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 30, 2023 | | |
On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET:
Will China change? As the Biden administration reaches out in high-level meetings seeking to calm superpower tensions, Fareed asks if Beijing will reciprocate.
"Is an increasingly autocratic and closed decision-making system capable of learning and adapting?" Fareed asks. The removal of Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang from his post this week, after he vanished from public view last month, "does not suggest a positive answer."
After that: Israel's right-wing government has passed one part of an explosive judicial-reform agenda. What's behind the highly controversial push, and where does it leave the country? Fareed asks New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who has written on the new law and has spoken recently with US President Joe Biden about it.
As critics rail at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government, Fareed examines simmering controversies over the role of high courts in Israel, the US and elsewhere with Emily Bazelon of The New York Times Magazine, Yale Law School, and Slate's "Political Gabfest" podcast.
The US asylum system has been overwhelmed—and illegal immigration is providing fodder to the populist right in American politics. How does the federal government plan to handle a record number of border crossings? Fareed talks with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
It's been more than a month since Russia's failed rebellion, and questions still swirl about President Vladimir Putin's grip on power. To understand the ongoing aftermath, Fareed talks with exiled Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar, author of the new book "War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine."
Finally, Fareed examines the mysterious disappearances from public view of two high-ranking officials in China and Russia—and what they say about those countries. |
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Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, the tank—a critical weapon since World War II—has seen a rise and fall and rise. Russia advanced toward Kyiv with a threatening column of them; Ukraine destroyed some of them and saved its capital, leading some to conclude the tank was passé, ill-suited to modern warfare and its nimble shoulder-mounted missiles and drones; then Europe and the US supplied Kyiv with tanks, notably the German-made Leopard II, after an international campaign to point out their necessity.
Has there been a definitive conclusion to this tank talk? As Ukraine presses its counteroffensive with renewed vigor, war analysts have stressed the importance of "combined arms maneuver"—using multiple weapons systems and kinds of troops in conjunction on the battlefield—and in the current issue of the Hoover Digest, retired US Army Lt. Gen. and former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster writes that the Ukraine war has indeed proven its importance. Effective war-fighting not entirely about the equipment, McMaster writes, but rather the ability to use it weapons in effective combination; tanks, however, happen to be an important part of that combination. ("Without tanks, even the most modern land forces are forced to re-enact the stalemate and battlefield carnage of the Western Front," McMaster writes.)
In another Hoover Digest essay, Peter R. Mansoor makes the point about the tank as a necessary, but not sufficient on its own, condition for battlefield success more directly: "What the world is witnessing in Ukraine today is not the end of the tank, but rather the latest chapter in the continuing development of armored forces. Soldiers require mobile, protected firepower to close with and destroy the enemy. The alternative is a return to trench warfare, which is happening in the Donbas region and southern Ukraine today." |
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Iran is "breaking out of its box," declares the headline of a Foreign Affairs essay by Jamsheed K. Choksy and Carol E.B. Choksy, who identify Iran's recent rapprochements with regional rivals, notably including a re-normalization of diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia, via talks facilitated by China. It doesn't stop there, they write: Iran "has embarked on a charm offensive across the Arab world, seeking to reestablish diplomatic ties and economic influence in Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and elsewhere. Iran sees an opening to take advantage of the United States' confused and diminished ambitions in the Middle East, and its moves are contributing to the further displacement of the United States there. … Going forward, reestablishing ties across the Middle East can decouple Iran's currency flows from the dollar and the euro, allowing Iranian goods to bypass American and European sanctions."
While the diplomatic and economic efforts are indeed "yielding dividends," the authors caution against buying into the whole initiative: Iran's goal of being a dominant regional powerhouse likely remains unchanged, they argue, suggesting the US shore up alliances with its Sunni partners.
Part of the calculus, the Foreign Affairs authors suggest, may involve a need to alleviate domestic difficulties, as leaders in Tehran have faced a wave of popular discontent following 2022's massive protests over the death of Mahsa Amini. On that front, Iranian politics are not yet settled: At the Stimson Center, Javad Heiran-Nia writes that Iran's young people remain unsatisfied, while the reformist political forces (which counterbalanced regime hardliners in decades past) have yet to adapt to the new reality. |
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After dire warnings about Italy's first far-right leader since World War II, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of the nationalist Brothers of Italy party has made her way into the club of Western leaders, as Benoît Bréville recently wrote for Le Monde diplomatique. Visiting the White House on Thursday, Meloni burnished such bona fides; as Hannah Roberts, Jonathan Lemire and Eli Stokols wrote for Politico, Meloni appears to have forged a positive working relationship with US President Joe Biden, partly by rallying behind NATO support for Ukraine. (That's important for Washington, the Politico authors note, as Italy will take over the G7 presidency in January.)
Some have welcomed Meloni's turn toward the mainstream: As the Global Briefing noted on Friday, a Persuasion essay by Sheri Berman includes Meloni among points of evidence that Europe's far-right has mellowed and doesn't threaten democracy.
Others are less wowed. At The New York Times, a guest opinion essay by David Broder (a Syracuse professor in Florence and author of "Mussolini's Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy") urges caution: "For all its Mussolinian roots, this government is no return to the past. Instead, in galvanizing the political right behind a resentful identity politics, it risks becoming something else entirely: Europe's future. Conservatives in Britain echo Ms. Meloni's obsession with favoring birthrates over migration; French anti-immigrant politicians like Éric Zemmour cite Italy as a model of how to 'unite the forces of the right'; and even in Germany, the Christian Democrats' long refusal to consider pacts with the Alternative for Germany is under strain." |
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What has Africa contributed to global development? Not much, according to some strains of Eurocentric history-telling against which Black scholars have worked since W.E.B. Du Bois, Adom Getachew writes in a New York Review of Books essay reviewing a new entry into that scholarly tradition: Howard French's "Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War."
French, a career foreign correspondent who helmed multiple overseas bureaus for The New York Times, "draws on his travels throughout the African continent and the wider Atlantic world and on extensive research in the primary sources and secondary literature to reconstruct Africa's place in history," Getachew writes.
That place in history involves many elements, as Getachew summarizes them, including: the centrality of African slave labor to supplying Europe with goods and to building plantation economies in the New World; the equal version of sovereignty applied by Europe to sub-Saharan Africa in the later Middle Ages; trade links that brought West African goods as far as China; the sought-after richness of West African nations, particularly in terms of gold and captured slaves; an original European interest in developing trade with that richness, not just with the Far East, a common conception in assessing European motivations for sailing the Atlantic; an "early Pan-Africanism" that featured "remarkable information networks that radiated from large port cities like Kingston and Havana, crisscrossed oceans, and traversed plantations"; and the production of creole cultures and a Black political identity.
Getachew writes: "In the United States, conflicts over the nation's fractious history—including debates about Confederate statues, The New York Times's 1619 Project, and school curriculums—have reached a frenzied pitch. French seeks to provoke a full-scale reconsideration of who we are as Americans. … Yet the history recounted in Born in Blackness contains lessons for Africa and Europe as well." |
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