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 2, 2022 The Horror of Afghanistan's Collapse "As a foreign correspondent for the past 35 years, I have seen too much famine, disease and death," The Times of London's Christina Lamb writes from Kabul. "But I have never seen anything of this magnitude."
Lamb's account begins with an eight-year-old girl sold into marriage, to be given away when she reaches puberty, by a father who says he must choose between selling his children and watching his family starve. For months, journalists, regional analysts, and NGOs have been warning of Afghanistan's slide toward famine amid a thoroughgoing economic collapse since the Taliban takeover last August. "[A]ccording to the UN, 23 million people, more than half the population, face starvation and a million children" under the age of five "may die," notes Lamb, whose reporting puts that collapse into stark relief.
As International Rescue Committee President and CEO and former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband articulated it on GPS and in a recent CNN op-ed, the humanitarian cry for action is a simple one: that the US and international powers should unfreeze billions of dollars in Afghan central bank holdings and ease sanctions on the Taliban. Carveouts to allow humanitarian aid are not enough, Miliband and others say, to get Afghanistan's national economy functioning—no matter how unpleasant it would be for the US and its allies to fund a Taliban government of onetime foes who fall short on ethnic inclusion, women's opportunities, and human rights.
As attention turns to Afghan suffering, George Packer writes in a long, reported Atlantic essay of the chaotic American withdrawal and the allied Afghans the US left behind. Accusing the Biden administration of a gross moral failure, Packer details those Afghans' frantic efforts to get out and warnings that had been sounded months earlier. Is the Party Over for Boris Johnson? With the release this week of a highly anticipated government report on lockdown-era parties in the government of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Guardian columnists channel dismay at Johnson socializing while the rest of Britain was subject to strict rules.
Rankled Conservative MPs aren't sure whether Johnson should stay or go as Prime Minister, per The Spectator's James Forsyth, while The Economist's Bagehot columnist cites a dearth of alternatives. "The party's MPs will stick with Mr Johnson for as long as they think he is their best bet for retaining their seats and staying in power," the magazine writes. "He is the product of a broken system, not its cause." Are China and Russia Angling for a 'New World Order'? Analysts have suggested relations are warming between Russia and China, and Gideon Rachman writes in a Financial Times essay that Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are aligned in goals of upholding autocracy, keeping the US out of other countries' domestic affairs, and reshaping the world order more to their liking.
The two leaders are "united by a belief that the US is plotting to undermine and overthrow their governments," Rachman writes. "In the heyday of communism, Russia and China supported revolutionary forces around the world. But today Moscow and Beijing have embraced the rhetoric of counter-revolution. ... The question now is whether Russia and China's ambitions for a 'new world order' will also need a war to come to fruition. ... But even if Putin fails to achieve his goals in Ukraine, the threat to the US-led world order will not disappear. A rising China, led by an ambitious President Xi, will make sure of that." The US–China Rivalry, as Told From Each Side of the Pacific The US–China relationship could shape world politics for decades to come, and two essays in the current issue of Global Asia suggest Washington and Beijing are taking wildly different approaches to it. The US has come to see China as a "systemic rival," G. John Ikenberry argues, pointing to American fears of China's wholly different system of government and its perceived threat to liberal democracy.
To hear Wang Dong tell it, China wants nothing of a putative showdown. "China is a reluctant rival," Dong argues. "Beijing is not willing to take the initiative to provoke conflict with the US, nor does it crave hegemony. … For now, stabilizing China-US relations and preventing them from spiraling into a new Cold War remain the key goals of China's policy toward the US." |
