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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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January 20, 2022

Time to Move On From the Pandemic?

Science has "largely defanged" Covid-19 for those who've been vaccinated, University of Edinburgh global-public-health chair Devi Sridhar writes in a Guardian column, suggesting it's time to move on from the pandemic's more-frightening phases. 

Through Britain's rounds of lockdown debate, Sridhar has advocated caution. Now, she argues we've reached a turning point thanks to current vaccines, the possibility of even-more-effective ones in the future, and promising treatments.
 
"[W]e need to find a better way of living alongside [Covid-19] using the tools we have," Sridhar writes—including, for instance, employers recognizing those at greater risk who might need protecting. "[N]ow is the time to start to recover and heal as a society and move forward, treating this virus like we do other infectious disease threats."

In Russia–NATO Crisis, Is Western 'Hubris' to Blame?

As Russia and the US negotiate over the former's 100,000-plus troops gathered near Ukraine, some say it wouldn't make sense for Moscow to invade again. At CNN, Nick Paton Walsh outlines why that'd be "a very bad idea"—though in Paton Walsh's view, the US is making war more likely by "sounding the alarm" at such a high volume.
 
Others, like The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, warn that "the West is losing Ukraine" to Russian control.
 
Still others say the West is to blame. Some analysts of European security have argued the US and Western Europe adopted too triumphalist an attitude after the fall of Soviet Communism; among them is Stephen M. Walt, who writes at Foreign Policy that "liberal hubris" through NATO enlargement in the 1990s—and, critically, the 2008 announcement that Ukraine and Georgia would be welcomed—needlessly provoked Russia and ignored basic laws of power and self-interest in international relations. "If the United States and NATO want to solve this via diplomacy, they are going to have to make real concessions and may not get everything they might want," Walt writes. "I don't like this situation any more than you do, but that's the price to be paid for unwisely expanding NATO beyond reasonable limits."

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Eyeing China's Slowdown

China's was the only major world economy to grow through the first year of the pandemic, but a slowdown in the second half of 2021 has generated concern. At Nikkei Asia, Minxin Pei writes that President Xi Jinping has emphasized Communist Party authority, where Beijing has in the past prized economic advancement above all else. Turning back to the previous model has now become necessary, Pei advises.

'Can He Build Back Better'?

US President Joe Biden took office poised to enact infrastructure and social-safety-net spending that could remake America in a social-democratic model, Michael Tomasky writes for The New York Review of Books.

That agenda now lies in tatters, Tomasky writes under the above headline, identifying causes in poor Democratic campaigning, the difficulties of passing anything ambitious through the US Senate, and resistance from the Senate Democratic Caucus's right flank. But it can be recovered, Tomasky suggests, if "some version" of Biden's "Build Back Better" social-spending bill passes, inflation abates, and the Covid-19 situation improves.

Johnson Teeters, as Does Tory Populism

Support for Prime Minister Boris Johnson has wavered among Conservative MPs as the "Partygate" scandal threatens his leadership, according to some. Johnson is beginning to look like a "drag" on his own party's electoral future in legislative seats it won in 2019, The Economist writes, while suggesting elsewhere that Tory populism is on the ropes along with Johnson.
 
"Brexiteers were right to sense that a run of technocratic British governments had lost touch with voters," the magazine writes. "But the excesses of Partygate have shown that the post-Brexit Tory party has lost touch with reality."