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.
May 3, 2023
|
|
|
A Complicated Picture of Taliban Rule |
Having seized power in 2021, the Taliban both are and are not as awful as the international community expected them to be, The Economist writes. On one hand, there is widespread hunger, and “Afghanistan is now the only country where it is illegal to be female and study above secondary-school level, or to work in most professions.” The magazine tells of middle-class women driven into prostitution.
“Yet the Islamists are in some ways surpassing the—admittedly low—expectations for their rule,” the magazine writes, noting that “the threat of Afghanistan-launched terrorism has not increased” as the Taliban feuds with the local ISIS branch. Harsh corporal punishments mean laws are followed, and corruption seems to be down.
The international community doesn’t know quite what to do about the Taliban government or which actors in Afghanistan can exert leverage over it, as Centre on Armed Groups Co-Director Ashley Jackson noted in a recent panel discussion hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Meanwhile, the United Nations mission in Afghanistan faces a conundrum, Lynne O’Donnell writes in a Foreign Policy column: “Barred by Taliban decree from abiding by the U.N. Charter yet obliged to alleviate the terrible suffering of Afghanistan’s people, the U.N. must make a choice between integrity and collaboration. If it stays, it risks becoming a tool of the Taliban, as it was in the 1990s, operating contrary to its mandate while sending a message to repressive regimes everywhere that they can do as they wish without consequence. If it calls an end to its Afghanistan mission, reasoning that it cannot function according to its fundamental principle of nondiscrimination, it will abandon the country’s 40 million people to a violent, lawless gang of drug-dealing misogynists.”
|
|
|
Can China Handle Its Aging Population? |
As the Global Briefing has noted before, China faces a big, looming problem: a demographic gap after decades of population control under the infamous “one-child” policy. As the years pass, many Chinese citizens will advance into old age while the country will have relatively few young, working-age people to sustain the economy, fund social and health programs and care for elderly relatives themselves. A recent Nikkei Asia feature warned China could see a “Japan-style lost decade” of economic stagnation, as a result.
Economics aside, Carl Minzner writes in a Foreign Affairs essay that China’s government is ill-equipped to craft and execute policies to deal with the challenge. Minzner cites urban–rural inequality, connected with China’s system of registering citizens and offering social benefits by location, that extends to elderly citizens; the concentration of power in leader Xi Jinping, which Minzner sees as diminishing the role of technocrats who can “carry out long-term planning, particularly in rural China”; and government-fostered “ethnonationalism” that could prevent an influx of labor from other countries.
“One might think China’s rulers more capable of confronting such risks and ramming through necessary reforms than their democratic counterparts, given Beijing’s powerful repressive apparatus,” Minzner writes. Instead, “China’s rapidly aging population and increasingly rigid, autocratic political system will severely hobble the country as it stumbles toward the middle of the twenty-first century.” |
|
|
Where Will Lula Steer Latin America? |
Now that the leftist former president is back in office, having defeated incumbent Jair Bolsonaro last fall to reclaim Brazil’s presidency, the current issue of Americas Quarterly asks what the return of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known commonly as Lula) might mean for Latin America.
For one thing, Brazil’s foreign policy is turning abruptly. Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira tells editor-in-chief Brian Winter we can expect a multilateralist, reengaged Brazil that declines to take sides in global superpower politics. As many of Latin America’s current national leaders are relatively new to the world stage, Oliver Stuenkel writes, Lula has a larger opportunity as “the region’s only diplomatic heavy hitter and the most globally visible Latin American political leader of his generation.” On top of that, the region has seen a tide of leftist leaders, much more similar to Lula than to Bolsonaro, take office in recent years.
“(T)he foreign policy legacy of Lula’s third term is likely to be less about Latin America and more about general reengagement after the Bolsonaro years,” Stuenkel writes. “That means, specifically, a possible ratification of the trade deal with the European Union, a possible trade deal with China, and the emergence of Brazil as a global climate superpower—but perhaps not a return to the heady talk of a more unified, ascendant Latin America.” |
|
|
As The Economist wrote recently, expert views on artificial intelligence are divided: Some say we shouldn’t worry so much about smarter computers wrecking the world; others keep a closer eye on doomsday. As Cade Metz writes for The New York Times, Geoffrey Hinton falls in the latter category.
A pioneer in the architecture of artificial-intelligence systems, Hinton is now leaving Google and warning of danger. “A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work,” Metz writes. Hinton tells Metz: “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.” In an interview with the MIT Technology Review’s Will Douglas Heaven, Hinton observes: “These things are totally different from us. … Sometimes I think it’s as if aliens had landed and people haven’t realized because they speak very good English.”
|
|
|
|
