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 15, 2021 The Pandemic Games and the Fear That Surrounds Them For a celebration of global unity, the Tokyo Summer Olympics have suffered quite a bit of controversy.
With the games set to begin July 23, Tokyo is in a state of Covid-19 emergency. Daily new cases in the city have already registered their highest total in six months, and spectators will not be present at events in or around the capital. Japanese scientists and politicians have disagreed over whether the games should proceed, considering a slow national vaccination drive (fewer than 20% are fully inoculated), concerns about viral spread, and the money and prestige at stake. The public has grown more approving, but sentiments remain split: In May, an Asahi Shimbun poll showed 83% of Japanese respondents opposed holding the games; in late June, 62% advocated suspending the games or postponing them again.
At the MIT Technology Review, Mia Sato sums up the quandary. "A global health crisis that is far from over, a staggering amount of money, and a government set on making its gamble pay off: the forces colliding in Tokyo are unprecedented," Sato writes, noting the $1.4 billion price tag for Japan's new national stadium alone.
As for how participants will be kept safe, Sato describes protocols for regular testing, contact tracing in the Olympic Village, and a requirement that anyone entering Japan must download a contact-tracing app. But that's not enough to calm some experts, Sato writes: "Hitoshi Oshitani is a professor of virology at Tohoku University who created the country's 'three Cs' approach: avoiding closed spaces, crowds, and close contacts. He says that the games' location within Japan [i.e., centered on Tokyo] is particularly risky: 'In all previous waves, with no exception, the virus spread from Tokyo to other parts of the country.'" Israel's new coalition government—led by right-wing Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, in conjunction with center-left Alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid—probably won't change the country's direction on big-ticket policies like Palestinian statehood, many have predicted. (Most recently, Micah Goodman writes for The Wall Street Journal that Israelis seem to "agree on a paradox—they don't want to control the lives of the residents of this territory, nor do they want to withdraw from it.")
But in a short essay for Foreign Affairs, Yohanan Plesner asks if the country can't seize the moment to make fundamental changes to its governance. Israel doesn't have a constitution, but rather a collection of "Basic Laws"; in Plesner's view, their shortcomings have fostered an under-defined relationship between the judiciary and Israel's unicameral legislative body, the Knesset, which "has turned the Supreme Court into a political football."
Plesner continues: "Eventually, it will be necessary to go beyond defining the rules of the game and resume the long-delayed project of crafting a comprehensive constitution for the State of Israel, including a Bill of Rights. … How likely is it that all of this will come to pass in the near future? As long as [former Prime Minister Bejnamin] Netanyahu remained in charge, it was inconceivable. But the Bennett-Lapid 'change coalition' might try to live up to the aspiration implied by its name." Many column inches have been spent predicting how Iran will evolve under conservative President-elect Ebrahim Raisi. In a new episode of the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Babel podcast, Middle East analyst Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace proposes a historical analogy for the country's broad trajectory, under Raisi and beyond.
"I found the most compelling parallel with Iran's system to be the Soviet Union," Sadjadpour says. "[W]hen the Soviet Union reached a fork in the road and had to decide whether they put ideology first or economics and national interest first, they were unable to abandon their ideology. Similarly, the Islamic Republic of Iran—which is now in its forty-second year—is really incapable of prioritizing Iran's national and economic interest before revolutionary ideology, so I think they're going to follow the same fate … They're incapable of reforming, so eventually it becomes a system which will likely implode internally." The regime may be able to maintain power "with repression for perhaps even another generation," Sadjadpour speculates, but after that, he sees a secular, Persian-nationalist movement or leader as most likely to take the reins. China vs. Its Tech Giants As the Global Briefing noted last week, China's regulatory clamp-down on the country's top ride-sharing app, Didi, has raised questions about Chinese companies' future listings on foreign stock markets. Soon after a $4.4 billion IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, Didi's shares crashed 20% as the Chinese government placed it under data-security review and prompted its removal from app stores.
At Project Syndicate, keen China observer Minxin Pei writes that China is fulfilling the wildest dreams of anti-China hawks in the US. China's flourishing tech giants, collectively, account for one of Beijing's biggest advantages in global competition, as Pei sees it; as Chinese authorities seek to rein them in (not just by scrutinizing Didi, but by imposing anti-monopoly fines on Alibaba and Tencent), Pei writes that the Communist Party is only damaging its own interests. American Democracy: Still a Concern It hasn't fallen off the radar just yet: In the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, "stop the steal" cries heard from some of former President Donald Trump's supporters, and a raft of GOP-drafted state-level bills and laws aimed at changing how elections are administered, analysts continue to warn that American democracy is at risk.
At Foreign Affairs, Stanford sociologist and political scientist Larry Diamond writes that a backsliding in free and fair elections endangers US democracy as a global presence. The Economist has voiced similar concerns.
At The Atlantic, "How Democracies Die" authors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt join in: "For elections to be democratic, all adult citizens must be equally able to cast a ballot and have that vote count. Using the letter of the law to violate the spirit of this principle is strikingly easy," they write. "Election officials can legally throw out large numbers of ballots on the basis of the most minor technicalities … Large-scale ballot disqualification accords with the letter of the law, but it is inherently antidemocratic .... Crucially, if hardball criteria are applied unevenly, such that many ballots are disqualified in one party's stronghold but not in other areas, they can turn an election. … The 2020 election was, in effect, a dress rehearsal for what might lie ahead. All evidence suggests that if the 2024 election is close, the Republicans will deploy constitutional hardball to challenge or overturn the results in various battleground states."
Their proposed answer, meanwhile, sounds a bit daunting: "[s]erious constitutional reform," including the elimination of the Electoral College and a reexamination of how US Senate seats are apportioned. |
