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 2, 2021 On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET: First, Fareed gives his take on the state of global Islamist terrorism, as this weekend marks the 10th anniversary of the US raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
"The initial report has to be: The movement is in bad shape," Fareed says. Worldwide, deaths from terrorism have plummeted, and in the US, far-right extremism is a greater threat. The appeal of jihadists today largely rests on local grievances and is a far cry from the centralized structure and global aims of al Qaeda at its strongest. Islamism as a political movement is flagging, and as Syrians and Iraqis fled the ISIS caliphate "in droves," Fareed points out that Arabs and Muslims don't want the kind of governance Islamists and jihadists offer.
"For America, there is one big lesson" in Islamist terrorism's decline, Fareed says: "Stay calm. In the months after 9/11, we panicked, sacrificing liberties at home and waging war abroad, terrified that we were going to be defeated by this new enemy. … Let's learn to right-size our adversaries and learn to run fast but not run scared."
Next, Fareed talks with Hillary Clinton, who weighs in on President Joe Biden's first 100 days in office, his multitrillion-dollar agenda, and the West's deteriorating relationship with Russia.
After that: Prime Minister Narendra Modi's India is suffering through a horrific Covid-19 crisis, after the US under former President Donald Trump and Brazil under President Jair Bolsonaro each saw the virus do widespread damage. Can populism be blamed for these runaway levels of death and sickness? Fareed asks Yascha Mounk of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Brett Meyer, a research fellow at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
Finally Fareed examines Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's radical reversal on Iran. 'The Most Dangerous Place on Earth' That's what The Economist dubs Taiwan, in an editorial noting the risk of US–China war over the island. Noting US concerns that Beijing is growing stronger militarily and could invade Taiwan before the end of Chinese President Xi Jinping's reign, the magazine writes in a companion piece that "[t]he passage of time poses a dilemma for China," which considers Taiwan to be a rogue part of its territory. "Every year, China's ability to coerce Taiwan economically and militarily grows greater. And every year it loses more hearts and minds on Taiwan. Should rulers in Beijing ever conclude that peaceful unification is a hopeless cause, Chinese law instructs them to use force."
China could continue to build up its military, waiting until its victory in any war over Taiwan is a fait accompli. Either way, if Beijing did succeed in absorbing the island—especially without a fight from the US— "China would overnight become the dominant power in Asia. America's allies around the world would know that they could not count on it. Pax Americana would collapse." The US has never clarified whether it would fight to protect Taiwan against a mainland invasion, but The Economist writes that as some call for such a promise to be made explicit, "strategic ambiguity" is getting harder for Washington to maintain. During the Pandemic, Has Populism Been Deadly? As Fareed will discuss on today's show with Yascha Mounk of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Brett Meyer of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, Mounk recently argued in a post to the Council on Foreign Relations website (originally published at Folha de S.Paulo) that "populism has proven lethal" during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Early on, Mounk wrote, it seemed that political trends and governance typology had little to do with how a country fared against the virus. "Tragically, that is no longer the case," Mounk argued, noting the lax approaches taken by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. "The longer the pandemic has dragged on, the more the quality of governance has turned out to matter. If you look around the world today, it becomes painfully clear that those countries that are ruled by populists have paid an especially heavy toll in economic damage, case load, and mortality … The evidence for the pandemic cost of populism is mounting elsewhere, too. Bolivia, Ecuador and the Philippines also count among the world's worst-hit nations." A Warning About High Leverage At the Financial Times, Gillian Tett warns of signs that the global financial system is once again leveraged heavily enough to warrant anxiety. After the collapse in March of Archegos Capital Management, a fund that borrowed billions, apparently to purchase derivatives, Tett writes that with credit cheap during a pandemic that has kept stimulus money flowing and interest rates low, borrowing to take on risk has been relatively easy.
"Savvy financiers are of course keenly aware of this and the smartest prime brokers are undoubtedly already trimming back their margin lending," Tett writes. "For most of the rest of us, it is a useful reminder that fundamentals such as profits and low interest rates can explain some of today's rise in asset prices. But they are only part of the tale. As was true in 2007, just before the financial crisis exploded, liquidity and leverage can matter just as much—even if they are harder to observe and thus often ignored." Will Biden's Majority Hold? New presidents often lose their legislative majorities two years after winning office, when the US holds its midterm elections for House and Senate seats, The Atlantic's Ron Brownstein notes. "The last two times Democrats had unified control [of both houses of Congress, as is the case now]—with Bill Clinton in 1993–94 and Barack Obama in 2009–10—they endured especially resounding repudiations in the midterms, which cost Clinton his majority in both chambers and Obama the loss of the House."
Will things be any different for President Joe Biden? Brownstein writes that some Democrats hope bold initiatives will be winners at the polls in 2022. Republicans, meanwhile, are betting that Biden's multitrillion-dollar agenda will turn voters off; they'll also be running against Democrats in the first elections since the 2020 legislative redistricting, which could give them an edge as they vie for newly drawn House seats, thanks to strong GOP control of state governments that oversee the map-drawing process.
"[I]f Democrats are to avoid the midterm deluges that submerged each of their past two presidents, some in the party believe an even more urgent task may be one that Biden, with his emphasis on bipartisanship, hasn't really begun," Brownstein writes: "showing Democratic voters what Republicans will do to them if they regain power in Congress next year. In the meantime, Democrats are racing the clock to pass an agenda that rivals FDR's and LBJ's—in a country and a Congress divided far more closely between the parties than when those presidents made their indelible marks on history." At The New York Review of Books, Rachel Nolan reviews four volumes on MS-13—the notorious Salvadoran gang, and the only street gang to be designated by the US Treasury as a transnational criminal group—including the intersection of its origins with US Cold War dealings. After a contested 1972 election, the US trained Salvadoran security forces and sent money, taking the anti-communist side in what "is usually called a civil war, but… was more like a rampage of cold war state terror," as Nolan puts it. That violence "displaced one million Salvadorans, half of whom fled to the US." MS-13 would begin as a street and prison gang among Salvadorans in the US; Nolan notes that some of the émigrés who reached Los Angeles had already known war.
The gang is now a major source of strife in El Salvador, Nolan writes, and of the danger and instability that prompt Salvadorans to emigrate to the US. As the Biden administration faces a surge of Central American migrants on the southern US border, Nolan suggests corruption and gangs' alliances with some Salvadoran political parties have made it more difficult for foreign aid to provide economic alternatives to gang membership and, in turn, to end the misery. |
