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 4, 2021 On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET: First, Fareed gives his take on President Biden's $2 trillion infrastructure plan and the place it would take in America's history of spending.
"While Donald Trump claimed he wanted to 'Make America Great Again,' President Biden is attempting to actually do it," Fareed argues. "The former president's slogan got Americans thinking nostalgically about the 1950s and early '60s … A defining feature of those years was federal investment in infrastructure, scientific research and education. Think interstate highways, NASA and the massive expansion of public universities." Since then, the US government has mostly doled out tax cuts and transfers, while actual investment has waned.
Though larger in terms of contemporary GDP, President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal "is the only valid comparison with what the Biden administration is proposing," Fareed says. It was also remarkably well run, as efficient bureaucrats managed large programs like the WPA in a way that inspired confidence. "For the Biden administration to truly be transformative," Fareed says, "it needs to rival not only the ambition of the New Deal but also its impressive execution."
After that: As Biden's progressive initiatives garner comparisons to FDR and LBJ, Fareed asks historians Jon Meacham and Niall Ferguson how the Biden presidency is stacking up to those analogies.
Next: This week, the World Health Organization's highly anticipated report on the origins of Covid-19 found that an animal was the virus's likely conduit to humans; it also drew questions and criticism from the US and 13 other countries. Fareed asks one of the WHO's investigators, Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, about the findings and the controversy.
Then: What happened to Germany? After drawing early praise for its level-headed response to Covid-19, the country has since seen the virus run rampant. Fareed asks Berlin-based New York Times correspondent Melissa Eddy what went wrong.
And with Covid-19 keeping many kids out of in-person school—especially students of color and those from low-income households—Fareed examines the education gap the pandemic has widened and what can be done to close it. Is the US on Track to Rejoin the Iran Deal? After news broke on Friday that representatives of the US, Iran, and world powers that signed the 2015 nuclear deal will meet next week in Vienna, hopes are high that the agreement can be revived. Iran made clear that it will not meet directly with US negotiators, but arms-reduction activist Joe Cirincione tweeted jubilantly that the US seems to be "climbing out of the hole it dug," as the news seemingly indicates to Cirincione that the Biden administration may be backing away from a posture of retaining Trump-era sanctions as leverage to extract bigger concessions from Iran.
Iran expert Trita Parsi, an advocate of rejoining the deal, aired some speculation on Twitter, writing: "So why the breakthrough now? I suspect the US has wisely, behind the scenes, put forward a more robust proposal. No more lowballs. I doubt that when Russia's [Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov spoke of 'positive movements' on the US side, he was referring to the lowball proposals." Expanding on that point at Responsible Statecraft, Parsi wrote, "[T]he message we're hearing now is that things have changed, and Washington is now moving full speed toward" a return to the deal. Don't Call It a Cold War? Taking issue with suggestions that the US and China are hurtling into a new "cold war," Thomas J. Christensen writes for Foreign Affairs that such hawkery lacks perspective.
"U.S.-Chinese strategic competition, which is real and carries dangers, lacks three essential and interrelated elements of the United States' Cold War with the Soviet Union and its allies," Christensen writes: "the United States and China are not involved in a global ideological struggle for the hearts and minds of third parties; today's highly globalized world is not and cannot easily be divided into starkly separated economic blocs; and the United States and China are not leading opposing alliance systems such as those that fought bloody proxy wars in the mid-twentieth century in Korea and Vietnam and created nuclear crises in places such as Berlin and Cuba. Without any one of these three factors, the U.S.-Soviet Cold War would have been much less violent and dangerous than it actually was. So although China's rise carries real challenges for the United States, its allies, and its partners, the threat should not be misconstrued."
China doesn't want to spread its authoritarian governance style around the world, Christensen writes, so much as it wants to beat back criticism of its own domestic practices; nor does Beijing seek to dismantle the international system that, so far, has benefited it. If hawkish voices prevail in depicting US–China competition as a Cold War redux, Christensen writes, the US will end up forcing allies into tough choices and needlessly overplaying its hand. Boehner on How 'The Crazies' Took Over the GOP In a new memoir, an excerpt of which was published by Politico Magazine, former House speaker John Boehner has few kind words for the Tea Party generation of GOP representatives who catapulted him to the speakership in 2011, writing that many would only make his job miserable with strident demands.
"You could be a total moron and get elected just by having an R next to your name," Boehner writes of the 2010 Republican-wave election—"and that year, by the way, we did pick up a fair number in that category." Calling many in the Tea Party wing of his House conference "the crazies," Boehner laments: "Incrementalism? Compromise? That wasn't their thing. A lot of them wanted to blow up Washington. That's why they thought they were elected."
In details unverified by CNN, he alleges a striking descent by now-deceased former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes into conspiracy theories about being surveilled. Fox and other outlets would abet the rise of the Tea Partiers and their anti-compromise ethos, Boehner writes, helping to give them their "own power base" outside traditional party structures—one that would exist in force by 2013 and which, though Boehner doesn't say it, has seemed to outlive his 2015 retirement. At Scientific American, author and Baylor pediatrics Professor Peter J. Hotez issues a stern warning: "Antiscience has emerged as a dominant and highly lethal force, and one that threatens global security, as much as do terrorism and nuclear proliferation. We must mount a counteroffensive and build new infrastructure to combat antiscience, just as we have for these other more widely recognized and established threats."
Defining antiscience as "the rejection of mainstream scientific views and methods or their replacement with unproven or deliberately misleading theories, often for nefarious and political gains," Hotez warns that it's now "causing mass deaths once again in this COVID-19 pandemic," in the US and around the world. As polls find vaccine resistance more common among Republicans, Hotez warns that antiscience has become enmeshed in political alignment, as "thousands of individuals … tied their identity and political allegiance on the right to defying masks and social distancing." |
