CNN Fareed's Global Briefing : Why is the US struggling to get the biggest developing countries on board with its global agenda? and more

 

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.   June 4, 2023

On Today’s Show On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET: Why is the US struggling to get the biggest developing countries on board with its global agenda?   As countries like India, Brazil and South Africa go their own way—declining to join the US sanctions campaign against Russia and, more broadly, seeking to balance their relationships with Russia, China and the West—Fareed examines why.   “This is the new world,” Fareed says. “It is not characterized by the decline of America ‘but rather the rise of everyone else,’ as I wrote in 2008. Vast parts of the globe that were once pawns on the chessboard are now players—and intend to chart their own, often proudly self-interested course. They will not be easily cowed or cajoled. They have to be persuaded … Navigating this international arena is the great challenge of American diplomacy today. Is Washington up to the task?”    After that: Fareed sits down for an exclusive interview with one of America’s most important foreign-policy makers—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan—for a wide-ranging conversation about Ukraine’s highly anticipated counteroffensive, Washington’s above-mentioned struggles in rallying parts of the world behind its international agenda, and how to handle dangerous tensions between Washington and Beijing.   Could the world be made much better, on the cheap? Fareed talks with Copenhagen Consensus Center President Bjørn Lomborg, whose new book “Best Things First: The 12 Most Efficient Solutions for the World’s Poorest and Our Global SDG Promises” identifies low-hanging fruit in global development: the most cost-effective ways to improve lives across the planet, from maternal health to kids’ education.   Finally: It’s been a 15-year adventure at Fareed Zakaria GPS. Marking the 15th anniversary of the show’s CNN premiere on June 1, 2008, Fareed looks back at conversations with presidents, prime ministers, at least one king, filmmakers, human rights advocates, environmentalists, artists, philosophers … and the events that have changed our world in the last decade-and-a-half: some for the better, some for the worse.

Big Bad Baby Bust It’s not just China: Much of the economically developed world, plus major emerging economies China and India, face low birth rates that figure to threaten economic growth in decades to come, The Economist writes in its current issue.    The main problem posed by that trajectory is well known: fewer working-age adults to make the economy go and, critically, to fund health and social support for older people. But The Economist identifies another: that “younger people have more of what psychologists call ‘fluid intelligence’, the ability to think creatively so as to solve problems in entirely new ways,” and the world will have less of it.    What the magazine predicts is an economy that might be less innovative, even as the innovation of artificial intelligence looms as a potential solution: “An über-productive AI-infused economy might find it easy to support a greater number of retired people. … Combined with robotics, AI may also make caring for the elderly less labour-intensive. Such innovations will certainly be in high demand.”

Will Russia Face War Fatigue? As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war grinds on in Ukraine, the toll is being felt in Russia, too, as soldiers are killed and as their bodies are returned. At Der Spiegel, Christian Hebel reports on the pain of relatives of slain Wagner Group mercenaries recruited from prisons and deployed in the brutal “meat grinder” tactic the group has become known for.   As estimates vary widely over Russian war deaths and injuries, RAND’s Dara Massicot asks if Russia will be able to care for waves of physically and psychologically wounded veterans.   Massicot writes: “Just as the terms ‘Afghan Syndrome’ and ‘Chechen Syndrome’ emerged to describe the plight of Russian veterans who lacked support and struggled to adapt to civilian life after those conflicts, it is only a matter of time before ‘Ukraine Syndrome’ grips Russia, as thousands of veterans suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or other conditions return home. … The Russian medical system is already straining, even though most Russian soldiers are still deployed.”

‘Who Are the Taliban Now?’ The world still doesn’t know what to do with Taliban-run Afghanistan. As the group pursues what’s been dubbed “gender apartheid,” banning women from many settings of work and public life—including from working with the UN—international donors and foreign countries alike are faced with a difficult choice: engage and seek to help, playing by rules that may violate their own ethics, or stand aside while as many as 28 million Afghans need humanitarian aid. In a recent Le Monde diplomatique essay, Tanya Goudsouzian outlined a particularly difficult position for the UN; talks last month in Doha “concluded … with no sign that the global community was inching closer to formal recognition of the Taliban.”   In that context, notable American journalist Steve Coll reviews in a New York Review of Books essay Hassan Abbas’ new book “The Return of the Taliban,” finding the group’s internal politics complicated—not all prominent Taliban figures agree with the draconian treatment of women, and some seem to want better relations with the outside world, Coll writes—and yet still relatively immovable.   Coll writes: “Abbas’s take is that ‘the battle lines … are drawn’ between ‘the relatively pragmatic Taliban in Kabul and their highly conservative counterparts’ in Kandahar. Yet, he observes, the divisions have resulted only in ‘policy paralysis.’ In fact, the movement is not likely to crack up violently over issues like female education, even if such policies cause international isolation. The Taliban have a long record of maintaining military and political unity under severe pressure. … Some sort of political transition in Kabul that tests the contours of Taliban factionalism seems more likely during the next year or two than an ideological split does.”

Hope in Health On a more hopeful note, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof writes from Sierra Leone that improvements in women’s and infants’ health is something we should pause to appreciate.   “One of the misimpressions people have about the world is that it’s going to hell,” Kristof writes. “Perhaps that’s because humanity’s great triumph over the last half-century—huge reductions in poverty, disease and early death—goes largely unacknowledged. … We happen to live in a transformational era in which 96 percent of the world’s children now survive until adulthood. That arc is visible here in Sierra Leone, a country that remains heartbreakingly poor—yet where the risk of a child dying is less than half what it was 20 years ago.”

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