CNN FAREED's Global Briefing - June 28, 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.   June 28, 2024

The World Thought Biden Tanked, Too It wasn’t your TV set: President Joe Biden’s debate performance looked terrible around the world, according to the world’s press. “Biden misses his first campaign debate against Trump,” declares a headline in the conservative French daily Le Figaro. (“Voice raspy, blinking his eyes, Biden stayed on the defensive, seeming sometimes disoriented and sputtering,” writes correspondent Adrien Jaulmes.) “[C]onfused and with a hoarse voice” is how Italy’s Corriere della Sera describes Biden in the debate. The Spanish daily El País pronounces in its headline: “Biden fails in debate with Trump in his attempt to clear up concerns about his age.” The center-left British paper The Guardian notes “[c]alls for Biden to stand aside as surrogates reiterate support after debate.” Brazil’s Folha de S.Paulo calls it “an event that could be decisive” in the US election. Chinese state-propaganda paper the Global Times crows that “global viewers [were] more focused on candidates’ physical condition.” The debate was “marred by falsehoods and incoherent remarks,” writes the UAE newspaper The National. As Foreign Policy’s Rishi Iyengar and Christina Lu write, Biden and former President Donald Trump clashed last night in their visions for the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and America’s global image. And yet, to most, policy was not the main takeaway.  Nor were Trump’s falsehoods and misleading statements, though international headlines made some mention of them. Le Monde Washington correspondent Piotr Smolar writes that Trump “was able to tell, without contradiction, lies about America's economic situation at the end of his term, about the January 6 assault on the Capitol by his supporters and about the migration issue.” The paper’s English-language headline laments Biden’s “failure to call out” Trump’s “lies.” The French headline calls Biden’s performance a “shipwreck.” From the German weekly Der Spiegel, we learn that “German politicians suggest Biden withdraw.” And that may be the main result: If Biden had a cold, as unnamed sources claimed to reporters, the Western world order seems to have caught it. Although one German foreign-policy expert tells Der Spiegel that Biden can salvage his candidacy by giving a strong speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, German politician Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann of the centrist Free Democrats, who was elected to the EU Parliament, “fears a ‘historic tragedy’ in November,” Der Spiegel reports.   As for US reactions, The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser writes: “The question now is not so much about what kind of bounce Trump might get from Thursday’s debate but an even bigger one that we can’t quite answer yet: Was this the beginning of the end of the Biden Presidency?” Biden supporter and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman put a point on the utterly dispirited reaction among Biden allies, writing: “[I]t made me weep. I cannot remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime, precisely because of what it revealed: Joe Biden, a good man and a good president, has no business running for re-election. … If he insists on running and he loses to Trump, Biden and his family—and his staff and party members who enabled him—will not be able to show their faces. They deserve better. America needs better. The world needs better.”

Fareed: Given the Choice, People Like the West Despite any pessimism engendered by last night’s debate, Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column that “[t]he rise of China and the return of Russia have unsettled international affairs. But they have also reminded the world of the choice between two sets of values—Western liberal ones and autocratic illiberal ones.” Seeing that heightened contrast, people around the world prefer the West, Fareed writes: “In a new poll commissioned by Ipsos and King’s College London (to coincide with my delivering this year’s Fulbright Distinguished Lecture at Oxford), the shifting global mood is evident. Surveying nearly 24,000 people in 31 countries, the study found that people were thinking more seriously and critically of the growing power and influence of the autocratic great powers. They saw Russia, China and Iran as three of the four countries mostly using their influence for bad, and this represented a souring of views on all three countries since the last time this survey was conducted in 2019. … [P]eople in most countries viewed U.S. influence on the world stage more favorably than they did in 2019—with one notable exception: in the United States itself. The loss of confidence among Americans in their own country’s vitality, strength and virtue is profoundly worrying.”

Israel–Hezbollah Danger Level Keeps Rising Since Oct. 7, many have worried a second Middle East war would break out between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Islamist militant group. Experts say that danger has been rising in recent weeks. As tensions heightened, on June 19 Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah pledged an unrestrained war if the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were to launch a major campaign against Hezbollah. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that the “intense” phase of Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza will soon end and that Israel could soon shift its focus to the Lebanese border, where the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Hezbollah have exchanged attacks since Oct. 7. Reading into all this, the Middle East Institute’s Randa Slim warns: “Neither Hezbollah nor Israel wants the border clashes between them to devolve into an all-out war, but the gap between their positions on launching a diplomatic process to resolve their conflict is unbridgeable in the absence of a cease-fire deal in Gaza.” At the UK international-affairs think tank Chatham House, Lina Khatib writes that “Israel and Hezbollah are likely to continue to play an increasingly reckless game of chicken while using psychological warfare as both an effort at mutual deterrence and a supposed message of defiance to the US.” Attacks have reached farther, territorially, and verbal threats have been notable, Khatib writes, as both sides are “rewriting their rules of engagement, demonstrating once again that the notions of red lines have become utterly meaningless.”

Will Iran’s Election Matter? Iranians have been voting today to replace the late President Ebrahim Raisi, who died suddenly in a helicopter crash last month. Fitting a recent trend in the Iranian polity, the Middle East Institute’s Alex Vatanka writes, “[I]t is clear that the June 28 presidential election is not exciting the country’s voters. … In fact, a major ‘no vote’ campaign has been under way on social media and elsewhere, aimed at convincing Iranians to stay home.” Iranian elections are not considered free or fair, and the massive protest movement that unfolded at the end of 2022 reflected wide dissatisfaction with Iran’s political system. Looking at the candidates, Vatanka writes, “the one figure who has run on a platform of seeking détente with the West is Masoud Pezeshkian, the sole reformist-leaning candidate. He has vowed to make Iran once again a ‘player’ in the region and has said he has no hesitation about negotiating and reaching agreements with rival countries—a hint to the Americans and Europeans.” But Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has criticized Pezeshkian’s foreign-policy views, Vatanka writes. At Foreign Policy, Saeid Jafari adds: “The reformist movement’s credibility has been severely undermined by the failure to deliver on promises and the harsh crackdown on dissent. The movement’s association with [former President Hassan] Rouhani’s government, which many Iranians view as having failed to bring about meaningful change, further complicates Pezeshkian’s prospects.” At American Purpose, Kasra Aarabi and Jack Roush predict continued influence for the hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), regardless of who Iran’s next president is: “The patron-client relationship that developed between Khamenei and Raisi hinged … on the late president nurturing close ties with the IRGC—the Iranian supreme leader’s ideological paramilitary. It is almost certain, therefore, that Raisi’s successor will already have a deeply embedded relationship with both the IRGC and the Office of the Supreme Leader—and is compliant with their directives.”