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 19, 2021 On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET: First, Fareed gives his take on President Joe Biden's puzzling unpopularity.
Many of Biden's policies have been popular, Fareed points out, but Biden will likely end his first year as President with a lower approval rating (at this point in a presidential term) than any other since relevant polling began—except for his predecessor, former President Donald Trump.
Why the disconnect? "Presidents often get rewarded for being around in good times, whether they caused them or not," Fareed says. "In Joe Biden's case, he has mostly handled his job with intelligence and decency. But he is paying the price for the complicated times that we are living through."
Next: Fareed talks with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about America's political troubles; why Democratic presidents often face backlashes for pursuing bold agendas; what's behind Russia's military buildup near Ukraine; and the new political thriller Clinton has coauthored, "State of Terror."
After that: Israel vociferously opposed the Iran nuclear deal when it was concluded in 2015. Now, former Israeli officials say Trump's pullout was a mistake. Why? Fareed asks author, Economist correspondent, and Haaretz columnist Anshel Pfeffer.
Finally: Was George III, the last British king to rule the American colonies, really the tyrant America's founding generation portrayed or the madman US popular culture makes him out to be? Fareed talks with historian Andrew Roberts, author of "The Last King of America," who says George III wasn't so bad at all. Omicron Slams Into Europe As the US faces a wave of Covid-19, Europe has witnessed a swift onset of Omicron cases that has upended the relative ease that allowed people to feel comfortable socializing mask-less in public spaces, as Rafaela von Bredow and Veronika Hackenbroch detail in Der Spiegel.
Restrictions have returned with stunning speed—the Netherlands has ordered all nonessential businesses to close until mid-January—as scientific attention focuses on the severity of illness Omicron produces. At Nature, Heidi Ledford writes that studies conflict as to whether Omicron yields less-severe illness than other variants, and more data are needed. More research also needs to be done regarding what level of immunity vaccination and previous illness confer, Ledford writes. The Economist's country-of-the-year award highlights improvement, and this year's prize goes to Italy for having stabilized its politics (which swung in populist directions in recent years) to elect technocratic Prime Minister Mario Draghi. That, in turn, has given Italy, an often maligned debtor nation among Europe's fold, the prospect of shoring up its fiscal position.
In Draghi, Italy "acquired a competent, internationally respected prime minister," the magazine writes. "For once, a broad majority of its politicians buried their differences to back a programme of thoroughgoing reform that should mean Italy gets the funds to which it is entitled under the EU's post-pandemic recovery plan. Italy's covid vaccination rate is among the highest in Europe. And after a difficult 2020, its economy is recovering more speedily than those of France or Germany. There is a danger that this unaccustomed burst of sensible governance could be reversed. … But it is hard to deny that the Italy of today is a better place than it was in December 2020." Can the US 'Rightsize' Its Involvement in the Middle East? Successive US presidents have hoped to pull back from the Middle East, but Becca Wasser and Elisa Ewers write in a Foreign Affairs essay that leaving the region completely would be unwise. Still, they suggest America can "wind down posture elements that are vestiges of outdated wars"—for instance by keeping nimbler, smaller ships in the Persian Gulf; retrenching to bases beyond the reach of Iran and its proxies; and relying on reconnaissance and intelligence.
The US presence in the Middle East hasn't seemed to deter Iran's nuclear program, for instance, and scaling-down (but not eliminating) America's footprint there can lower tensions while being as effective, Wasser and Ewers argue. The Original Anti-Vaxxers Since smallpox pus was used to inoculate the unexposed in the 1700s, people have resisted the idea of vaccination as counterintuitive on its face, Mark Honigsbaum writes for The New York Review of Books. Government mandates have spurred fierce resistance among popular minorities throughout the centuries, too.
Honigsbaum recounts the organization of that resistance: "Robert King, a Leicester man, was fined in 1877 for failing to vaccinate his child even though the child had since died (of causes not recorded); his treatment by the authorities transformed him into a martyr for the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League. (The league was founded in 1866 by Richard Butler Gibbs, a noted vegetarian and food reformer. Like other anti-vaccination groups, such as the National Anti-Vaccination League, founded in 1874, its members also tended to be vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, and supporters of temperance. By 1870, the AVCL had 103 branch leagues and claimed 10,000 members.)"
Governments, meanwhile, have handled things roughly the same: The so-called "Leicester method" of allowing the vaccine hesitant to quarantine at home for 14 days, instead of getting the smallpox vaccine derived from the related cowpox virus, arrived in response to a "popular rebellion" against mandates. Given how interconnected the world has since become, Honigsbaum wonders if such exceptions are workable today. Note to readers: The Global Briefing will be on hiatus for the next two weeks. We'll return to your inboxes briefly next Sunday, with topics and guests for that day's GPS, then regularly on Jan. 4. |
