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. January 18, 2024 |
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Already Hot, the Middle East Gets Even Hotter |
Will the Middle East explode into a full-blown regional war? 2024 has featured disquieting developments. This week has brought even more.
On Tuesday, Iran struck sites in Syria, Pakistan, and northern Iraq—Tehran claimed the last was an Israeli intelligence base—flexing itself as “a missile power in the world,” as Iran’s defense minister told reporters. Pakistan has since struck back. (At Bloomberg, Ismail Dilawar and Patrick Sykes explain that the Iranian and Pakistani strikes have revealed bilateral tension and have heightened fears of regional conflict, but Iran and Pakistan typically have cordial relations, and each country said it had struck at Baloch separatist militants in the other’s territory, not at government or national-military targets.) The US, meanwhile, has continued an air campaign begun last Friday in conjunction with the UK against Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants, who have attacked international shipping in the Red Sea. As Ben Watson notes in Defense One’s The D Brief newsletter, Charles Lister of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy tweeted to point out an “insane scale of cross-border conflict” in the Middle East just in the last week.
What to make of all this? Some analysts see a dance of warning and deterrence between the US, Israel, and Iran.
“US strikes on Houthi positions inside Yemen aim to deter the militant group, and its Iranian backers, from any serious escalation in the Red Sea,” writes Middle East Institute President and CEO Paul Salem, in a roundup of expert analysis. “In Iraq and Syria, US attacks on militias allied with Iran carry the same message. In all three of those arenas, the jury is still out as to whether this deterrence is working.” At CNN Opinion, Yemen expert Elisabeth Kendall told Peter Bergen that the Houthis are particularly difficult to deter, as they’re independent and accustomed to war. Elsewhere at CNN, Tamara Qiblawi has written that amid current conflicts with Israel and the West, the “popularity” of these Iran-backed groups “has soared in the region. They have largely redeemed themselves in a galvanized Arab and Muslim street, after having been mired in internal politics and plagued by allegations of corruption for years.”
Comfortingly, as the Middle East Institute’s Salem writes, Iran does not seem to want a full-on war with the US and Israel. “A policy of what we can call ‘limited and measured escalation’ suits Iran just fine,” Salem writes. “It does not want a large flare-up … but it hopes that raising and sustaining the costs for the US in the region is both popular in Arab and Muslim public opinion and unpopular with American voters in an election year.” Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft observes the same to CNN’s Qiblawi: “The Iranians are trying to stay out of a war. Their population absolutely does not want a war.” |
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The front lines in Ukraine may be stalemated, but that stalemate leaves Russia in control of much Ukrainian territory: 17.92% of it, according to Institute for the Study of War geospatial-intelligence researcher Daniel Mealie. As Russian control persists in those areas, so has a project of Russification, David Lewis writes for Foreign Affairs: “An army of (pro-Moscow) technocrats is overseeing the complete absorption of these territories, aligning their laws, regulations, and tax and banking systems with Russia, and getting rid of any traces of institutional ties to Ukraine. ... In occupied Ukraine, bureaucrats have been effective at enforcing the compliance of locals. Even as some people resist, authorities impose Russian education, cultural indoctrination, and economic and legal systems to rope these lands ever more tightly to Russia. The longer Russia occupies these territories, the harder it will be for Ukraine to get them back. ... At schools in the Russian occupied areas, children cannot avoid the propaganda. They are forced to sing the Russian national anthem every week. Schools have completely switched over to using Russian curriculum, with Ukrainian reduced to an optional second language. ... Most people simply try to get by without ending up ‘in the basement,’ as locals term the grim brutality of Russian detention.” |
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Guatemala’s ‘Jan. 6 in Reverse’ |
In December, commentators noted a dramatic test of democracy unfolding in the Western hemisphere. In Guatemala, as Frida Ghitis described the situation at the World Politics Review and as Graciela Mochofsky similarly relayed at The New Yorker, victorious reformist presidential candidate Bernardo Arévalo faced stacked odds as the established order, widely seen as corrupt, sought to block his inauguration following his August election win. An unlikely Indigenous-led protest movement supported his assumption of power in keeping with the vote results.
After Arévalo was sworn in as president on Monday, Ghitis revisits the story at the World Politics Review, hailing the “survival of Guatemala’s weak democracy” and finding a positive lesson: “News about attempts to subvert democracy have become a staple of our time. The phenomenon is dispiriting, to say the least. But amid this deeply worrisome trend, it’s easy to miss one encouraging development: Those attempts appear to be failing with some regularity. And they have been failing because those who support democracy are getting better at defending it.”
At Persuasion, Quico Toro invokes the above headline, drawing a similar conclusion and lamenting that global media haven’t paid more attention. Toro writes: “Ahead of last summer’s vote, every high-profile reformist candidate was disqualified from the ballot on one technicality or another. It was a very obvious stitch-up … only they left one loose end: A single, mostly-unknown reformer—an egghead former diplomat and academic—was polling so low, the pacto de corruptos didn’t even bother disqualifying him. His name was Bernardo Arévalo. Nobody had heard of him. Two days ago, Bernardo Arévalo was sworn in as president. … (T)he story has everything: enough plot twists and 11th-hour reversals to read like a tropical House of Cards, only with the good guys coming out on top. Amid a million stories of democratic backsliding everywhere … here’s this tiny poor country showing us the way regular people, indigenous people, can fight back against the enemies of democracy and win. It sounds like a movie. But it’s real.” |
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The world is a crazy place. At The Atlantic, Brian Klaas reminds us of the bearing that chaos theory—in lay terms, the study of randomness—has on world affairs, revisiting what became known popularly as the “butterfly effect”: small, seemingly inconsequential events influencing big ones through chain reactions. As a case in point, Klaas notes that Kyoto avoided the atomic bomb because US war secretary Henry Stimson had vacationed there with his wife in 1926 and, having fallen in love with it, lobbied President Harry Truman directly to remove the city from America’s nuclear target list.
In the course of exploring this intellectual terrain, Klaas advances a theory about human life and the locations of order and disorder. Klaas writes: “For most of the 250,000 or so years that Homo sapiens have graced the planet, things ticked along more or less the same way from one generation to the next. Day to day, however, life was dangerous and unpredictable. Childbirth was a death trap. Starvation was a constant threat … Most of the human story is one of local instability but global stability. … Today the dynamic is inverted. Most people in rich, industrialized societies live according to routines, patterns, and a rigid sense of daily order. In one study, researchers using geolocation data from cellphones found that they could predict, with 93 percent accuracy, where a given person would be at any specific time of day. But the familiar routines take place within a superstructure that is constantly shifting. Children now teach parents how to use technology, not the reverse. Three decades ago, few people had heard of the internet; now no one can function without it. We have the opposite of our ancestors: local stability, but global instability. In this upside-down world, Starbucks remains unchanged while rivers dry up and democracies collapse.” |
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