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 18, 2022 The pandemic has showcased inequality from the start, given its uneven effects on the work-from-home crowd and those who must show up in person to earn a paycheck. And as Emma K. Atwood and Sarah Williamson noted at JSTOR Daily in 2020, past pandemics have led to social strife, as the Black Death produced both anti-restriction protests and feudal uprisings in Europe in the 1300s and later.
In a New York Times opinion essay, M.T. Anderson reflects on those trends, suggesting Covid-19 has collided with modern economic inequality in ways that are destabilizing and about which the Black Death can teach us a lot.
Of the medieval plague, Anderson writes: "Workers of all kinds—farm laborers, artisans in the cities, even poor parish priests who'd had to minister to the dying—looked at their lives once the pandemic had eased and reassessed what they were worth. They saw a system that was tilted impossibly against them." And they rebelled, clashing with a feudal system that tied peasants to the land of nobles, writes Anderson, drawing parallels to today's economic precarity and the so-called "Great Resignation."
Covid-19 has indeed prompted a reassessment of work and the value of labor, many have argued. It has not (yet) prompted the kind of class-based violence or out-group persecution Europe saw in the 1300s, notes Anderson, who suggests a familiar remedy: beefing up the social safety net with more child- and health-care support and funding it with taxes on the rich. Would Sanctions Sway Russia? If Russia invades Ukraine again, the Biden administration has stressed, tough economic sanctions will make it expensive for Moscow. Would they, really?
Probably not—or at least not enough to sway Russian President Vladimir Putin's calculus—according to a number of commentators poking holes in the threat. Russia doesn't seem intimidated by sanctions talk, John Cassidy writes for The New Yorker, and with good reason: Even drastic measures like cutting Russia off from the SWIFT inter-bank communication network might not do as much damage as some would like to think, as Cassidy sees it. Sanctions would only bite if Europe held to them, Sam Fleming, Henry Foy, and James Shotter wrote for the Financial Times earlier this month—and with Russian energy supplies looming over the Continental economy, such unity could be tough to maintain. At Nikkei Asia, Vandana Hari questions the ethics of asking Europeans to forgo Russian energy, voicing skepticism that US exports could meaningfully cover for a dearth of Russian gas.
More broadly, some say US sanctions—Washington's favorite tool in international standoffs of recent years, it seems—are no longer sufficient to influence behavior around the world. If North Korea's Kim dynasty can persist with its nuclear program in the face of them, Howard W. French asks at the World Politics Review, who's to say richer and stronger countries like Russia and China can't just ignore them, too?
Regardless of sanctions' broad utility, The New Yorker's Cassidy writes of Ukraine and Putin, "Fear of more sanctions seems unlikely to be the primary factor in his decision-making." Sponsor Content by Blinkist Apple Recommends the App Intellectuals Use To Beat Boredom Blinkist is an app used around the world that makes it easy to access powerful ideas from bestselling nonfiction books and podcasts. Start your free trial today! Should Everyone Just Quiet Down About Ukraine and NATO? That's the recommendation of Stephen Sestanovich, the former US ambassador at large to the former Soviet Union, who writes for Foreign Affairs that the current debate—between leaving NATO's door open to Ukraine and reassuring Russia that Ukraine won't join the alliance—ignores something important.
Either course of action would divide Ukraine, Sestanovich writes, identifying a great weakness in the country's political schism between (broadly speaking) Russian affinity in its east and pro-European Union sentiment in its west. When it comes to Ukraine's relationship with NATO, Sestanovich writes, either path would heighten divisions and block Ukraine's progress as a country. Better, then, to stop talking about it and instead help Ukraine bridge its divide, Sestanovich argues. Myanmar's Future Is Still Uncertain More than a year after the military coup in February 2021, fighting continues, and the military has not managed to take full control of the country, observers have noted this month, pointing to ethnic militias' persistence and popular organization against junta rule. The military expected to take power swiftly and easily last February, Frida Ghitis writes for the World Politics Review, but instead "a year of relentless resistance" has unfolded.
Anti-military forces aren't waiting for the outside world to intervene, Ghitis observes: "Inside Myanmar, activists say they would welcome more help—but they are not waiting for the rest of the world to save them. The first year of the junta's rule has been brutal for the civilian population, but it has also been painful for the military. That, for pro-democracy forces, is reason enough not to lose hope." Who will helm ISIS after its most recent leader died this month during a US raid? Advising readers to take the prediction "with a grain of salt," at New Lines Magazine editor in chief Hassan Hassan purports to identify the leading candidate, who possesses both religious knowledge and the right bloodlines, which Hassan suggests could energize the terrorist group.
As for the group itself, ISIS is in a "fractured and weakened state," Hassan writes. "When the group started to lose a number of its most seasoned leaders in 2015 and 2016, the effect of leadership decapitation was minimal … Today … the Islamic State is arguably facing its worst crisis since 2008." |
