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. January 12, 2022 Can the West Play a Long Game With Putin's Russia? With some 100,000 troops stationed near Ukraine, Russia may well want its list of demands taken seriously, as Françoise Thom wrote convincingly for Russia Desk, and it may not be worried about US threats of financial sanctions, as Chris Miller argues in Foreign Affairs.
But as a crucial series of summits unfolds in Europe this week, Leonid Bershidsky has argued at Bloomberg that the West needn't focus solely on the near-term danger that Russian President Vladimir Putin will invade Ukraine again.
After the fall of Soviet communism, Bershidsky writes, the West did relatively little to bring post-Soviet states into its fold, offering a dearth of investment and aid when compared to Germany after World War II, for instance. If Putin wants to redraw the post-Cold War security map, Bershidsky argues, the US and Western Europe might well expand their own goals. Western negotiators could counter Putin's suite of requests with their own big proposals—including, Bershidsky goes so far as to suggest, Russian membership in NATO (something Moscow sought in the 1990s) and economic integration with the EU for other post-Soviet countries.
Putin could hardly accept such an offer, Bershidsky acknowledges, but the point is to look beyond him. "The West must be prepared, on a strategic level, to deal differently with its unfinished post-Soviet business than it did in the last three decades," Bershidsky writes. Such amiable proposals as Bershidsky suggests "would outline an attractive scenario for Putin's successors, a bridge from confrontation to cooperation from which Russia could benefit. They would also present the Russian people with an alternative way of thinking about the West. Even if they have no say in the Kremlin's policy today, that won't necessarily always be the case." With the revelation this week of yet another lockdown-era party at Downing Street, Prime Minister Boris Johnson's "partygate" scandal continues to prompt indignation and isn't going away anytime soon, Rebecca Mead writes for The New Yorker, offering that Johnson has done a substandard job of mopping it up.
Some had speculated this would be the scandal to sink Johnson in the public's esteem, whereas he's glided past so many others. In that vein, the Financial Times' Robert Shrimsley writes: "As so often with leaders, the prime minister's undoing may be the features that once made him attractive to voters, in this case his irreverence and carelessness." Will Pandemic Savings Sustain the US Economy? The US economy got more bad news today, as consumer-price inflation hit a new high since 1982 last year, but The Economist writes that pent-up pandemic savings could help Americans out, even as the stimulus era fades and as the Federal Reserve appears poised to tighten monetary policies.
Inflation will cut into the value of those household savings, but an extra $2.5 trillion of them stocked up over the pandemic could get consumers reengaged, and citizens already enjoy improved debt-to-asset ratios, the magazine writes. Afghanistan's New Main Outside Players Since America's withdrawal and the Taliban's takeover, Afghanistan has spiraled, as former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown writes for The Guardian: Its economy lies in tatters, the threat of starvation looms, and public workers go without pay.
Amid that chaos, Iran and Pakistan are now the country's most influential outside players, Kamran Bokhari writes for Foreign Affairs. By virtue of ethnic links, past political and military relationships, and long borders, Iran and Pakistan are left to manage a situation (to the extent that it's possible) that could spill over, with China and the Gulf states hoping they can, Bokhari writes. Joseph S. Nye, Jr. coined the term "soft power" to describe countries' abilities to persuade and attract through culture, politics, and values—but as hard, military power was on full display around the world in 2021, Nye wonders at Project Syndicate if the softness has been lost.
China's adoption of "wolf-warrior" diplomacy and the American presidency of Donald Trump damaged each country's soft power, Nye writes, but persuasion (as opposed to coercion) figures to remain a key mechanism in global politics. And even when governments turn away from soft power, Nye observes, it works in other ways: "Firms, universities, foundations, churches, and protest movements develop soft power of their own. Sometimes their activities will reinforce official foreign-policy goals, and sometimes they will be at odds with them. Either way, these private sources of soft power are increasingly important in the age of social media." |
