HOT AIR BALLOON FLIGHT

View this email in your browser 

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.

February 20, 2022

On Today's Show

On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET:

With US President Joe Biden saying he's "convinced" Russian President Vladimir Putin has already decided to invade Ukraine, Fareed discusses the latest developments with CNN Chief International Correspondent Clarissa Ward, who joins from Ukraine, and CNN International Diplomatic Editor Nic Robertson, who joins from Russia.
 
Fareed also gets vital context from former Secretary of State and current Director of Stanford's Hoover Institution Condoleezza Rice—who is not only one of America's foremost foreign-policy officials of recent decades, but also one of its highest-ranking Russia and Eastern Europe experts, having directed policy on that region in the National Security Council as the Soviet Union collapsed.

What is Putin thinking? What could happen next, and how will the world respond? Fareed talks with two more observers who have experience dealing with the Russian President: Member of European Parliament and former Polish Defense Minister Radoslaw Sikorski and former US National Security Council Senior Director for Russia Thomas Graham, now of the Council on Foreign Relations.
 
Taking a broader look at US foreign policy and the Ukraine crisis, Fareed gives his take on a major flaw: that America is uniting its adversaries.
 
As seen in the lengthy joint statement issued after Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in Beijing this month, Russia and China are only growing closer, including through the current crisis over Ukraine. Fareed argues the Biden administration should seek to reverse that trend.
 
"At the start of the Cold War, when ideology also dominated over strategy, Washington lumped all communist states together," Fareed says. "It took the US 25 years—and the Vietnam War—to learn that we should treat Moscow and Beijing differently. At the start of the war on terror, the Bush administration announced that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea formed an 'axis of evil,' a mistake for which we are still paying the price. Let's hope that this time we do not have to endure a long and costly misadventure before we finally recognize that we should not be helping to unite our foes."

Do Ukrainians Think War Is Coming?

Not in the eastern city of Kharkiv, The Economist writes. As the current crisis has unfolded, reporting on Ukrainian attitudes has been mixed: Accounts of constant anxiety and life-goes-on indifference have each been aired in credible publications. The Economist looks and finds the latter.
 
"(D)espite a stream of videos of Russian military convoys just north of the border circulating on social media, many appear to have relaxed" since President Volodymyr Zelensky warned in late January that Russia may try to occupy Kharkiv, the magazine writes. "Most people in this city of 1.5m people are deeply sceptical that a new all-out war is about to break out."
 
As international analysts show considerably more worry, an armored invasion isn't their only concern. Russia has already damaged Ukraine's economy, harming its bonds, currency value, and foreign investment, Anders Åslund writes for The Atlantic Council. And if Russia does invade, Ukraine can expect cyberattacks, too, Jillian Kay Melchior writes for The Wall Street Journal.

What Will Happen If Russia Invades—and Wins?

The Biden administration and Western pundits have warned that Russia will incur heavy costs it if invades Ukraine, levied by sanctions and a likely Ukrainian insurgency. But Russia has succeeded in Syria despite similar warnings of a morass, Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage write for Foreign Affairs, suggesting Moscow could do the same in Ukraine.
 
As their discussion turns to consequences, Fix and Kimmage foresee big changes if a Russian strategic victory comes to pass: NATO would retrench to guard its core members and more or less stop associating with new countries, they write; Russia would loom as "an anarchic presence—sometimes real, sometimes imagined—in every instance of European political instability"; China and Russia could grow ever closer; and Turkey might return more fully into NATO's fold.  
 
Try as he might, Russian President Vladimir Putin can't undo a sense of national identity that has solidified in Ukraine over 30-plus years of independence, Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel write for the same magazine. But if he does destabilize or gain outright control of the country, we can expect human rights to be sharply degraded there, Clint Williamson and David J. Kramer warn at American Purpose.

Chile's Wild Ride

Chile is debating a nearly incredible list of reforms, Ariel Dorfman writes for The New York Review of Books, over everything from its presidential system to restoring land rights to native peoples. Solving them will be up to young, newly elected President Gabriel Boric and a constitutional convention composed of members who "look far more like the sprawling and variegated population of Chile itself than the elite that has ruled this land for more than two centuries since independence," Dorfman writes. 
 
Whether that convention can arrive at agreement smoothly—which "radicals" in the ranks seem to be making difficult—will help determine how the country's new constitution fares in a September plebiscite, Dorfman writes.

Ennui Rules the Workday

"It is in the air, this anti-ambition," Noreen Malone observes in The New York Times Magazine, in an essay arguing that as Covid-19 has prompted a broad reassessment of the value of work, it's been laid bare that a sizable quotient of white-collar workers hate their jobs. The sacrifices necessary for career advancement, Malone suggests, are seen by a growing number as simply not worth it.
 
A pre-pandemic linkage of personal value to work has been decoupled, Malone writes. As ennui pervades and as the living room unhappily becomes an office, Malone suggests white-collar workers are becoming more like their blue-collar kin: viewing their work as "just a job, a paycheck to take care of the bills."