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. December 17, 2021 A Scandal Johnson Can't Shake? UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson's superpower, The Economist writes, is that scandals just don't stick: "Whenever lesser politicians bluster and contradict themselves, voters sneer at their sleaze, lying and hypocrisy. By contrast, Mr Johnson has had an uncanny ability to make them feel as if they are in on the joke."
A new series of controversies will test that quality, some observers of UK politics now say, amid what an Anna Russell column at The New Yorker calls Johnson's "Christmas from Hell." Leading the hit parade is "partygate": a rolling kerfuffle over the allegation that last year, as other Britons locked down unhappily, top officials held a Christmas party at 10 Downing Street. (And when parties are taboo, Russell notes, "every festive detail is salacious.")
At the same time, questions have persisted over the funding of a Johnson apartment refurbishment, and, as Robert Shrimsley details in the Financial Times, Conservative MPs revolted against Johnson's new series of Omicron-responsive Covid-19 restrictions. The parliamentary vote revealed cracks in Johnson's leadership, as well as his party's refusal to adapt to the pandemic times, Shrimsley writes.
Johnson's political skill and reformism have carried him so far, The Economist writes, but this raft of controversies cuts against his strengths. "Once lost, trust with voters is hard to recover," the magazine observes. "If reform loses focus and purpose, it is hard to jump start. When a government and its party are ragged, they are hard to reunite." Girding for the Omicron Wave With Covid-19 cases surging in the US and the Omicron variant raising new concerns, The Atlantic's Ed Yong writes that America isn't ready for what's coming.
Real-world data have suggested Omicron may not produce such serious illness as other variants, but Yong questions the conclusion, given that the trend has been observed, in part, among young people who tend to suffer less-serious illnesses from Covid-19 anyway. Full (but not boosted) vaccination is only about as effective against Omicron as partial vaccination is against Delta, Yong writes, and Omicron spreads terrifyingly fast.
"The Omicron wave won't completely topple America's wall of immunity but will seep into its many cracks and weaknesses," Yong writes. "It will find the 39 percent of Americans who are still not fully vaccinated (including 28 percent of adults and 13 percent of over-65s). It will find other biologically vulnerable people … It will find the socially vulnerable people who face repeated exposures … Here, then, is the problem: People who are unlikely to be hospitalized by Omicron might still feel reasonably protected, but they can spread the virus to those who are more vulnerable, quickly enough to seriously batter an already collapsing health-care system that will then struggle to care for anyone—vaccinated, boosted, or otherwise." A US–China War Over Taiwan Could Be 'Long' and 'Ugly' Leaders in both the US and China "would prefer a splendid little war in the western Pacific," Hal Brands and Michael Beckley write for Foreign Affairs, noting assumptions that any conflict over Taiwan would end quickly, regardless of the winner. "[B]ut that is not the sort of war they would get."
Rather, Brands and Beckley warn, a war over Taiwan would more likely be "long" and "ugly"—"much easier to start than to end." Brands and Beckley go into the specific escalations that might occur, from cyberattacks to low-yield nuclear weapons, but their main point is that each side would have incentive and ability to keep fighting beyond the opening salvos. Great-power wars often drag on, they write, involving long commitments and wide-scale mobilizations—something policymakers in Washington and Beijing would do well to remember. The New 'Terrains' of Power In an ambitious package of essays, the European Council on Foreign Relations seeks to define international power in the present era. Looking beyond military strength and trade in goods, the ECFR's authors explore seven fields—economics, technology, climate, people, military, health, and culture—noting that global interconnection is complex and can be exploited in various ways.
Some of the rankings are as one might expect, but they're also nuanced. China is an economic powerhouse, the series notes, but its special advantage is in infrastructure; the US plays a "gatekeeper" role, controlling access to multiple public domains; South Korea has emerged as a "surprise" cultural power; India plays strongly on multiple fields (including, as an animated graphic shows, via massive growth in its film industry).
"In an era in which states use their interdependence against one another, power is no longer defined by control of land or oceans, or even the normative influence of 'soft power,'" Mark Leonard writes in the introductory essay. "It is now defined by control over flows of people, goods, money, and data, and via the connections they establish. As states compete to control such connections and the dependencies they create, these flows cut across overlapping spheres of influence – shaping the new map of geopolitical power. Only those who see this map clearly will be able to control the modern world." |
