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 4, 2024 |
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On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET:
“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
Michael Corleone’s famous line from “The Godfather Part III” neatly encapsulates the last 15 years of US policy toward the Middle East, Fareed says. It’s not the most important region to US global interests, but since George W. Bush’s second term, Middle East crises have stymied America’s hopes of stepping back and directing attention elsewhere in the world.
Last weekend, it was a drone strike that pulled the US back in. Carried out by an Iran-backed militia in Iraq, the attack killed three American soldiers and injured more than 30—prompting a round of retaliatory US strikes against Iran-allied militias in the Middle East in recent days.
“The most effective response to this broader Iran-backed push against American interests in the region,” Fareed counsels, “would be to show not that Washington can escalate militarily, which of course it can do, but that it can de-escalate politically, meaning that it can use the crisis in Gaza to create conditions for longer-term stability. And that means working to create conditions for Israeli security and Palestinian aspirations for a state, which would then make it much easier not just for Saudi but broader Arab–Israeli reconciliation. That kind of political and diplomatic response would not appease the war hawks in Washington, but it would be the most effective counter to America’s foes. As Michael Corleone says in the same movie, ‘Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment.’”
After that: the US vs. Iran. How should Washington respond to the attacks and provocations launched by Iran-backed forces across the Middle East, from militias in Iraq to the Houthis in Yemen? And how can a full-on war be avoided? Fareed asks Vali Nasr of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Mina Al-Oraibi, editor in chief of the UAE newspaper The National.
Then: US aid to Ukraine and Israel is on hold, at least until knotty problems on America’s border with Mexico can be solved. Fareed asks The Atlantic’s David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, why he says congressional Republicans are committing a great “betrayal” by tying these issues together.
Have China’s decades of extraordinary economic growth reached a permanent end? Sluggish since the pandemic began, China’s economy faces some strong, longer-term headwinds as the country’s population ages. Financial Times chief economics commentator Martin Wolf joins Fareed to assess.
Finally: Can an unorthodox new president deliver Argentina from the doldrums? Javier Milei campaigned on radical, libertarian economic theories. Will he manage to implement them? And where is Argentina heading under his leadership? Fareed talks with Council on Foreign Relations Latin America expert Shannon K. O’Neil. |
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For weeks, rumors have swirled that Ukraine’s top military commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, is on the outs with President Volodymyr Zelensky and could be dismissed. While nothing has materialized, and while rumors of Zaluzhny’s pending dismissal remain just that, The Economist ascertains: “(T)he dysfunctional relationship between the president and his general, and suspicions in the president’s office that the general harbours political ambitions … have not gone away. Both men look damaged by the row, and the open disputes between Ukraine’s political leadership and its military command are worrying Ukraine’s main allies. … A president is entitled to change a commander … But removing a man as popular with his soldiers and the public as the general carries political and military risks. It is not clear how this story will end. But if Mr Zelensky keeps his top commander on, he will look weak. If he fires him, the clumsy way it has been handled will only damage confidence in the leadership. As so often in this conflict, there are no easy wins.” |
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Pakistan to Vote, With Khan in Jail |
Pakistan will vote this coming week, with a glaring absence from the ballot: popular former Prime Minister Imran Khan, who was convicted of publicizing state secrets and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Khan and his wife were subsequently convicted of a “fraudulent” marriage. Critics allege Pakistan’s military, which looms large over the country’s politics and with which Khan has feuded, was behind Khan’s convictions.
In a Nikkei Asia op-ed, King’s College London war-studies scholar Ayesha Siddiqa writes: “As Pakistanis prepare to go to the polls … (t)he subdued atmosphere reflects a sense that the results have been predetermined this time, as the country's powerful military has maneuvered to block out former Prime Minister Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. Electoral manipulation is nothing new in Pakistan. Barring the 1970 election, which could be considered the fairest ever held in the country, the army has always meddled in the electoral process to help ensure the result would bring the party it favored to power. It then tended to find a way to remove that party when the situation became uncomfortable.”
The Economist agrees, writing: “(T)he purpose of the verdict is to remove what little political space Mr Khan and the PTI had … After receiving a three-year sentence in a separate corruption case in August, Mr Khan has already been disqualified from contesting the election. Candidates for the PTI have been arrested and the party’s rallies broken up. … With the generals’ ire directed at Mr Khan and his party, (former Prime Minister Nawaz) Sharif is quietly marching towards what would be a fourth term.” |
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As France Mulls Constitutionalizing Abortion Rights, It Parts With US |
Historically, Pamela Druckerman wrote for The Atlantic in 2022, France and the US had “moved in near-lockstep” on abortion policy.
