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? Subscribe here. April 16, 2021 Fareed: Biden Is Right to End the War in Afghanistan After President Biden announced the US will withdraw from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, ending America's longest war 20 years after it began, Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column that Biden made the right decision for an unwinnable campaign.
As Henry Kissinger observed of the Vietnam War, "The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win." Fareed writes that the US has faced the same problem in Afghanistan, where the "ragtag" Taliban has staved off the world's most advanced military for two decades.
"People will claim that this withdrawal shows that the United States does not have the capacity to stay the course," Fareed writes. "They will say U.S. troops should remain in Afghanistan as they have in South Korea and Germany. But those forces are stationed to deter a foreign invasion, not to hold the country together. American soldiers have stayed in Afghanistan longer than they did in Vietnam and twice as long as the Soviets stayed there. It is time for them to come home." Hong Kong Has a Problem With Vaccine Skepticism East Asia has been a bastion of pandemic success, boasting low infection rates and organized responses to the crisis. But surprisingly, Hong Kong currently faces a problem with vaccine hesitancy, Laura Westbrook reports for the South China Morning Post, as citizens express concern about possible adverse effects and misinformative warnings they've seen on social media.
Expats and those looking to travel are getting the shots, but skepticism among others is holding the city back from herd immunity; Hong Kong is well supplied with vaccines from Sinovac and BioNTech, Westbrook writes, but according to Bloomberg's tracker, only 8.9% of residents have gotten at least one shot. (In the US, that figure now sits at 38.5%.) At The Atlantic, Timothy McLaughlin blames low public faith in the Hong Kong government, with one expert telling him the city is suffering a "crisis of confidence." Support and knowledge are important in improving your health. Noom provides both. By providing a personal coach trained in psychology, fitness, and nutrition, Noom is here to help you meet goals and see lasting results. Start today! Is the US Trapped in a Minority-Rule 'Doom Loop'? Is the US trapped in a cycle of minority rule? Adam Jentleson, who served as an aide to former Democratic US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and who recently authored the book "Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy," writes for The Atlantic that the filibuster, the Electoral College, gerrymandering, and voting laws are configured in a vicious anti-democratic cycle—a "doom loop," in his words—that keeps Republicans in control even though Democrats win more votes.
To Jentleson, the filibuster is the key. "In today's Senate, evenly split at 50 seats a party, that bias toward predominantly white, small states means that Democrats represent 41 million more people than Republicans," he writes, noting that in today's accepted procedure, a bill effectively needs a supermajority of 60 votes to pass. (Why is that? "It just kind of happened," Jentleson writes, though he traces the filibusterial tradition to "Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, a champion of the slaveholders and spiritual father of the Confederacy," who "recognized that majority rule would lead to the steady elimination of slavery" and promoted the talking filibuster in the 1830s.)
Ending or changing the filibuster, Jentleson points out, could allow Democrats to banish the other segments of the "doom loop," too, by passing bills to reform voting procedures and other democratic workings. "Calhoun would be appalled," Jentleson writes. "But [James] Madison, whose respect for minority rights never obscured his higher loyalty to the 'republican principle' of majority rule, would approve." Nuclear Talks and Iran's Electoral Politics Nuclear negotiations got off to a promising start in Vienna last week, Ali Vaez writes for the Financial Times—but talks could still collapse, partly because it's in the interest of Iran's hardliners to block progress before the country's June presidential election. At the same paper, Najmeh Bozorgmehr takes a longer look at the politics ahead of that vote.
Reformists "fear" the election "will be dominated by hardliners"—meaning nuclear talks will need to progress quickly before a less deal-friendly president takes power. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif "may be the best hope for the reformists if he stands in the June 18 poll. But first he would have to navigate the powerful institutions that often weed out candidates from the race long before election day," Bozorgmehr writes. Hardliners, too, look warily to the June vote, fearing "a combination of a pro-reform government in Tehran and a Democratic administration in Washington."
Even larger issues are at play. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is 81 years old, and Bozorgmehr writes that for multiple factions, the priority "is to influence the transition of power once the supreme leader dies. … Yet perhaps the biggest threat to all the factions is a low turnout at the June poll. Estimates suggest it could be as low as 40 per cent with a young educated population extensively using social media to express discontent over corruption, the state of the economy and the regime's wider policies. Since 2009, there have been at least three major outbreaks of unrest across the country." Given that low turnout could dent the regime's legitimacy, Bozorgmehr writes that Khamenei has sought to boost participation, while rebuking hardliners and pressing for nuclear talks to move ahead. |
