FAREED's Global Briefing -July 28, 2024 - How should we view the Biden presidency?

 

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.   July 28, 2024

On Today’s Show On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET: How should we view the Biden presidency? With six months left it’s too early to talk about President Joe Biden’s legacy, Fareed says, but we can examine the highs and lows so far. While inflation has been painful, Fareed says, the US economy rebounded impressively from the despair of Covid-19. In foreign policy, Biden has met the challenges of a rising China and a belligerent Russia by rallying allies and adding two members to NATO’s ranks. Domestically, he has spearheaded a dramatic shift toward investment. Since Reagan, America’s signature domestic policy achievements have been tax cuts, Fareed says; Biden, by contrast, has steered massive investments toward infrastructure and technology. Biden seems to feel he has long been underestimated, Fareed says, and his record as president suggests he is right. After that: The last few weeks have brought sudden changes in US politics. 100 days from the election, can Democrats’ new standard bearer Vice President Kamala Harris run a competitive campaign against former President Donald Trump? And who is Harris, in terms of her own policies and how she’ll sell them to voters? Fareed talks with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, host of the paper’s podcast “The Ezra Klein Show.”  Then: the state of conservatism. With the GOP lined up solidly behind Trump, Fareed talks with historian Niall Ferguson about conservatives’ broad turn toward protection and populism. What does autocracy look like, today? Fareed talks with The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum—author of the new book “Autocracy, Inc.”—about the rise of a new kind of dictator.  Tinpot military strongmen have gone out of style, superseded by political operators who enjoy vast riches and wield technological power to control their countries. As today’s autocrats deepen their cooperation, Fareed asks Applebaum who they are and what they want. Finally: a new culprit for CO2 emissions that you probably haven't considered. For all of its potential benefits to humanity, AI uses massive amounts of energy.

What China Wants—And How It’s Trying to Get It What to do about China? Earlier this year, Fareed heard from former Trump administration China-policy hand Matt Pottinger, who argued (as he did in a Foreign Affairs essay) that the US is already locked in a new cold war with Beijing—and should play to win. Another noted American China expert, Elizabeth Economy, has argued in Foreign Affairs that the US is indeed competing with China, but engagement rather than combativeness is the better course of action. In a new Foreign Affairs podcast, Economy tells Editor-in-Chief Daniel Kurtz-Phelan that China is seeking to change the world order to its benefit by undoing Western primacy. Programs like the Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, the Global Development Initiative, and Global Security Initiative are meant to rally international partners to cooperate with Beijing—but their stated goals are enmeshed with political visions at odds with the West, like economic prosperity taking precedence over civil rights. “Embedded in all of these things … is a kind of stealth bomber that is designed to really detonate in some ways the current priority, primacy of Western values,” Economy says. If the US doesn’t engage with the rest of the world—by failing to fill ambassadorial posts, for instance—it will have a harder time competing with what China offers.

When Political Violence Isn’t So Political The US has a problem with political violence. From Charlottesville to Jan. 6, recent years have brought a spate of violent episodes and thwarted plots that would undermine the democratic principle of choosing leaders and policies through elections, peacefully. This month, the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump prompted immediate flashbacks—and acute concerns about the country’s direction.  Two weeks later, the motives of the gunman are still not known. In the days after the shooting, a handful of security experts stressed to the Global Briefing that there is considerable loose wiring in the motives behind what we might consider political violence.   As details emerged slowly, former FBI special agent Kenneth Gray, now of New Haven University, suggested Trump’s would-be assassin might be more akin to a school shooter than to a terrorist with a defined political agenda. In some cases, today’s threats are posed by individuals carrying “a cocktail of grievances that are internally inconsistent, that are not coherent,” said Carrie Cordero, a CNN analyst and general counsel for the Center for a New American Security. “Different individuals can be inspired by so many different things.” Juliette Kayyem, a CNN analyst and contributing writer to The Atlantic, noted that “Hinckley was about Jodie Foster,” referencing the 1981 shooting of then-President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley, Jr., in an attempt to impress the actress. At The New York Times Magazine, Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell interviews Hinckley, and the two discuss the attempt on Trump’s life. (Hinckley was released from a psychiatric hospital in 2016.)   “I come from Ireland, a country with a long and complicated history of political violence,” O’Connell writes. “The tradition of political violence in the United States is of an entirely different order, and it seems to me to arise out of the conjoined American traditions of entrepreneurial individualism and gun ownership. The presiding archetype of such violence in American life is not a revolutionary in a balaclava, backed by a paramilitary organization, but a lonely oddball with a firearm fixation and a complex of conspiratorial grievances, whose relationship to the political dynamics of his country is often highly inscrutable or, in any case, disconnected from any organized political project. … John Hinckley Jr. was both an extreme and an imperfect example of this archetype, not least because he failed. On a psychological level, he had less in common with practitioners of political murder from other cultures and times … than he did with that other major avatar of American carnage, the mass shooter. … His motives were not exactly obscure, but his politics were incoherent and largely irrelevant to his deed.”

Uncertainty in New Caledonia When riots broke out in the French Pacific-island territory of New Caledonia in May, they marked the latest instance of post-colonial grievances upsetting the political order. Tensions over inequality between natives and colonial descendants spilled into the streets. The unrest was sparked by electoral reforms, since rolled back by Paris, that would have allowed newer island residents to vote there. More recently, Azerbaijan’s president has waded in, pledging to help France’s overseas territories secure independence. Assessing New Caledonia’s challenges in The Diplomat, Catherine Wilson writes: “The landscaped city park in downtown Noumea [the capital] is bordered by patisseries and chic fashion boutiques. The streets usually throng with holiday makers, but now they are mostly desolate and many shops remain shut. The hotels, however, and upmarket bars and restaurants by the waterfront are full of French police reinforcements flown out from France to restore order. But [native] Kanaks [who make up about 40% of New Caledonia’s population] say that sustainable peace is dependent on their grievances being addressed. … [T]he challenge of creating one future from two competing dreams is further away on the horizon. Talks will continue between France and local leaders to decide the territory’s future governance. But New Caledonia is an important strategic, military, and economic asset for France in the Pacific and Blake Johnson at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute believes that France is unlikely to agree to independence soon.”