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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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December 3, 2023

On Today’s Show

On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET:

The passing at 100 of Henry Kissinger, the most consequential US diplomat, has prompted a wave of retrospectives. Having known Kissinger well, Fareed offers his own, identifying an organizing principle that drove Kissinger’s foreign policies: a preference for order.

Kissinger “grew up in Germany as Hitler came to power and watched what was perhaps the most advanced and ‘civilized’ nation in the world descend into barbarism and mass murder,” Fareed says. “He developed a lifelong obsession with order. He was too suspicious of democracy and human rights, but it was because he had seen demagogues like Hitler rise to power through elections. He often remarked, sometimes attributing it to Goethe, that between order and justice he would choose order, because once chaos reigns, there is no possibility for justice. … From start to finish, over a century, Henry Kissinger’s abiding fear was that disruptive forces once set in motion could easily rip off the thin veneer of civilization and stability, pushing the world into the abyss—like the one in which he came of age.”

After that: What lies ahead in the Israel–Hamas war? Who is to blame for Israel’s apparent security failures before and on Oct. 7? Fareed talks with retired Israel Defense Forces Col. Miri Eisin, managing director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism.

Then: the terrible suffering in Gaza. Fareed talks with British–Palestinian plastic and reconstructive surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a founding board member of the International Network for Aid, Relief and Assistance, who traveled from London to operate on patients in Gaza during this war.

What can we learn from public opinion in Gaza, the West Bank, and the broader Arab world as this war continues? Fareed asks Amaney Jamal, dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and co-director of Princeton’s Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice Workshop on Arab Political Development.

Finally: unpacking the life and legacy of Henry Kissinger with the statesman’s official biographer. Fareed talks with historian and author Niall Ferguson, author of “Kissinger 1923–1968: The Idealist.”

In the West Bank, Troubling

Signs Persist

The fighting in Gaza has been horrific, but the situation in the West Bank isn’t good either. As the Global Briefing has noted, violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians rose after Oct. 7, with farmers and shepherds reporting threats and attacks intended to drive them from their land. In a New York Review of Books essay, David Shulman writes of extremist settlers—many of them young; Shulman encounters a group and guesses the oldest may be 20—who harbor a rigid, ideological commitment to seizing the land. One insists to Shulman it was promised to Jews by God.
 
Shulman describes these settlers as “terrifying thugs who can invade villages and hamlets at any moment (with a certain preference for late at night). They are heavily armed with M16 rifles, pistols, butcher knives, and often all three, and they take obvious pleasure in causing pain: beating people; breaking anything breakable; stealing; torching cars and homes; destroying food, water tanks, and solar panels; and shooting in the air—and sometimes not in the air. They have a standard formula that has been repeated in village after village: ‘You have twenty-four hours to leave. If you don’t, we’ll be back to kill all of you.’”
 
As for Palestinians in the West Bank, the Israeli news site Ynet sees growing support for Hamas, in evidence among crowds gathered to greet Palestinian prisoners released by Israel during the recent pause in fighting. The outlet relays one scene: “Many (Palestinians who had gathered) held green Hamas flags and chanted pro-Hamas slogans as they embraced the freed Palestinian prisoners. The images of the large, young, vocal crowds have concerned the Palestinian Authority as it battles to stay relevant.”

Is the Far Right Now Mainstream?

That has been an open question since the electoral successes of Donald Trump, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Brazilian former President Jair Bolsonaro, and others. Further discussion has been spurred by vote results in the Netherlands, where far-right politician Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) won the most legislative seats (a projected 37 out of 150) on Nov. 22. Wilders has been the most-prominent far-right Dutch populist off and on for more than a decade, rising to prominence with sharp anti-Islam rhetoric.
 
