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. December 7, 2021 Can the US Keep Putin Guessing? Before today's virtual meeting between US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Financial Times editorial board pointed out the high stakes.
"Even sitting down for such talks would risk appearing to reward Moscow for aggression; making them a success would require bold and creative diplomacy," the paper wrote. "The US approach should combine toughness with incentives that in effect call the Russian leader's bluff—and challenge him to break out of the perilous downward spiral in relations that he is creating." Right now that aggression—read by the FT as a "bluff"—consists of Russia's military buildup near Ukraine's border, estimated by the latter country to involve nearly 100,000 troops. As Adm. (ret.) James Stavridis, the former NATO supreme allied commander in Europe, told Fareed on Sunday's GPS, it has earned Putin the full attention of Western leaders.
Assessing the state of play, Angela Stent writes for Foreign Affairs that the time is right for Putin to play offense, as the US has turned its attention to China and as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is struggling, domestically. In Stent's view, what Putin wants is the attention Stavridis mentioned, in a sense: for the US to engage with Moscow as a fellow great power and to return to the 20th century way of doing things, when such powers settled the affairs of the world.
As for what to do about it, Stent recommends something the US has deployed against China, vis-à-vis Taiwan: "strategic ambiguity." Putin does a masterful job of keeping the West guessing, Stent and many others have observed. "By contrast, the United States has been more predictable in its approach to the crisis in Ukraine," Stent wrote. "The Biden administration would do well to take a page out of the Russian playbook and make Moscow wonder—and fret—about Washington's capabilities and plans. Only then can a reinvigorated diplomatic process—one that puts the United States at the table—work to prevent Russia from pressing its advantage in Ukraine." Omicron and the Vaccine Divide As Fareed has argued, the Omicron variant's emergence was sadly predictable, given rich countries' hoarding of vaccines. Theories vary as to how Omicron developed, Rafaela von Bredow, Marco Evers, Fritz Schaap, and Veronika Hackenbroch write for Der Spiegel—including that it may have germinated in an animal or in an immunocompromised human patient—but Omicron reminds us that the vaccination task ahead is an urgent one, lest more variants come about.
Then again, Olga Khazan writes for The Atlantic, vaccine hoarding isn't the only problem. Developing countries face a significant degree of vaccine hesitancy, though as one observer theorizes, some of that reluctance could have developed as a result of vaccines being unavailable in developing countries in the first place. Didi, the Chinese "ridesharing firm that ate Uber alive" in its home country, is delisting from the New York Stock Exchange, and other large Chinese firms will want to take note, Matthew Silberman writes for SupChina. After China launched a cybersecurity investigation of Didi's data-collection and sharing practices, China Neican writes that Didi and firms like it are caught between Chinese strictures and US corporate-disclosure requirements, an untenable place to be when listed in the US.
China may clarify its rules soon, Rui Ma writes for Rest of World, but "[e]ven that may not soothe investors' concerns about other listings, notably Alibaba. Trust is at an all-time low. Now that the delisting gates have been breached, I'm not sure the fear will dissipate, no matter how many assurances are given. I wouldn't blame investors for steering clear of Chinese-U.S. tech listings for a while." How the US Might Handle a Green Conversion During its decades of global hegemony, the US served as an international oil guarantor, producing much of it and ensuring its safe shipment from the Persian Gulf, Adam Tooze writes for Foreign Policy. As oil has been key to America's global power and profits, Tooze writes that a coming green-energy revolution could see the US become one of its biggest losers.
As such, the politics of decarbonization are uniquely tricky in the US. "When [John] Kerry as [US President Joe] Biden's climate tsar evokes a green industrial revolution, one thinks of breakthroughs in battery technology and green steel, answering the U.N. climate conference's global challenge," Tooze writes. "But if the energy transition is actually to take root in the United States' unique political economy, it may be better to envision it in rather different terms divorced from the climate issue. It could be an agro-industrial transformation, offering ultra-cheap electricity from wind and solar as a new common denominator of rural and urban America." |
