On Fareed Zakaria GPS

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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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April 21, 2024

On Today's Show

As an issue, immigration figures to weigh heavily on the 2024 US election. President Joe Biden would do well to take aggressive action on it, Fareed argues.

Immigration is driving right-wing populism on both sides of the Atlantic, and it epitomizes the feeling of many voters that elites simply don't get the problems they care about, Fareed points out. "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."

After that: It has been a big weekend for Ukraine, as the GOP-controlled US House approved long-awaited and much-needed military aid for Kyiv. Fareed talks with Andriy Yermak, head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's presidential office, about the battlefield difficulties Ukraine faces and the struggle to secure more help from friendly Western capitals.

The Middle East has been on edge, fearing a catastrophic wider war as Israel and Iran have traded strikes. Has the moment of danger passed? Fareed asks Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi if escalation can be avoided.

Then, Fareed has an interview with the Oscar-winning actor and producer Michael Douglas. He's currently starring as Benjamin Franklin in the Apple TV+ series "Franklin," which depicts the Founding Father in his role as American diplomat.

Finally: Nippon Steel's bid to acquire the storied American company US Steel. The deal is in jeopardy as it is opposed by the United Steelworkers and Republican and Democratic politicians—including Biden, who has maintained some of his predecessor's protectionist tendencies. Fareed spoke recently with US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel about the proposed takeover.

Trump Is on Trial, Sure. But What Comes After?

US political news currently centers on the beginning of President Donald Trump's criminal "hush-money" trial in New York. (Trump denies the charges, which include influencing the 2016 election by allegedly paying off porn star Stormy Daniels to cover up an alleged affair.) As The Economist writes, the case is "both momentous and tawdry." It's the first criminal prosecution of a former US president, and as such it makes solemn history. "But the felony charges are low-level and the details tawdry. The case is about sex, money and blackmail. Mr Trump's former lawyer and fixer, who will testify against him, once described the conduct at issue as the 'filth and muck of politics' and, less delicately, a 'shit sandwich.'"

The more interesting part will come if Trump is convicted, according to a New York Times guest essay by Norman Eisen, the CNN legal analyst who served as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Trump's first impeachment and trial. Were Trump to be convicted, Eisen writes, sentencing would likely come in late summer or early fall—at the height of the 2024 presidential race. "A review of thousands of cases in New York that charged the same felony suggests something striking," Eisen writes: "If Mr. Trump is found guilty, incarceration is an actual possibility. It's not certain, of course, but it is plausible." If Trump is convicted and sentenced to prison time, then wins the fall election, "he can't pardon himself because it is a state case. He will be likely to order the Justice Department to challenge his sentence, and department opinions have concluded that a sitting president could not be imprisoned, since that would prevent the president from fulfilling the constitutional duties of the office. The courts have never had to address the question, but they could well agree with the Justice Department."

'How Gullible Are You?'

From the US to Europe, disinformation, misinformation, and adherence to conspiracy theories have made a deep imprint on our political and public lives. In 2020, a Der Spiegel feature delved deeply into QAnon's "inexorable spread beyond the US" and the damage it has caused to some Germans.

In the current issue of The New Yorker, Manvir Singh reviews recent books on the subject, challenging the conventional wisdom that conspiracy theorists are dupes. Where they are concerned, Singh writes, the form of "belief" at play might be looser, functioning more as a signal about group identity or broader worldview than any specific factual misconception. Singh points out a paradox: If the big problem is that misinformation is so nefariously effective at convincing gullible people, why aren't real facts effective too?

That leads Singh to suggest misinformation itself is less the problem than larger forces that make it appealing. "From this perspective," Singh writes, "railing against social media for manipulating our zombie minds is like cursing the wind for blowing down a house we've allowed to go to rack and ruin. … By declaring that the problem consists of 'irresponsible senders and gullible receivers,' in ['Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop It' author Paul] Thagard's words, credulity theorists risk ignoring the social pathologies that cause people to become disenchanted and motivate them to rally around strange new creeds." Disappointment with things like government corruption or hypocritical foreign policies might be driving the disaffection that draws people to certain false beliefs, Singh suggests.

Did Montenegro Break Bad?

Perhaps best known to Americans and Western Europeans as a vacation destination, or as a Balkan state mercifully less embroiled in the bloody conflicts of the 1990s and 2000s than its neighbors, Montenegro has big problems with organized crime, Alexander Clapp writes in the London Review of Books. The story involves the alleged smuggling of cigarettes and cocaine and, according to one observer Clapp quotes, department-store shoplifting. "The sheer reach of Montenegro's cartels ... stands in stark relief to the reality of Montenegro as a state," Clapp writes. "With a population of just 600,000, Europe's second youngest country uses the currency of a political bloc to which it does not belong, and aspires to become little more than a hotel economy. Its richest citizen, at least on paper, is the former prime minister of Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra. But this is misleading. More than anywhere else in Europe, and in ways that may only be comparable to Central America, the cartels in Montenegro today are indistinguishable from the state." How did this come to be? Clapp writes: "It seemed unlikely that Montenegro would emerge intact from the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The pillars of its economy—mining, shipping, tourism—were particularly vulnerable to the UN sanctions levied against Yugoslavia in 1992. But Montenegro had one advantage: two hundred miles of coast facing the Mafia-infested ports of southern Italy."