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 21, 2021 On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET:
First, Fareed gives his take on the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill President Joe Biden just signed: why the US badly needs it and what infrastructure spending says about a country.
"Every two minutes, a water main breaks in America," Fareed says. "The total amount of treated water wasted every day as a result is about 6 billion gallons or 9,000 swimming pools. Every day! And it highlights why the infrastructure bill that President Biden just signed into law is so important. The need to fix America's crumbling infrastructure has become boringly obvious—but that doesn't change the fact that it is indeed falling apart."
What's more, as US spending on infrastructure has eroded, so has a natural advantage for America, which boasts more connected waterways and ports than its competitors. As infrastructure spending also says a lot about a society's willingness to invest in itself, Fareed says, "let's celebrate the change" marked by Biden's bill "and hope that we can begin, once again, to embark on some bold endeavors for the country's future."
Next: After Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping completed a three-and-a-half-hour virtual summit, Fareed discusses the all-important US–China relationship with the man who helped bring it into being half a century ago: former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
After that: With the COP26 climate summit over, and troubling situations on the borders of Poland and Ukraine, Fareed discusses those global developments and more with Economist Editor in Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes and International Rescue Committee President and CEO and former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband.
Is the pandemic beginning to fade in America? Fareed asks epidemiologist and NYU professor Dr. Celine Gounder if US vaccination rates and boosters are paving the way to a resumption of quasi-normalcy.
Finally: Where is China heading under President Xi Jinping? What motivates him? And what does it mean for the rest of the world? Fareed gives viewers a preview of his latest CNN special report, "China's Iron Fist: Xi Jinping and the Stakes for America," which airs tonight at 9 p.m. ET. Afghans 'On the Edge of an Abyss' As uncertainty persists over the Taliban's governing plans, and as Afghanistan's economy continues to spiral toward collapse, BBC world-affairs editor John Simpson writes for The New Statesman that Western asset-freezes and aid withholdings may "just make us feel better," rather than achieving any positive end.
With signs of starvation, reports of murders, and girls attending school, Simpson writes of Taliban-run Afghanistan, "The picture is confused. … In Kabul I've been talking to stallholders, cooks, small businessmen, even the women who sell second-hand clothes in the marketplaces. Every single one of them is fully aware that they are standing on the edge of an abyss. The problem isn't necessarily food supplies; there has been drought in large parts of Afghanistan, but if conditions were normal the population would probably get by. It was far easier in the past because outside governments and aid agencies made up the shortfall. Now, there is no one to help. I have seen plenty of humanitarian catastrophes over the years, but never, I think, one where so few outside entities were prepared to assist." In Europe, Belarus Crisis Highlights a Shift on Migration The migrant crisis on Poland's border with Belarus—which EU officials have accused Belarus of engineering, and which Belarus in turn has denied—has produced heartbreaking images of migrants camped in harsh conditions. At The Spectator, Gabriel Gavin writes that it has also signified a completion of "the EU hardening its heart towards refugees."
Europe has implicitly backed Poland's turning-away of desperate Middle Easterners, who've found themselves trapped between Belarusian authorities and barbed-wire fences; Gavin notes that Europe does not seem interested in simply judging and accepting asylum claims. Belarusian President Alexander "Lukashenko's 'weaponisation' of migrants, as Brussels sees it, appears to be working precisely because Europe sees them as a threat," Gavin writes. The 'Weariness' of Covid-19 Restrictions Before American observers more recently began to wonder if the pandemic is winding down, a hexa-bylined June essay in the French magazine Esprit (just republished in English by Eurozine) asked if public restrictions were taking too much of a toll. A Franco-Canadian study revealed some of the ill effects on young people, particularly those with less education, no employment, or low income; depression and loneliness were reported at high levels.
By insisting on vigilance, government "places responsibility for the spread of the pandemic on individual behaviour," the authors wrote. "This invocation of responsibility contributes to the prevailing pandemic fatigue in a manner reminiscent of the 'weariness of the self' described by Alain Ehrenberg in a different context: that of capitalism in the 1990s. Like Ehrenberg's weariness of the self, pandemic fatigue belongs to a world made up of contradictory demands, where individuals are constantly called upon to act in a spirit of responsibility, in a pandemic-stricken world marked by uncertainty." To address broad-based protests that unfolded in 2019, Chile moved to convene a constitutional convention, charged with rewriting its national charter. But those elected to do the drafting were, in an unusually large quotient, political newcomers, and The Economist writes that "the convention has become a theatre of wokeness," with some potential demands verging on the unreal. Of more immediate concern, the magazine writes, leftist and hard-right candidates have emerged as the frontrunners in today's first-round presidential vote, as centrism appears to have faded from the scene; Chilean voters "are on the verge of a terrible mistake," as the magazine sees it. |
