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. May 14, 2021 Fareed: Today's GOP Cares More About Loyalty Than Ideology Reflecting on the ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) as House Republican Conference chair—in favor of more-ardently pro-Trump Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY)—Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column that Republicans have traveled far from their ideological roots.
"Stefanik has pledged fealty to Trump and his 'big lie' about fraud in the 2020 election, while Cheney will not," Fareed writes. "The American Conservative Union gives Cheney a lifetime score of 78 (out of 100) for her consistent conservatism. Stefanik gets a lifetime rating of 44, which is one of the lowest scores for a House Republican these days," but currently, Republicans "care more about tribal loyalty than conservative principles."
The Republican Party of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan stridently attacked government spending, Fareed writes; but over the decades, when they found themselves in power, Republicans demurred from rolling back a welfare state that, despite their rhetoric, was actually popular. "Over time," Fareed writes, "Republicans' dedication to their core ideas began to wear thin."
Now, the party is left with tribalism as its guiding force, Fareed writes: "Cheney says she will fight back to rebuild a Republican Party based on conservative principles. But that battle was lost years ago. The Republican Party today is not a movement dedicated to ideas but a tribe devoted to self-preservation, defined by anger and emotions, and organized around a clannish loyalty to its leader." Counting Covid-19's Real Death Toll Covid-19's official death toll sits at 3.3 million worldwide, The Economist writes—but that figure "surely falls well short of the true total." To estimate that true total, the magazine modeled "excess deaths" (deaths surpassing those in a normal year), using data where it was deemed reliable and feeding 121 variables into a machine-learning model to produce excess-death estimates for countries and during times where that total is unreported or less certain.
The results: a "95% probability that the death toll to date is between 7.1m and 12.7m, with a central estimate of 10.2m," the magazine writes. Which implies that "official numbers represent, at best, a bit less than half the true toll, and at worst only about a quarter of it."
In every region except Oceania, the algorithm modeled excess deaths surpassing official Covid-19 death totals; in that region, the magazine writes, it's possible that pandemic measures saved lives that would've been lost, for instance to other diseases, and that fewer died during the pandemic. On a per-capita basis, the model supported observations that Covid-19 "really has been worse in richer countries. For Asia and Africa, the average estimated deaths per million people are about half those of Europe (including Russia). India is comparable to Britain, at least for now." The Israeli–Palestinian Conflict Endures As Hamas rockets, Israeli airstrikes, and mob violence unfold in Israel, Shlomo Ben-Ami writes for Project Syndicate that this week's conflict has dashed hopes by Israel and Arab countries that they could simply move on from Palestinian demands for statehood and equal rights.
"Israel certainly cannot claim victory" from its aerial pounding of Hamas positions in heavily populated Gaza, Ben-Ami writes. "The fragile coexistence between Jews and Arabs within its borders has been shaken. The prevailing consensus among Israelis that Palestinian nationalism had been defeated—and thus that a political solution to the conflict was no longer necessary—lies in tatters. And even as the violence escalates, it has become clear to both sides that the era of glorious wars and victories is over." While Ben-Ami sees Palestinian nationalism as living on, at Foreign Policy, Yousef Munayyer argues hopes of a two-state solution have been further dashed, as this week's violence clarifies that Israelis and Palestinians are thrown together in one place with deep, intractable problems. Is the Middle East Seeing a Diplomatic Renaissance? As disturbing as recent Israeli–Palestinian violence has been, in a Washington Post column, David Ignatius heralds an encouraging trend for the rest of the Middle East. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey all seem to have opened diplomatic back-channels in the region and are showing less exuberance for proxy wars and regional military adventurism, Ignatius writes. (In particular, he cites progress toward an accord in Yemen between factions backed by Iran and Saudi Arabia.)
Ignatius writes that a US pullback from the Middle East has nudged countries to turn away from militarism and look inward. "Maybe we're seeing a Middle East version of President Biden's dictum that the best foreign policy is to 'build back better' at home. If so, it's a welcome epiphany," Ignatius writes. "[T]hese nations are now trying to de-escalate them and rebuild their economies after the pandemic." Pipeline Attack: What Else Should We Worry About? After a ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, a major operator that supplies gasoline to much of the Eastern US, gas shortages continued in the Southeast on Friday.
The potential of cyberattacks on infrastructure has raised concerns among experts for years—in the 2000s, Brazil's power sector suffered suspected cyberattacks which some viewed as warning signs—and Tufts University cybersecurity policy professor Josephine Wolff tells Scientific American's Sophie Bushwick that the Colonial Pipeline episode "fits into that nightmare scenario of 'What do we do if we lose control over our power infrastructure?' But it's true across a number of critical infrastructure sectors. What happens if a large part of the banking infrastructure is shut down or impossible to access? What happens if the subway system in a major city is compromised, and it's impossible to schedule trains or operate transportation?"
The cybersecurity blog Krebs on Security, meanwhile, identifies a purely for-profit motive by the group thought to be responsible. "First surfacing on Russian language hacking forums in August 2020, DarkSide is a ransomware-as-a-service platform that vetted cybercriminals can use to infect companies with ransomware and carry out negotiations and payments with victims," Brian Krebs writes. This group says it only targets big companies, but Krebs writes that experts think "ransomware attacks will continue to grow in sophistication, frequency and cost unless something is done to disrupt the ability of crooks to get paid for such crimes." |
