CNN FAREED's Global Briefing February 1, 2024 -Could a Grand Bargain Save the Middle East?

 

View this email in your browser  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.   February 1, 2024 Could a Grand Bargain Save the Middle East? It’s not correct to say the Middle East is more deeply enmeshed in conflict than it has been recently. In just the last decade, a brutal civil war in Syria featured torture and chemical weapons, another in Yemen killed hundreds of thousands, and ISIS built a genocidal caliphate the size of Britain. Still, analysts have warned the region is on the brink: As The New Yorker’s Robin Wright recently observed, a host of ongoing Middle East conflicts could merge into one big war pitting the US and Israel against Iran.   The scale of the danger has been equaled by the breadth of speculation about potential answers. Since mere days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of Israeli civilians, commentators have wondered if a diplomatic grand bargain could end the fighting in Gaza, create a Palestinian state, and durably settle the decades-long Israeli–Palestinian conflict.   Such talk is intensifying. The US approach to the region appears to be evolving—President Joe Biden today announced US sanctions against violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank—and at The New York Times, Thomas Friedman predicts and hopes that a new “Biden Doctrine” on the Middle East could soon arrive. As Friedman sees it, such a US foreign-policy doctrine would be predicated on standing firm against Iran, pressuring Israel to accommodate a Palestinian state, solidifying the US alliance with Saudi Arabia, and getting the kingdom to recognize Israel diplomatically.   The Economist senses similar movement. “Amid intense diplomacy, led by America and Saudi Arabia, a transformative deal is taking shape,” the magazine writes. “Its novelty, we have learned, is to use a proposed hostage-release to reset Israeli politics; to use that reset to open a path to a Palestinian state; and then to use Israel’s commitment to that as the basis for a deal between it and Saudi Arabia, in which mutual recognition is underpinned by American security guarantees. Officials say the odds of a hostage deal may be 50% and, with that in place, the odds of a Saudi-Israeli deal could also be 50%. The prize is far from certain, obviously, but it promises a new economic and security architecture in the Middle East.”   On the other hand, a Foreign Affairs essay by Dalia Dassa Kaye and Sanam Vakil questions whether Washington can swoop in to forge a region-shaping deal. “(W)aiting for the United States to take the lead in effectively managing Gaza and delivering a lasting Middle East peace would be like waiting for Godot,” they write: “current regional and global dynamics simply make it too difficult for Washington to play that dominant role. … Given this emerging reality, regional powers—particularly Israel’s immediate Arab neighbors Egypt and Jordan, along with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which have been coordinating since the war began—urgently need to step up and define a collective way forward. … Among the difficult realities that the war in Gaza has exposed, one of the starkest may be the limits of American power.” Did Kim Mean It? North Korean saber-rattling is nothing new, but alarms have been raised by Kim Jong Un’s declaration a month ago that he will no longer seek reconciliation and reunification with South Korea. At 38 North, Robert L. Carlin and Siegfried S. Hecker took Kim seriously, writing that the North Korean leader “has made a strategic decision to go to war. We do not know when or how Kim plans to pull the trigger, but the danger is already far beyond the routine warnings in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo about Pyongyang’s ‘provocations.’ In other words, we do not see the war preparation themes in North Korean media appearing since the beginning of last year as typical bluster.”   Others see a disturbing trend—but not a clear intention on war. “North Korea may now resort to provocations short of war to stir anxiety in the region in the hopes of extracting benefits for itself,” Soo Kim writes in a Nikkei Asia op-ed. “Kim’s remarks may mark the first official public instance of the North Korean regime calling the South public enemy No. 1, but the sentiment has long been demonstrated.”   In a Foreign Affairs essay, Sue Mi Terry—who recently joined Fareed on GPS to reflect on North Koreans’ attempts to escape, as detailed in the documentary she co-produced, “Beyond Utopia”—argues similarly that the North isn’t necessarily preparing for war: “Kim knows that a major war with South Korea would surely draw in the United States and would spell the end of his regime. The risk, then, is not that North Korea will intentionally begin a war but that Pyongyang’s saber rattling and regular acts of low-level aggression—including launching missiles into South Korean waters, sending drones toward its islands, and violating borders in the Yellow Sea—could nevertheless start a war by provoking retaliation. To ensure that this does not happen, and that peace holds on the peninsula, Washington and Seoul must send an unmistakable signal of military strength and purpose even as they seek to reestablish communication with Pyongyang.” Milei vs. Inflation Argentina notoriously suffers from inflation that makes regular economic functioning more difficult. As inflation continued to dominate discussion of the US economy last spring, at CNN Opinion Azul Blaquier detailed, by comparison, Argentina’s “economic chaos” of 15 different US-dollar exchange rates and Argentines’ persistent need to change money on the black market.   Enter Javier Milei, the new president of Argentina who campaigned on radical libertarian economic ideas, like abolishing the central bank and converting to the US dollar as official currency. (Milei later walked back some of those proposals.) At Americas Quarterly, Eduardo Levy Yeyati writes that inflation marks Milei’s most significant challenge, and solving it will be necessary to pursue other plans: “The opening weeks of President Javier Milei’s government have been defined by talk of sacrifice, of enduring short-term pain in order to achieve the medium-term payoff of price stability, a necessary condition for a healthier economy. But there are some signs that the pain may be more acute, and longer-lasting, when it comes to prices. … So, the question remains: What if the current plan fails to lower inflation, a condition for pretty much everything else? What if the dollarization fairy is not available as a last resort? Can the government still achieve stability before the honeymoon is over?”   On Sunday’s GPS, Fareed will discuss Milei’s program and Argentina’s future with Council on Foreign Relations Latin America expert Shannon K. O’Neil. Tune in to CNN at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET to watch. In Ukraine, Comedy Persists Darkly In The Atlantic, Tim Mak offers up a brief profile of Ukraine’s stand-up comedy scene, as it persists through war and turns toward dark humor. Mak writes: “In the old days, you could amuse a crowd with jokes about sex, workplace shenanigans, and political corruption. Now the jokes are about air-raid sirens, missile attacks—and dead Russians. Perhaps too many jokes are about dead Russians, comics told me. ... And they are morally troublesome as well. ‘I’m actually sure that this hatred that we have developed since the beginning of the invasion toward Russians will play a bad joke on us in the future,’ (comedian Borden) Boyarin said. ‘Because this hatred that you accumulate for so long doesn’t just go away that easily.’