“In 1965,” Druckerman noted, “the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling granting married couples access to birth-control medication; France authorized free access to the pill, for anyone, two years later. The U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling on Roe in 1973; two years later, France decriminalized abortion by passing what became known as the loi Veil, after Simone Veil, the celebrated postwar politician who, as health minister, spearheaded the effort to enact the legislation.” After the overturn of Roe v. Wade in the US, Druckerman saw the two countries “diverging,” as France’s National Assembly had just expanded abortion rights to 14 weeks from conception.
This week, France’s National Assembly approved (and advanced to the senate) a move to enshrine abortion rights in France’s constitution. At CNN Opinion, Jill Filipovic writes that America’s opposite turn has played a role: “If the French bill is approved by the senate and then adopted, France will be the first country on earth to include the right to abortion in its constitution, a vanguard moment in feminist history and a potential model for other nations that want to protect women’s rights. But this hopefully forthcoming French feminist victory is borne from an American loss: The push to enshrine abortion rights in the French constitution came precisely because the US Supreme Court ruled that abortion is not a right guaranteed by ours. ‘It was a wake-up call for everyone,’ French Senator Mélanie Vogel told CNN in December. ‘We don’t want to wake up like American women… with this right being taken from us.’”
Although polling has suggested abortion rights are popular in France, as they are in the US, the proposed constitutional change has involved controversy and disagreement—including over doctors’ rights to decline to perform abortions when their consciences object and over whether to call abortion a “right” or a “freedom,” as Hélène de Lauzun writes for The European Conservative. |
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Originalism and the Trump Ballot Debate |
As select US states move to keep former President Donald Trump off the 2024 presidential ballot—on the premise that Trump engaged in insurrection and is thus barred from holding office by the Constitution’s post-Civil War Fourteenth Amendment—the US Supreme Court will take up the matter this coming week.
In a New York Review of Books essay, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz argues that Trump plainly did participate in an insurrection and that his 2024 White House bid will be done in by none other than the dominant conservative jurisprudential theory of recent decades: originalism, the legal philosophy of hewing to the constitutional framers’ original intent, or to how the constitution would have been interpreted at the time of its writing.
Clearly no fan of originalism, Wilentz argues: “Over the past forty years the doctrine of originalism (along with its sibling, textualism) has been the cornerstone of the jurisprudence of the conservative majority that now dominates the Court. Concocted in the 1980s to roll back the constitutional precedents of the New Deal and Great Society eras, supposedly in the name of judicial restraint, originalism purports to divine the original intentions of the framers by presenting tendentious renderings of the past as a kind of scripture. This bad-faith invocation of the framers has become a ploy to justify overturning Roe v. Wade, gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965, eliminating commonsense gun regulation, and more. But now this originalist petard is exploding in the majority’s face. No degree of cherry-picking or obfuscation can deny the historical record of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is unequivocal: if Donald Trump engaged, in any way, in the insurrection of January 6, he is automatically barred from holding any public office, federal or state.” Seeing an awkward situation for conservative, Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices, Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman agrees in a Politico Magazine essay, positing: “In short: originalism, pure and simple, serves as the foundation for Trump’s exclusion from the race.” |
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… And Weighing Fears of a Trump Dictatorship |
Wilentz highlights the danger, in his view, that Trump would unravel American democracy if he won. Weighing the likelihood of that, a Politico Magazine essay by Asli Aydintasbas identifies lessons in the rise and tenure of authoritarian-leaning Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
“(P)anic is unnecessary,” Aydintasbas writes. “As someone who lived through the birth and growth of authoritarianism in Turkey, I’m something of an expert on the subject—and no, another four years of Trump is not enough time to turn America into a dictatorship. What I saw in Turkey over the course of two decades of Tayyip Erdogan’s rule—working as a journalist for much of that time — is that building a dictatorship takes a long time. Similarly in Poland and Hungary, illiberal governments have needed years to chip away at the rule of law. There is a particular rhythm and process to dismantling a democracy, a kind of incubation period for despotism: There are laws to change, institutions to dismantle, alliances to build. With a concerted effort by Trump, the incubation period could be squeezed into eight more consecutive years, but not four.” |
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