the worst offenders and take them off the streets." The Financial Times' editorial board poses this moment as a test for Prime Minister Keir Starmer's new Labour government and a reflection of the toxic politics surrounding immigration. Polling has shown that "Britons hold one of the most positive attitudes towards immigration in Europe," the paper writes, but "[o]nce the violence is contained and the culprits are sanctioned, efforts to tackle the root causes that feed a fear of immigration—as well as the channels that amplify it—must be stepped up." |
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Former President Donald Trump has pledged to slap heavy tariffs on imports if reelected, Fareed noted on Sunday's GPS. Trump is ideologically committed to such policies, but as Fareed points out, they hurt US consumers by raising prices. If Trump is right about tariffs, Fareed said, then the American Revolution was a big mistake: Why dump tea into Boston Harbor if the British crown was only hurting itself, not the colonists, by imposing new duties? |
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RFK, Jr.'s Weird Bear Story |
So that's how a dead bear cup ended up in Central Park in 2014. In what will be remembered as one of the strangest campaign videos of all time, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. offers a long and detailed admission. Kennedy is on the ballot in a handful of states, could play a spoiler in November, and is known for his heterodox mélange of views including environmentalism and vaccine skepticism. In the video, the candidate says that in 2014 he found a dead bear cub while driving in New York state, kept it in his car during a day of falconry, still kept it in his car while dining at an upscale New York City steakhouse, then upon realizing he had to go to the airport, left the bear in Central Park along with a bicycle, staging the bear's death as a bicycle accident. As RFK, Jr. tells this bizarre tale, Roseanne Barr listens politely.
The admission preempted a profile by The New Yorker's Clare Malone that includes the anecdote. As Malone tells is: "In a picture from that day, Kennedy is putting his fingers inside the bear's bloody mouth, a comical grimace across his face. (When I asked Kennedy about the incident, he said, 'Maybe that's where I got my brain worm.')" Kennedy has said part of his brain was eaten by a parasitic worm. Of greater import for the November election, Malone speaks with former Kennedy friends deeply disillusioned by his run for office, as it could sap votes from either Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris and tilt the outcome. |
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