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 30, 2022 On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET:
First: Russian President Vladimir Putin may have calculated that he enjoys real advantages in the standoff over Ukraine, but Fareed gives his take on the headwinds Putin faces.
Putin has suffered declining popularity at home, Fareed notes, and as Owen Matthews writes for New Lines Magazine, Putin effectively pushed Ukraine out of Russia's political orbit by cleaving off its most-pro-Russian regions in 2014. The current standoff, meanwhile, has strengthened NATO resolve.
Ukraine is already unlikely to join NATO anytime soon, Fareed says. "And yet, the United States cannot—and should not—forswear the possibility that [Ukraine] could join NATO at some point in the future. Between those two realities lies a narrow corridor, a space for creative diplomacy to avert a war that could consume the energies of both sides for years."
Next: How does the standoff look from Ukraine, Russia, and the key regional player Germany? Fareed is joined by Ukrainian author and journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk, Russian International Affairs Council Director-General Andrey Kortunov, and New York Times Berlin Bureau Chief Katrin Bennhold, who discuss Russia's goals, NATO's response, and possible diplomatic paths forward.
Then: With the Winter Olympics set to begin next week, the world's eyes are on China—and its Covid-19 rates. Is Beijing's stringent, zero-Covid strategy a disaster waiting to happen, now that Omicron has arrived? Author, former health-policy adviser to Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and University of Pennsylvania Vice Provost for Global Initiatives Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel joins Fareed to discuss.
After that: Why is Biden so unpopular? What do the latest polling numbers tell us about his presidency, after its first full year? And will Republicans make big gains in midterm elections this fall? Fareed talks with Amy Walter, publisher and editor in chief of The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter.
Finally: In light of a scathing World Bank report detailing a "deliberate depression … orchestrated" by Lebanon's "elite," Fareed examines the collapse that country has suffered—and the political system that has produced it.
Note to viewers: If you missed it the first time, tonight at 10 p.m. ET CNN will air Fareed's recent special report "China's Iron Fist: Xi Jinping and the Stakes for America."
It explores the biggest story in global politics today: China's aggressive, repressive path under President Xi Jinping—what he wants, where China is heading, and what that means for the rest of the world. Russia, Ukraine, and Consequences Russian President Vladimir Putin would harm his own country—and potentially his own political standing—by invading Ukraine again, The Economist warns.
"Seldom has the difference between a country's interests and those of its leader been so stark," as the magazine puts it. "Russia would benefit from better, closer, peaceful relations with the West. Such ties would be available if Mr Putin didn't behave so abominably. Only he benefits from discord, since he can tell Russians they are under siege and need a strongman to defend them. But even the wiliest strongman can miscalculate. Invading Ukraine could ultimately prove Mr Putin's undoing, if it turns into a bloody quagmire or makes Russians poorer, angrier and more eager for change. Even if just for his own sake, he should claim a victory over the imaginary threat Russia confronts in Ukraine—and back down."
There could be consequences for US President Joe Biden, too: At The New Yorker, Robin Wright asserts that "Biden's Presidency may now hang on how he handles Moscow's threat to Ukraine—and, broadly, everything America has built since Biden was born and the United States became a superpower." The latter is at stake, too, former Portuguese Secretary of State for European Affairs Bruno Maçães writes for Time: If Russia invades Ukraine again, in Maçães' view, "[t]he existing security order in Europe would be broken beyond repair. Europeans would suddenly be living in a world where Russia would have a claim to intervene anywhere in its near abroad or even beyond, any time it felt important interests were at stake." Ukrainian Bitterness, Unease Hang Over Standoff Russian President Vladimir Putin argued in a long essay last year that Ukraine, historically, is part of Russia. Ukrainians may dispute that: At The Conversation, Emily Channell-Justice and Jacob Lassin write of deep Ukrainian bitterness over the country's Soviet past, which included a famine that killed millions and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
In the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, anxiety, jadedness, and determination to live on unafraid swirl together in Lina Verschwele's Der Spiegel dispatch, which follows three women with various experiences of the conflict that began in 2014 (though all lost their homes as a result of it) and various relationships with Russian heritage. The Case Against a Drastic Response to Inflation As inflation rears its head, unconventional remedies have been floated. At Project Syndicate, economist Dani Rodrik recently noted that alternative economic theories will be tested, with some advocating price controls. The Economist writes that in Turkey, resistance to raising interest rates seems doomed to produce failure.
Turkey's path aside, BlackRock's Philipp Hildebrand argues in the Financial Times that this wave of inflation is "fundamentally different" from the last major one, in the 1970s, in that it's solely caused (in Hildebrand's view) by supply shortfalls, not by an unnatural demand boom. "The old playbook doesn't apply," Hildebrand writes—though it should be noted that interest-rate hikes tend to hurt corporate earnings and stock markets and thus investment firms like BlackRock. "[T]oday, we are in an era of severe supply constraints even as economies are below their potential. This changes everything from a macro perspective." As such, Hildebrand argues, policymakers shouldn't "destroy demand"—i.e., jobs and economic growth—for the sake of it and should instead pursue "normalisation" of monetary policy, not a drastic fix. What History Tells Us About Vaccines and Information Convincing people to get vaccinated may be a challenge, but it's not one of delivering more information, Rivka Galchen writes for the London Review of Books.
Reviewing two histories of anti-vaccine sentiment—Heidi Larson's "Stuck: How Vaccine Rumours Start—and Why They Don't Go Away" and Jonathan Berman's "Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement"—Galchen recounts how Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis was disregarded by colleagues and society for recommending obstetricians wash their hands, offering an early example of beliefs about health dovetailing with emotion, politics, and ulterior motives.
"For those who are sceptical of vaccination without necessarily being anti-vaxxers, the most effective public health strategy remains unclear," Galchen writes. "Berman argues that 'reactive' responses, such as mockery, are counterproductive. … Factsheets like those used by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention tend not to work, both because they are less powerful than personal narratives and because the other side produces misleading literature in the same format. Online bots and trolls are a source of both pro and anti-vax messages, in more or less equal amounts: the amount of contradictory and unstable information is as much, if not more, of a problem as the information itself." Community leaders seem to have more power to influence behavior than direct government outreach with facts, Galchen writes. |
