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. June 25, 2021 Fareed: At State and Local Levels, Democrats Must Prove Themselves US President Joe Biden has gathered momentum for his party nationally, Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column, but Democrats face significant headwinds in state and local races.
That's due not only to Republicans' edge in drawing district maps, Fareed writes, but to Democrats' governance failures, as blue states like New York and California lag their red competitors in public services provided per tax dollar collected. As shown by the emergence of Democratic pragmatist Eric Adams as New York City's mayoral-race frontrunner, Fareed writes, governmental competence often trumps progressive ideals at the ballot box.
"The Democratic Party wants more government, for many good causes and reasons," Fareed writes. "But to gain the trust of people, it needs to first face up to its failures and work harder to show that it can effectively manage the governments it already runs. President Biden is doing that at the federal level. At the local level, New York City would be a good place to start." Afghanistan's Looming Crisis Rival Afghan politicians President Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, who chairs Afghanistan's High Council for National Reconciliation, traveled to Washington to meet with US President Joe Biden Friday under precarious circumstances, Michael Kugelman writes for Foreign Policy. As detailed by The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, the Taliban are closing in on government-controlled areas as US forces plan to withdraw fully by Sept. 11.
"Since May the Taliban have taken more than 50 of the country's roughly 400 districts, a United Nations official said this week. Fighting continues in many districts, which are comparable to American counties," the Journal writes. "Some 8.5 million Afghans already live under Taliban control, the Long War Journal estimates, with more than 13 million in contested zones. These numbers will keep rising absent a policy reversal from Mr. Biden. Most of the newly captured districts surround provincial capitals, which the group will move on once U.S. and allied forces are gone. The intelligence community believes Kabul could fall six months after the U.S. withdrawal has finished."
Adding to the anxiety, Leila Barghouty writes for Newlines Magazine that Afghan combat interpreters who worked with US forces have been left to face the grim prospect (as other news outlets have warned) of Taliban reprisals while waiting for the US to process special visa applications to resettle in America. In the China-focused current issue of Foreign Affairs, Yuen Yuen Ang writes that China's state-controlled economic model has abetted a form of "crony capitalism" that parallels a past period of American growth and upheaval.
"China is now in the midst of its own Gilded Age," Ang writes. "Private entrepreneurs are growing fabulously wealthy from special access to government privileges, as are the officials who illicitly grant them. Recognizing the dangers of crony capitalism, Chinese President Xi Jinping is attempting to summon China's own Progressive era—an age of less corruption and more equality—through brute force," with heavy-handed anti-corruption efforts. "Transparency mandates, muckraking journalists, and crusading prosecutors were central ingredients in the United States' battle against graft during the Progressive era," Ang writes, but China is going at it "very differently." Socially, Latin America's Left Goes Right Latin America is witnessing a surge in economically leftist leaders with socially conservative tendencies, Paul J. Angelo and Will Freeman write for Americas Quarterly. Citing countries including Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, they write that left-leaning, "economically populist" leaders have flashed conservative impulses on matters of gender-based pay equality, femicide, abortion, and the environment. Angelo and Freeman wonder if the strategy will work "[i]n a region that is both young and increasingly urban," or if the left won't pay a price for it later. 'The Next Pandemic Is Already Here' So declares Maryn McKenna, writing in the MIT Technology Review that the world is on the precipice of dealing with an antibiotic-resistant superbug—but that Covid-19's lessons could help us head it off.
In the 1990s, "in a small seasonal outbreak, Malagasy and French researchers had discovered a strain of plague that was resistant to almost all the antibiotics used against it," McKenna writes. "If that strain had been responsible for the 2017 outbreak" of pneumonic plague that occurred in Madagascar, which McKenna details, "it would have been untreatable. The result could have been as grim as the plague epidemics of the past: the Manchurian Plague that killed 60,000 people in China in 1910; the Justinian Plague that destabilized the Byzantine Empire in 540; the Black Death, which killed an estimated 50 million and wiped out half the population of Europe."
Microbes and antibiotic-making scientists have been locked in an arms race since the advent of penicillin, McKenna writes, but experts say the research community needs funding and a guaranteed market for its wares, if it's to stay ahead. McKenna suggests the dual strategy of the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed—which both injected funding for Covid-19 vaccine development and included promises to buy doses—could help scientists keep an edge over superbugs, if it's used as a sustaining model. |
