CNN - FAREED's Global Briefing - October 11, 2024 - Fareed: We Are Now in ‘the Most Dangerous Moment’ Since the Cold War 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.   October 11, 2024

Fareed: We Are Now in ‘the Most Dangerous Moment’ Since the Cold War “As tensions spiral in the Middle East, keep in mind that this is only one of three arenas in the world where revisionists are trying to upend the international order,” Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column. “In Europe, a war continues to rage, and in Asia, a perilous new dynamic is at work. Taken together, they define the most dangerous period internationally since the end of the Cold War.” In the Middle East, wars in Gaza and Lebanon feature dangerous tensions with Iran. Russia, meanwhile, has sought to upend Europe’s post-World War II security order by invading Ukraine. In Asia, China “has been applying pressure … to rival or even replace America as the dominant power,” Fareed notes. On the same continent, North Korea looks as menacing as ever. Even more disconcertingly, Fareed writes, “there are increasing indications that this ‘axis’ of revisionist powers is coordinating and helping one another.” Fareed’s conclusion: “The United States and its allies must try to thwart these efforts at coordination. But this will require that they themselves be unified. … The last time the United States faced an alliance of hostile powers—during the Cold War—it effectively sowed discord within the Communist world, maintaining good relations with countries such as Yugoslavia and Romania and, above all, dividing China from the Soviet Union. But in a Washington that today sees the world in black and white, I wonder whether we have the diplomatic skill and acuity to pursue a sophisticated strategy like that one.”

Ukraine’s Wavering Front In Ukraine, two armies are once again fighting over a flexible front line as the weather turns cold. Russia has been pressing ahead, continuing gains from recent months in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, as The Economist notes. Still, Russia remains far from its goal of capturing all of Donetsk and Luhansk, two Ukrainian oblasts Moscow has eyed, the magazine writes. The Institute for the Study of War, which tracks the conflict closely, wrote this week: “Russian military command has likely ordered Russian forces to conduct a relatively high tempo of mechanized assaults in Ukraine to pursue significant tactical advances before muddy ground conditions in fall 2024 constrain mechanized maneuver.” As Fareed heard from a Ukrainian chief sergeant in Kyiv last month, frontline areas are under immense pressure. Asami Terajima writes for the Kyiv Independent: “Russia’s invading army is racing against the weather clock, trying to seize yet more towns in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region before the ground gets muddy this autumn and temperatures later plunge. The coal mining town of Toretsk is on the verge of falling to Moscow’s forces, an outcome which would make it the latest in a handful of towns and villages falling in recent months to Russia’s grinding Donbas offensive launched a year ago.” Western resolve is another question, as Fareed has pointed out. A top NATO official suggested last month that Ukraine has the right to strike deep inside Russia. Still, long-range US weapons come with a prohibition against doing so, for fear of sparking nuclear war. Ukraine is using its own weapons to conduct those strikes. This week, Ukrainian forces reportedly struck a drone storage facility and an ammunition warehouse in southwest Russia, the ISW notes. At New Lines Magazine, Michael Weiss and James Rushton wrote in September that “Kyiv’s fleet of homemade unmanned aerial bombs … over the past few months have immolated air bases, fuel depots, oil refineries and ammunition stockpiles, all of them well inside Russian territory.” Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces have lodged themselves in the Russian oblast of Kursk, as Oz Katerji details at Foreign Policy. Ukraine gambled by going on the offensive there in August, while on the back foot in its own territory. At the Atlantic Council, Peter Dickinson argues that Russia’s reluctance to send more troops to fight back reflects Russian military weakness. At Newsweek, Lottie McGrath and John Feng report that is changing. As for the bottom line: On the latest episode of the War on the Rocks podcast, Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace observed last week that control of specific towns or swaths of territory isn’t the most important thing to consider. Rather, it’s “which military will be exhausted first.”

Sudan: The ‘Neglected Crisis’ Late last month, Sudan’s army—which has been warring with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces for control of the country since April 2023—launched a new offensive to retake RSF-held ground in the capital, Khartoum. It was the latest step in a war that has wrought a massive hunger crisis on Sudan. In a Newsweek op-ed, Daniel P. Sullivan of Refugees International argued last month that Sudan’s suffering should not be overlooked: “Sudan's crisis is spiraling. Hunger has given way to famine. The capital, Khartoum, has been destroyed. Ethnically targeted killings in Darfur have reached levels that may surpass the genocide of 20 years ago. And diplomatic efforts have failed to bring the warring parties to the table or to secure more than minimal humanitarian access.” The Guardian’s The Observer column laments a lack of international will to stop the ongoing catastrophe. The Washington Post’s editorial board has called on President Joe Biden to exert more pressure on the UAE, which is believed to be supportive of the RSF. Reporting from the region, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof details the horrors experienced by Sudanese civilians: “With the militia killing even young boys, Naima was terrified the gunmen would murder her 10-year-old son, Nazir. So she put Nazir on her back, the way Sudanese moms carry young children, to make him seem smaller. A gunman saw through the ruse and demanded that she hand Nazir over. ‘He’s a boy,’ the man shouted. ‘Kill him!’ ‘Don’t kill my child,” Naima pleaded. ‘Kill me instead.’ One man clubbed Naima with the butt of his rifle to try to grab the boy. Another raised his gun and shot Naima twice, through the breast and in the leg; she showed me the scars. Both were flesh wounds, and even as she bled, she fought and would not surrender her son.”