Wilders “will still struggle to form a coalition government and to become prime minister” of the Netherlands, writes Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman. But “(h)is success is part of a clear Europe-wide pattern. Political groups that were once dismissed as fringe far-right parties are gaining popularity—and in some places power.” Rachman cites Hungary, Italy, Slovakia, and Sweden. “The far right is also gaining ground in Germany and France. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) now regularly tops 20 per cent support in the polls, making it the second most popular party in Germany. On a recent trip to London, François Hollande, the former French president, told me that in his country ‘the far right have devoured the traditional right’. Polls suggest (far-right politician) Marine Le Pen may finally win the French presidency in 2027.”
 
In some cases, center-right parties now imitate their far-right competititors. Of the Dutch election, Alexander Clarkson writes for the World Politics Review: “In addition to emulating far-right rhetoric over migration, center-right and even some liberal leaders also echoed the far-right’s posture toward supposedly ‘woke’ issues involving gender and culture. In such an environment, much of what once defined the PVV (Wilders’ Dutch party) as radical and dangerous had become mainstream political discourse.”
 
The trend cuts both ways. As Caroline de Guyter writes for Foreign Policy, Wilders and other far-right European political leaders no longer seem so enamored of leaving the European Union, heeding lessons from Brexit and softening their stances.
 
As for why far-right support has become so prevalent, at Foreign Policy in Focus, John Feffer points to economic inequality, suggesting the structural driver of far-right affinity is well in place. Feffer writes: “The desire for profound change is surely understandable. The conditions that generated victories for the far right that I describe in my 2021 book Right Around the World have not changed in any substantial way. Economic globalization, after all, continues to benefit the few and burden the many. … Note that the far right has prospered in precisely the countries that have experienced this rising income inequality: Donald Trump in the United States, Narendra Modi in India, and Vladimir Putin in Russia, as well as Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and now Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.”

The ‘Beginning of the End’ of Myanmar’s Junta?

After recent victories, that’s what the leader of one Myanmar anti-regime resistance army has promised. “Almost three years on from its bloody coup, Myanmar’s military junta is facing the biggest threat to its hold on power as it fights wars on multiple fronts across the Southeast Asian nation,” Helen Regan, Salai TZ, Angus Watson and Paula Hancocks report for CNN.
 
Last month, a resistance-army leader claimed allied groups had captured more than 150 military outposts. “The launch of an unprecedented coordinated offensive last month by three key ethnic armies has had a contagion effect, leading to a wave of concurrent attacks around the country by allied and affiliated ethnic resistance organizations and militias, known as people's defense forces,” Zachary Abuza writes in a Nikkei Asia op-ed, suggesting the international community should start considering what will come next in Myanmar. “While the regime’s defeat is not a given, it is now possible to start to imagine a return to true civilian rule.”
 
For opponents of the ruling military junta—which seized power in a February 2021 coup, 10 years after Myanmar began transitioning to civilian rule in 2011—victory can’t come swiftly enough. In a London Review of Books essay, Francis Wade nods to reports of horrific torture by the regime and notes a general strike that saw segments of society protest the junta’s rule en masse. “The cruelty and neglect of successive juntas caused great hardship, but it also made Myanmar’s 55 million inhabitants less dependent on the state,” Wade writes. “The social and economic infrastructure the resistance now relies on filled that gap.”

President Haley?

Could Nikki Haley pull it off? Former President Donald Trump remains the clear frontrunner in Republicans’ 2024 presidential primary, but as the field has shrunk, Haley has drawn attention.
 
The former South Carolina governor, who served as Trump’s ambassador to the UN, trails the former president by dozens of percentage points in key early-primary states. But this week Haley received an endorsement from the influential Koch network of conservative pressure groups, and Financial Times columnist Edward Luce sees a glimmer of possibility that Haley could give US voters a different choice besides Trump and President Joe Biden, both of whom are unpopular.
 
“(T)he odds against a Haley upset (in the Republican primary) are not as remote as they seem,” Luce writes. “Haley … has deftly threaded the needle between the Maga base and ‘Never Trump’ voters. In the first Republican debate, she raised her hand when candidates were asked if they would back Trump were he to be the nominee. She also said she would be inclined to pardon Trump if she became president. This lends a veneer of plausibility to her claim that she would be Trumpian without the chaos.”