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. November 14, 2021 On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET: First, Fareed gives his take on a new agreement by the US and China to cooperate on climate change—and whether that's possible, given their superpower rivalry.
The pledge is a positive step—if a small one—but it also points to a fundamental question for US foreign policy, Fareed says: "Should it be focused on solving the largest and most challenging global problems, or should it be focused on competing with China?"
It's not clear how the Biden administration is balancing cooperation and openness with the "extreme competition" it has embraced vis-à-vis Beijing, Fareed says. When Fareed asked US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan how the US is approaching China, Sullivan said the US wants both to ensure the international order advantages democracies and to keep it free and open.
That will be difficult, Fareed says, warning: "To my mind, the central lesson of the Cold War is that what allowed the United States to ultimately prevail … was building an open international system that secured peace, prosperity and freedom and allowed all who participated to thrive and prosper. It would be a tragedy if that central achievement of American foreign policy were to be sacrificed just to gain some temporary tactical advantage against Beijing."
Next: Prices in the US are climbing, as inflation has reached its highest point in more than 30 years. Why is this happening, and how can we stop it? Fareed asks former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
After that: With supply chains still disrupted, attention has turned to a puzzling shortage of truck drivers. Fareed asks The New York Times' Ana Swanson what's behind it.
As Russia builds up forces along its border with Ukraine, Fareed asks Brookings Senior Fellow and former National Security Council official Fiona Hill about tensions on Europe's eastern edge.
For some in Africa, climate change is already a matter of life and death. Fareed talks with Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate, who wants Africa to be front of mind in the global climate discussion.
Finally: This week, the world has seen heartbreaking images from the Poland–Belarus border, where migrants have camped in harsh conditions, desperate to enter the European Union. Has Belarus manufactured this crisis for political revenge? Fareed will explore. Hacking Tools Have Proliferated This summer's wave of headlines about Pegasus, the phone-hacking software purveyed by Israeli spyware company NSO Group, raised the international profile of hacking tools and their reported use by authoritarian regimes against dissidents and journalists around the world. This month, the US Commerce Department's blacklisting of NSO Group raised it further. At the MIT Technology Review, Patrick Howell O'Neill writes that a new Atlantic Council report details the global panoply of for-profit spyware companies—and demonstrates that hacking tools have proliferated around the world, without many checks on their use. It's well known that the Chinese economy, after growing rapidly in past decades, is now loaded with debt. At Foreign Affairs, Benn Steil and Benjamin Della Rocca identify a cycle: "In principle, the government would like to tame debt-fueled overinvestment in both housing and corporate sectors. Yet a downturn in either sector consistently spooks Beijing. So, when the government pumps the brakes on housing speculation, it simultaneously pumps the gas on corporate borrowing to temper the growth hit. Then, as corporate defaults threaten, the government does the reverse. Debt levels continue to rise."
President Xi Jinping, they write, faces "an unenviable choice. He can finally crack down on excess credit growth across the economy. This path leads toward longer-term economic stability. … But doing so also means an end to the ambitious short-term growth targets that Xi has relied on to cement his political legitimacy." With Xi likely seeking a third term in power, Steil and Della Rocca predict he'll choose short-term growth—and that cheap credit and an unwise debt load will continue apace. Cuba's extraordinary protests made global headlines in July, and after they subsided, some argued discontent with President Miguel Díaz-Canel would outlive them. At Persuasion, James Bloodworth writes that although the demonstrations were suppressed, a post-protest drama is playing out in nuanced ways.
"[O]n the surface, at least, an appearance of calm prevails," Bloodworth writes. "Yet, the material conditions that gave rise to July's protests are still present … [R]eforming voices within the Cuban government have already taken advantage of the July protests to push through reforms allowing more freedom for small and medium-sized businesses. But the screws have been tightened in other areas too. In August, the government introduced Decree-Law 35, a draconian ruling that requires telecommunications providers to interrupt, suspend, or terminate their services when a user publishes information that is 'fake' or affects 'public morality' and the 'respect of public order.' ... [B]ehind closed doors, yet another generation of young Cubans will undoubtedly be dreaming of a new life elsewhere, away from their homeland." Particularly after Republican Glenn Youngkin's victory this month in Virginia's gubernatorial election, attention in the US has increasingly turned to "critical race theory" and an ongoing political fight over educational curricula, specifically over how US history is taught. (Edward Luce notes this clash in a Financial Times column, writing that while conservative complaints are a bit shambolic, Republicans will likely reap advantage from how the left talks about race.)
One touchstone in this debate has been The New York Times' 1619 Project, spearheaded by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, which marks the arrival of the first enslaved Africans on American-colonial shores as the true beginning of US history. Ahead of The Times' publication next week of a 1619 book—"The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story"—a New York Times Magazine essay by Jake Silverstein notes Republican attempts to ban the project's work from being taught in schools and traces the rich history of history in America, as historians have long debated the centrality of slavery and its legacy in the national arc.
"You could see the pitched battles over public memory that have occurred since then as a product of the new history's corrosive effect on national unity," Silverstein writes; "or you could conclude that a republic founded on an irresolvable contradiction—freedom and slavery—was always going to wind up in an irresolvable argument over how to tell its story, that this contentiousness is American democracy, that the loss of consensus means we've finally arrived." |
