CNN FAREED's Global Briefing March 1, 2024

 

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.   March 1, 2024

Fareed: Biden Should Tell Hard Truths to Israelis—Directly After Hamas’s horrific massacres of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, President Joe Biden appeared to have a strategy for approaching Israel and reining in its forceful reprisal in Gaza—a military campaign estimated to have cost tens of thousands of lives and one that has stirred sharp and widespread backlash against the Jewish state, particularly in the Arab world. As Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column, Biden seemed to be thinking: Hug Israel close, show Israelis and their leaders that America stands with them, and then use the accrued leverage to influence Israel’s prosecution of the war.   That strategy has not worked, Fareed observes. “The United States has repeatedly pressured Israel to make greater efforts to protect innocent civilians, but to little avail,” Fareed writes. “Now it has been counseling against an invasion of Rafah, the city nestled close to Egypt where more than 1 million Palestinians have huddled together. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to invade Rafah, whether another hostage deal is made or not. Washington has warned that after the war there should be no Israeli seizure of land in Gaza and no new Israeli occupation of the territory. The Israeli government’s plans are to do both. The result is that American policy on the Gaza war now appears hapless, ineffective and immoral. The image of U.S. officials wringing their hands about civilian casualties while providing ever-more weapons is grotesque.”   As for what to do about this, Fareed echoes a recommendation made by seasoned US foreign-policy hands Richard Haass and Martin Indyk: that Biden should circumvent Netanyahu and address Israeli lawmakers or citizens directly and argue for abandoning, as Fareed puts it, “policies that they will regret deeply. … Biden should go to Israel and show the country his love for it by speaking these hard truths. He would also show America and the world that he still has the energy, moral clarity and wisdom to lead.”

Navalny Funeral Draws a Crowd Alexey Navalny—Russia’s most prominent dissident, who died this month in a Siberian Arctic penal colony—was laid to rest in Moscow today. His funeral drew thousands of mourners. Another dissident, who spent nine years in Soviet prison until 1986—like Navalny, with many days in solitary confinement—Natan Sharansky writes for The Economist that he received letters from the imprisoned Navalny, who “told me he was reading my book, ‘Fear No Evil’, and was surprised by the similarity of our experiences.” Navalny told Sharansky: “In your alma mater everything is as it was.”   Sharansky urges the West to care more about Russian dissidents and to raise their plight with the Kremlin as Washington did during the Cold War. “There was one big difference between my time in prison and Navalny’s,” Sharansky writes. “In my time Western politicians understood the scale of historic struggle and saw the fate of Soviet political prisoners as part of their own security. Now they don’t. And this is a mistake of historic proportions.”

China’s Economy: Still Struggling China’s economy disappointed in 2023, and it still faces “significant challenges including declining property investment, accumulating debt risk and weak consumption growth, all of which pose downside risks to China’s growth trajectory in the near term,” Jiao Wang writes for East Asia Forum. Among varying but mostly negative views in a ChinaFile expert roundup, Anne Stevenson Yang writes discouragingly of the government’s response: “So, China’s leaders pace like caged tigers, lunging at half measures like new bond issues and a ‘stock market stabilization fund,’ as if these efforts might bring back the glory days. But half measures will not work. China has a huge economy, much of which is functional. Debt can be spread around for some time, and it is hard to say when the banks will demand massive cash injections to survive. But once that happens, the currency will deflate like an old party balloon, and the government will do its best to suppress dissent and close the borders. Those processes have already begun, and they foretell nothing good for 2024.”

Turnout ’24 It’s a well-worn axiom that elections are won by “turnout”: the rate at which one’s supporters actually go to the polls and cast ballots. (The term also encompasses the associated mechanisms of getting them to do so: emails, text messages, door-knocking, TV ads, etc.) Separate from the project of convincing opponents or undecideds that you (or the candidate who employs you) is the best choice, turnout is the art and science of converting potential non-voters into actual voters.   And although the above may always be true, non-voters don’t get as much attention as they might. In a New York Times Magazine essay, Marcela Valdes seeks to remedy that. Drawing from the 2017 book “The American Nonvoter” by Lyn Ragsdale and Jerrold G. Rusk, Valdes finds relevant vote-motivating factors that resonate with today’s political ambiance. “Ragsdale and Rusk find that two things make ambivalent voters more inclined to action,” Valdes writes: “high contrast between the candidates and destabilizing national or international events like economic recessions, wars or the pandemic. When the world feels risky and the differences between the candidates are striking, decisions feel easier to make and the stakes of not voting feel higher. These conditions influence all voters, not just ambivalent ones, which may explain why turnout for presidential elections has improved since 1996, even as America’s polarization has increased, and why it leaped in 2020 to its highest point in more than a century.”   Worth noting, too, is that turnout operations are evolving with media-consumption habits. At Campaigns and Elections, Sean J. Miller quotes Democratic consultant Pili Tober as saying: “The reality is that the folks that we used to think we can find on local and Spanish media, now if you ask them, they get their news from TikTok—and it’s across generations. It’s not just young people.” Influencer marketing, another consultant tells Miller, will likely play a role in 2024.

What did you think of today’s newsletter? Send ideas, questions and feedback to globalbriefing@cnn.com