A Gender Election? Is gender the most important demographic fault line in the 2024 US election? Fareed heard from The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson in August about a male-female political divide (with men leaning to the right, women to the left) that is deepening particularly among younger voters. In The New York Times Magazine, Emily Bazelon notes that former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, have incurred the criticism of former campaign rival Nikki Haley. “Donald Trump and JD Vance need to change the way they speak about women,” Haley said on Fox & Friends last month, addressing their polling deficit among female voters. “When you call even a Democrat woman dumb, Republican women get their backs up, too.” Bazelon writes that Vance has “injected overt anti-feminism into the campaign” with comments about women without children. Bazelon continues: “Harris and Walz have a giant polling lead among young women, significantly higher than Trump and Vance’s lead with young men. That signals that the deepening divide on gender between the parties could last well into the future. … Still, the gender dynamics of the campaign work for Trump with his base. He is polling between 27 and 44 points ahead of Harris among all white voters without a college education in swing states. Not surprisingly, Trump’s numbers are highest with working-class men. Asked whether women’s gains have come at men’s expense, 40 percent of men ages 18 to 49 who support Trump said yes, compared with 17 percent of respondents overall, in a Pew Research Center survey published in June.”

Foreign Policy and the Vote It’s nowhere near the top issue for American voters. Per Gallup polling, 31% say “foreign affairs” are “extremely important” in influencing their votes, compared with 52% for the economy and 49% for US democracy. But despite the conventional wisdom that economics are all-important at the ballot box, Jeffrey A. Friedman and Andrew Payne argue in a Foreign Affairs essay that foreign policy does weigh on presidential elections. It’s not about specific policies, they write; rather, foreign policy is a venue in which a candidate’s underlying attributes, like toughness or wisdom, can be conveyed. And those attributes do influence voters, who want a capable commander in chief, regardless of the exact policies to be adopted. As examples, Friedman and Payne cite Eisenhower and Nixon: “Having led U.S. forces to victory in World War II and then served as NATO’s top general, Eisenhower’s military record gave him unsurpassed credibility on national security issues. Voters trusted Eisenhower to handle the Korean War better than his Democratic rival, Adlai Stevenson, even if it was not obvious how these candidates would handle the conflict differently. Richard Nixon ran a similar playbook during his own presidential campaign in 1968, which took place amid a darkening war in Vietnam. Nixon implied that he had a secret plan for achieving ‘peace with honor’ in Vietnam. Voters clearly did not know what this plan was—in fact, they perceived Nixon’s Vietnam policies to be little different from those of his opponent, Hubert Humphrey. Polls nevertheless showed that voters thought Nixon was a stronger leader who would do a better job of managing the war.”

Eye of the Infostorm A sitting congresswoman insisting (falsely, if we even have to say it) that “they” (explained elsewhere as government officials, but deeply resonant with a conspiracy theory about Jews) can control the weather. Accusations of malfeasance with disaster aid. Neo-Nazis using hurricane cleanup as a recruitment tool. All with heavy electoral overtones, as two the two states ravaged by Hurricanes Helene and Milton—North Carolina and Florida—could help determine the outcome of the US presidential election in less than a month. As Hurricane Milton crashed into Florida Wednesday night, a surge of misinformation crested over the internet. Politico’s Adam Aton and Scott Waldman write: “The wave of false conspiracy theories ‘is absolutely the worst I have ever seen,’ FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told reporters on a Tuesday morning call. The agency has long had a rumor control page to combat the kind of scams that often flourish after a disaster, she added. ‘I anticipated some of this, but not to the extent that we’re seeing.’” At The Atlantic, staff writer and avid chronicler of tech and internet culture Charlie Warzel laments Milton conspiracy theories as still more evidence that the online infoscape is now a cesspool. Warzel writes: “The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were ‘weather weapons’ unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and ‘truth seeker’ accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was ‘spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton’ in order to ensure maximum rainfall, ‘just like they did over Asheville!’” At the same magazine, disinformation expert Renée DiResta reflects more broadly on the mechanics of rumor-spreading. In recent years, DiResta writes, a new problem has arisen: “Rumors have always circulated, but the decision by Republican politicians and [X owner Elon] Musk to exploit them has created a problem that’s genuinely new. In the modern right-wing propaganda landscape, where facts are recast as subjective and any authority outside MAGA is deemed illegitimate, eroding trust in institutions is not an unfortunate side effect—it is the goal. And for now, the result is a niche political reality wherein elites on the right, including the world’s richest man, amplify baseless claims without legitimate pushback.”

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