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? Sign up here. April 19, 2024 | |
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Fareed: With a Two-Issue Election, Biden Should Act Now on Immigration |
"Bill Maher recently said on his show that the 2024 election was going to be fought over two issues: immigration and abortion," Fareed writes for CNN Opinion. "The party that best navigates these cultural battlefields is likely to prevail in November. Each party has an advantage, the Democrats on abortion and the Republicans on immigration." Immigration is fueling right-wing populism from Europe to the US, Fareed writes. Some of President Joe Biden's supporters would be angry if he took more aggressive action to block asylum-seekers from entering the country, Fareed argues, but Biden "needs to risk it and get tougher on immigration. It has become a proxy for all kinds of issues where people feel that elites simply don't get the concerns of average people. … He should declare a national security emergency, send the National Guard to the border, work with Congress to suspend the asylum process and propose a new one that basically makes it impossible to get asylum if you just show up at the border. Many will scream, and it will all be challenged in court. But it will signal that Biden is taking the problem seriously. Bill Clinton often says that the American people don't always need you to succeed, but they want to catch you trying. Joe Biden needs to be caught trying to solve the immigration crisis." |
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Israel vs. Iran:
Is It Over? |
The biggest story in global affairs took another turn Friday, as Israel appeared to strike Iran. So, after stirring fears of a catastrophic wider war in the Middle East, has this open tit-for-tat saga concluded for good?
To recap: Israel and Iran have engaged in a so-called "shadow war" for much of the last decade. (Israel has waged a "campaign between the wars" to strike at Iran's regional and nuclear capabilities between Israel's periodic active wars with Iranian allies Hezbollah and Hamas. Assassinations, strikes, and Iranian proxy attacks have all featured in this simmering, longstanding, covert back-and-forth between these two regional powers.) While also fighting a devastating war against Hamas in Gaza in retaliation for the terrorist group's Oct. 7 massacres, on April 1 a suspected Israeli strike destroyed an Iranian consular facility in Damascus and killed Iranian military commanders. Iran responded last Saturday night, launching hundreds of drones and missiles directly at Israel, nearly all of which were intercepted before reaching their targets. Although the Biden administration has distanced itself and encouraged Israel not to escalate, it seems Israel has struck Iran in relatively limited fashion. Last night, explosions were heard near the Iranian city of Isfahan, as noted by Iranian state media. Israel's military did not comment, but the wide and immediate assumption was that Israel had attacked an Iranian airbase. Iran had promised swift and severe reaction if Israel made any such move, but an official in Tehran said Iran had intercepted three drones, the Iranian airbase in question is secure, and Iran is downplaying the event, CNN's Simone McCarthy reports.
As for what to make of all this, former State Department director of policy planning and Council on Foreign Relations president emeritus Richard Haass, who had expected a limited Israeli strike on Iran, writes today in his Home & Away newsletter that Israel's apparent strike was "even more limited" than what he had foreseen. "[T]he Israeli action was also calibrated to make it easy for Iran not to respond. Israel's government is not trumpeting what took place," Haass writes. The details "suggest the high likelihood that a serious conflict between Israel and Iran is not imminent. … What just happened or more accurately didn't happen in the Middle East is a rare piece of good news." |
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Israel's sense of its ability to deter enemies was badly shaken on Oct. 7, former longtime US Middle East diplomat Martin Indyk said recently on a Council on Foreign Relations webcast. That's key to understanding Israel's view of its current back-and-forth conflict with Tehran, Indyk said before last night's apparent Israeli strike on Iran.
That sense of insecurity notwithstanding, others see Israel and its government enjoying a stronger position thanks to recent conflict with Tehran. At the British foreign-affairs think tank Chatham House, Sananm Vakil and Bilal Y. Saab write that Iran's strike last Saturday benefited Israel, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, by distracting world attention from the war in Gaza and ending Israel's isolation on the global stage. Netanyahu had faced protests at home and pressure from the White House not to invade the Gazan town of Rafah; after Iran's strike last Saturday, the Middle East Institute's Paul Salem suggested the attack had thrown Netanyahu a "lifeline" to sidestep domestic criticism and perhaps expand operations in Gaza.
Haaretz columnist Anshel Pfeffer is less sanguine. "Just like Netanyahu's resistance to presenting a day-after plan for Gaza, he has no plans for Iran now that Tehran has upended his strategy," Pfeffer argues. "The strike in Isfahan is at most a temporary measure. Something had to be done in response to the Iranian attack, and this was something. Once again, the grand geopolitical strategist has been exposed as a windbag with nothing to offer Israel but faux-Churchillian sound bites." |
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Mike Johnson vs. His Fellow Republicans |
The Republican Party appears split over whether to extend further US military aid to Ukraine, which faces grim battlefield prospects against Russia's invading army. Relatively isolationist, pro-Trump voices like Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance have argued broadly against heavier US involvement in that war or in European defense. Still, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is moving toward a weekend showdown by pushing forward an aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. As Julian Zelizer writes for CNN Opinion, Johnson is testing the strength of the House GOP's MAGA wing, which has been quite bold in demanding agreement from GOP leaders. The Wall Street Journal praises Johnson for showing "leadership" and making his case clearly, noting he has said he "would rather send bullets to Ukraine than American boys."
Reviewing Johnson's recent remarks, including his assertion that helping Ukraine is "critically important," The New Yorker's Susan Glasser writes: "Johnson's summation of the current geopolitical map differed little from what one might hear from President Biden at the White House lectern—and it suggested that the Speaker's world view has departed sharply from Trump's autocrat-admiring brand of American isolationism." By trusting US intelligence assessments and by warning of dire consequences in Europe if Russian President Vladimir Putin wins in Ukraine, Johnson diverged from the Trumpist line on foreign policy, Glasser writes.
The move to help Ukraine could cost Johnson his speakership. Mounting a charge to remove him is the ardent Trump supporter Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Last week, CNN political analyst SE Cupp observed Greene's campaign against Johnson fizzling, noting Republican criticism of Greene for seeking to throw the House GOP back into chaos. Greene's sputtering bid to unseat Johnson shows she's becoming "irrelevant," in Cupp's view. |
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Rushdie Returns With 'Knife' |
A year and a half after being attacked and wounded in a grisly knife attack, while onstage due to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York in August 2022, renowned author Salman Rushdie told "60 Minutes" last Sunday that he had a "premonition" of the attack days before.
Rushdie has returned to publishing this month with a memoir, "Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder." Rushdie famously has lived much of his life under an order to kill him, a fatwa issued by the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 over alleged blasphemy in Rushdie's novel "The Satanic Verses," a fantastical, London-set story that reimagines Quranic passages in dreams.
The Economist writes in its review: "Sir Salman was about to speak at a festival … when a black-clad man charged the stage. His first thought was: 'So it's you. Here you are.' … Omitting his name—he is 'My Assailant', then 'the A'—Sir Salman wavers over whether he wants to confront him. Instead he makes up a jokey-serious dialogue between them, probing the imaginary suspect about faith, failure and loneliness. … His other deep theme is the challenge of living in a bleak world; or, to put it another way, the riddle of human nature. He 'experienced both the worst and best' when onlookers tackled his attacker and saved his life. Above all, however, the counterbalance to evil is the love and devotion of [his wife] Eliza, with whom Sir Salman salvaged 'a wounded happiness.'" |
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