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. August 5, 2021 Raisi Ascends, and the World Waits Now that Iran has inaugurated hardline new President Ebrahim Raisi, some analysts warn that Iranian–Western relations will only become more difficult.
"The most zealous wing of the hardline faction" has now taken "control of most of the instruments of power," suggests noted Iran expert Robin Wright, in an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour. Dynamics between Iran and the West could become "worse than the Ahmadinejad era," when the tenure of populist, conservative former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad saw those relations reach a recent nadir.
In an essay for Foreign Affairs, Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar largely concurs, casting Iranian politics as a struggle between the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and a conservative-religious establishment on one hand, and the country's more-secular governing authorities (including reformist past presidents) on the other. Raisi's rise to power puts the civilian government on the same page with religious conservatives and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for the first time in decades, Tabaar writes, predicting international consequences: "As a new era of the Islamic Republic begins, Iran and the United States are on a collision course." The defection of 24-year-old Belarusian sprinter Kristina Timanovskaya, who absconded from her country's Olympic team to the Polish embassy in Tokyo on Monday, "harks back to Soviet times," writes the Financial Times' editorial board.
So does much else about Belarus these days, in the paper's esteem, as President Alexander Lukashenko's reported crackdown on opponents continues. Citing wide-scale arrests since last August's disputed presidential election, the paper calls for the US, UK, and EU to tighten sanctions or enact more of them.
At Foreign Policy, Natalia Antonova writes that dissidents worry about Belarusian authorities' ability to reach critics abroad—a concern raised by the grounding in Belarus of an international Ryanair flight carrying a dissident journalist in May. "Lukashenko is not going to stop by himself," Antonova writes. "Belarus is a true rogue state, its inner repressions spiraling outward alongside [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's tacit approval." Has the CDC Flubbed Delta? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has made serious missteps in recent months, Zeynep Tufekci writes for The New York Times—notably, by suggesting too soon that fully vaccinated Americans could drop their masks and by communicating with the public in herky-jerky fashion once the Delta variant arrived.
Of the CDC's mid-May recommendation that fully vaccinated citizens no longer needed to cover their faces, while unvaccinated Americans should still take that precaution, Tufekci writes: "Those who are not eager to get vaccinated were not going to be eager to keep on their masks. And a grocery store or a club cannot be expected to enforce masking selectively, so the practical effect of that guidance change was to undermine masking in general."
As the CDC has tightened its guidelines in response to the Delta variant—most significantly, by recommending that fully vaccinated people should once again wear masks indoors, in areas of high or "substantial" Covid-19 transmission—it has done so without clearly identifying the data on which it has based its decisions, Tufekci writes. "The Epidemic Intelligence Service unit of the C.D.C. has a core principle that needs to remain at the forefront of everything the administration does," Tufekci writes: "A pandemic is a communications emergency as much as it is a medical crisis."
Others think the US government needs to react more severely to Delta, in general. At Foreign Policy, Pulitzer-winning infectious-disease journalist Laurie Garrett recently suggested vaccine booster shots are clearly necessary, while the former New York Times health reporter Donald G. McNeil, Jr. writes for Medium that the US must rapidly embrace both booster shots and vaccine requirements in many public settings. The Pandemic Is Making Food More Expensive Food prices were already rising before the pandemic, Nicola Abé and Sonja Peteranderl write for Der Spiegel, but Covid-19 has accelerated the trend and may have put an additional 60 million people worldwide into a state of malnutrition or hunger in 2020, according to International Monetary Fund analysis. "South Africans, for example, now have to spend 30 percent more for tomatoes, vegetable oils and beans than they did a year ago," they write. "In Brazil, people are complaining about the rising price of beef, chicken and rice, and in India, the traditional dal soup is now considerably more expensive."
The reasons are many, including fewer passenger flights (which can also carry cargo shipments of food), higher shipping costs, higher gas prices and "regional shortages of truck drivers." Covid-19 has dovetailed with another disturbing trend for food supply, they write, as one agricultural scientist describes the current state of affairs as "[p]andemic meets climate change." |
