HOT AIR BALLOON FLIGHT

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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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August 8, 2021

On Today's Show

On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET:

First, Fareed gives his take on what some have called a new "cold war" between the US and China.
 
That description isn't quite accurate, Fareed argues, pointing to critical differences from a more straightforward standoff between America and the Soviet Union. For one, the US and China depend on each other economically, trading in large volumes of goods. China also has its own weaknesses and isn't threatening to dominate the world.
 
"Can Washington embrace the complexity of this challenge?" Fareed asks. "It is facing an economic powerhouse that, unlike Germany and Japan, is not dependent on America for its security. It faces a new great power that is not a democracy and has different values and beliefs, and yet has not occupied and controlled countries as Stalin's Russia did in the late 1940s (which is what triggered the Cold War). And this is all happening in a world in which international trade has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. It's not a new Cold War but something much more complicated: a Cold Peace."
 
Next, Fareed talks with America's pandemic point person, Dr. Anthony Fauci. What should we expect from the Delta variant and the current wave of Covid-19 it's fueling? Will an even worse variant follow? And how vulnerable are we to the next pandemic? Fareed hears Fauci's thoughts on all those questions.
 
After that, Fareed talks with New America President and CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter and Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer about Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's star status on the global right, Lebanon's political and economic collapse, and Iran's hardline new President. 
 
Finally, as the summer Olympics conclude, Fareed asks if we can't channel their spirit of global unity to vaccinate the world against Covid-19.

Will Iran's New President Keep the US in the Middle East?

As various analysts have suggested, the inauguration last Thursday of new, hardline President Ebrahim Raisi threatens to make Iran "trickier" for the West to approach. At Foreign Policy, Michael Hirsh goes a step farther, suggesting the US will have a harder time redirecting its focus from the region.
 
"Tehran is only likely to get more aggressive, experts say, and that means U.S. President Joe Biden—like so many of his predecessors—may not get his wish to downgrade the region's strategic importance," Hirsh writes, citing Tehran's ability to provoke headaches with skirmishes throughout the Middle East.

Will Inflation Sink Biden?

The latest US-government statistics show consumer prices rose 0.9% in June—nearly double the 0.5% rate of increase shown a year ago—and at the Financial Times, James Politi and Aime Williams quote complaints from business owners and others about rising costs of food products, transportation, and more. "It's more than the usual gas prices," Pennsylvania Democratic state Rep. Napoleon Nelson tells them. "We're not sure how long this will last. It's a struggle."
 
Political ramifications are worth monitoring, they write, given how inflation has played out before: "Politically, the battle lines around Biden's economic agenda are clearly forming over the issue of high prices. Although high inflation has not reared its head for decades in America and has not been a factor since the 1970s, it dogged both incumbent presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter during that era, a worrying precedent for [President Joe] Biden that Republicans will try to replicate."

An Inflection Point for Tunisia's Democratic Experiment

"Almost two years ago, I wrote in these pages that the Tunisia model matters because it helped dispel the myth that democracy was not possible in the Arab world," Sarah E. Yerkes writes for Foreign Affairs, now that the Arab Spring's lone success story appears on the verge of being undone. Some have cast Tunisian President Kais Saied's recent suspension of parliament and dismissal of the Prime Minister as popular moves, but Yerkes worries about the consequences. 
 
"Saied's actions also set a bad precedent for future Tunisian leaders," Yerkes writes: "[I]f he manages to hold on to power, he will normalize the practice of using emergency declarations to bend the political system to his will, with little to no accountability." Civil-society groups could come to the rescue as they did during Tunisia's post-Arab Spring transition, Yerkes writes, but the outcome isn't certain.

In Afghanistan, the US Leaves Quietly

At The New Yorker, Megan K. Stack writes of America's quiet exit from Afghanistan, noting a "strange and sombre" ceremony in Kabul and a similarly eerie departure from Bagram Airfield, which has been left to Afghan troops. Broadly, Stack laments a decline of press access to US military operations, as the popularity of embedded-reporting assignments waned over the years of America's post-9/11 wars. Between the military, press, and public, Stack hints at a symbiotic apathy: "There wasn't much to showcase" as the situation in Afghanistan proved difficult, "and the U.S. public was amenable to ignoring it. If it's true that the military kept the war shrouded when it was convenient, it's also true that very few Americans went looking for it."
 
As many have pointed out, US and NATO forces may be leaving, but the war continues: At Foreign Policy, Michael Kugelman writes that urban offensives by the Taliban in Afghanistan's provinces "mark a dramatic escalation."