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. July 18, 2021 On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET:
First, Fareed gives his take on the most important difference between this global crisis—the pandemic—and the last one, when the financial system crashed in 2008.
In the wake of the financial crisis, "countries cooperated, central banks worked together, and a downward spiral was averted," Fareed says. This time, global coordination has been lacking.
"The best way to prepare for future crises—whether they involve pandemics, extreme weather, or cybercrime—is collectively," Fareed says. "This is not dewy-eyed idealism. The system worked a decade ago; it can again."
After that, Fareed talks with retired Gen. David Petraeus, who commanded US and NATO troops in Afghanistan, about the country's post-withdrawal future. Fareed also asks Petraeus, who helped lead a UN force in Haiti in the 1990s, about that country's future after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
Next: What should we make of Cuba's extraordinary protests? Fareed asks historian Ada Ferrer what motivated them and what if any change they might produce.
Author Gary Ginsberg then joins Fareed to discuss his new book, "First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents," which examines how presidential history has been influenced by the best friends of America's national leaders.
After former President Donald Trump's four years of anti-China bombast, President Joe Biden has bent America's posture toward China into a new but equally aggressive stance, The Economist writes, observing that Biden has cast US–China competition as an epic clash of ideologies. There are several problems with that, in the magazine's view, including that Biden has used it as a rallying cry to advance his domestic agenda (including protectionist "industrial policy" and support for unions) and that it could alienate allies. "Mr Biden's plan is a missed opportunity," The Economist writes. "If America wants to stop China from rebuilding the global order in its image, it should defend the sort of globalisation that always served it well. At the centre of such an approach would be trade and the multilateral system, embodying the faith that openness and the free flow of ideas will create an edge in innovation. … It should also put money and clout behind new ideas that reinforce the Western order, such as a vaccine programme for future pandemics, digital payment systems, cyber-security and an infrastructure scheme to compete with China's Belt and Road Initiative. Rather than copying China's techno-nationalism, a more confident America should affirm what made the West strong." Down With the Private Space Race? As exciting as it is to see private entrepreneurs blast off for space, the burgeoning race between billionaires Richard Branson (who briefly exited earth's atmosphere last weekend), Jeff Bezos (who is planing a similar trip later this month), and Elon Musk has its fierce detractors.
"Musk and Bezos have a grander rationale" than Branson, "which is that humanity needs to become an interplanetary species," Henry Mance writes for the Financial Times. "Here I'm more sympathetic. We are screwing up our planet, and even if we weren't, we could be wiped from it by an asteroid. Yet this is the worst possible time for their space visions. Are we really promoting space tourism while asking ordinary citizens to restrain their diets, travel and consumption to fight climate change? Will people be persuaded to cycle to work while billionaires are blasting into orbit?"
At the Boston Review, Alina Utrata suggests the space billionaires are capitalizing on a purported public good—fascination, inspiration, and scientific advancement—to enhance their private fortunes. Going so far as to compare the private space race with the British East India Company and a "global regime of racial violence" left partly in private hands during the colonial era, Utrata colors the billionaires in part as space colonizers. Liberté, Égalité, Combat? Looking at two recent moments in French social politics—the rise to public prominence of high-school teacher Didier Lemaire, who warned of the threat of radical Islam and suggested the state did not do enough to protect beheaded teacher Samuel Paty, and an incident last month in which President Emmanuel Macron was slapped in the face at a public event—Hannah Leffingwell writes for the journal Public Seminar that France's inability to deal with racial and cultural tension has allowed far-right politics to thrive.
France's longstanding, statedly republican tradition of laïcité—or secularism—has suppressed the country's ability not only to deal with the presence of nonwhite, non-Catholic races and religions but also its ability to publicly debate racism and settle on consensus around it, Leffingwell argues. "This inability to speak about racism has allowed a person like Marine Le Pen to enjoy a meteoric rise," Leffingwell writes. "If France is to get itself out of this mess, it will need a unified Left that raises the principle of racial justice to the level of laïcité. It will need to save French secularism from itself, proposing a new order that redeems what is good about France, and reckons with what is destructive. If this is, indeed, a war, then the left better arm itself with a strong, unifying idea that will carry it to victory. If they don't, they are in for quite a fight." Young Chinese workers are sick of the long hours and pressure to produce more, Cai Zongcheng recently wrote for the English-language Chinese-culture magazine Sixth Tone: As a result, China has seen the viral explosion of "a first-person essay about ditching the urban rat race and relocating to a mountain village" and the rise of cultural memes about "a longing for a low-desire life, as evidenced by popular buzzwords like the sang subculture of dejection, an embrace of giving up and 'lying down,' and claims of being 'spiritually Finnish.'"
On the topic of "lying down," alternatively translated from the Chinese tangping as "lying flat," millennial journalist Karoline Kan describes the trend to host Cindy Yu on the latest episode of The Specatator's "Chinese Whispers" podcast as a sense that "there's too much ... meaningless competition ... we don't really want to join this game anymore, so we decide to [lie] flat. … China developed so fast in the past few decades … but the young generation … feel kind of like all the opportunities are down … like, okay, twenty years ago … all kinds of industries were like booming … if you work hard, yeah, you can get what you get, but today young people think, 'No, there's no chance we can get what we want no matter how hard we work. … You would never settle down in a city. You cannot afford a marriage and an apartment … let alone how many children you want to have in the future.'"
As Yu notes, this attitude has led to some tension with older Chinese citizens and accusations that a "snowflake generation" has arisen; Chinese authorities don't seem to like it, Kan says, as lying down isn't so conducive to China's national rise to global prominence. |
