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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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January 11, 2024

An Assassination and the Risk of Wider War

Will the Gaza war spill across the Middle East, as analysts have feared since it began? Signs are worrisome.
 
Recent weeks have brought troubling developments, as the Global Briefing has noted. In late December, an Israeli airstrike killed a high-ranking Iranian general in Damascus. An ISIS-claimed bombing in Iran will likely set the Middle East’s wildcard military power on edge. A US-led coalition is facing off with Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants in the Red Sea, where global shipping has been disrupted. Iran has deployed a warship. This week, Israel killed a top Hezbollah commander in southern Lebanon.
 
Of particular note, some say, was the suspected Israeli assassination of a senior Hamas leader in Beirut last Tuesday. (Israel has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility.) At The National Interest, Burcu Ozcelik wrote that Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist group and dominant Lebanese political party, will face pressure to respond to the strike on its turf.
 
Even more significantly, the assassination could portend more of the same in other countries, as Ozcelik writes and as Hussein Ibish explains further at The Atlantic.
 
Since Oct. 7, Israel has signaled as much. “This is our Munich,” Israel’s Shin Bet security agency chief Ronen Bar was recorded saying, The Times of Israel reported in early December—a reference to the global, years-long Israeli operation to find and kill those responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli team members. (That operation was the subject of Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film “Munich.”) In response to Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel will hunt down Hamas members “in every location, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Turkey, in Qatar, everyone,” Bar reportedly said, acknowledging that “it will take a few years.” In November, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant pledged that all Hamas members, including those outside Gaza, are “dead men walking,” adding that there is “no difference between a terrorist with a Kalashnikov and a terrorist in a three-piece suit.”
 
The assassination in Beirut may have marked “just the beginning of an international campaign” by Israel to kill Hamas members abroad, as Ibish puts it. If that’s the case, eyes will turn to Qatar, which is home to Hamas political leaders-in-exile, Ibish writes, surmising that last week’s killing in Beirut “suggests that the Israel-Hamas war could still easily spill over into a regional conflict or launch a string of assassinations that drag in third-party states.”

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Ecuador’s Chaos

“The images shocked the world,” Sebastián Hurtado writes for Americas Quarterly of what unfolded in Ecuador this week. “Gang members invading a TV station, police being kidnapped, university students stampeding to safety. Perhaps not since the days of Pablo Escobar has a Latin American country seen such an audacious assault on central symbols of power.”
 
Masked men stormed the set of a public TV station on Tuesday during a live broadcast. On Monday, President Daniel Noboa had declared a 60-day state of emergency after a high-profile gang leader had escaped from prison; on Wednesday, Noboa declared an “internal armed conflict” in the country, ordering security forces to “neutralize” several criminal groups. At the Wilson Center, Benjamin Gedan writes that what’s happening “sounds like Armageddon.”
 
“Ecuador is in lockdown,” The Economist wrote Wednesday, examining the country’s deterioration into “Latin America’s deadliest country.” That disturbing trend was seen clearly last August when an anti-corruption, anti-narco presidential candidate was assassinated outside a rally in the capital Quito. Known only a few years ago as an island of peace nestled between the notorious narco-producing countries Colombia and Peru, Ecuador has suffered since its ports became more significant to the international drug trade, The Economist wrote.
 
“The roots of this violence start in Colombia,” per the magazine. “Ecuador, and particularly the port at Guayaquil, became a more important hub by which Peruvian and Colombian cocaine is moved to the United States and Europe after Colombian ports tightened their security in 2009. … Ecuadorean gangs have generated cashflow by establishing a lucrative foothold in Europe, where cocaine consumption is expanding. On January 5th the mayor of Amsterdam warned that the Netherlands could become a ‘narco-state’. The busiest cocaine-trafficking route in the world today runs from Guayaquil to the port of Antwerp in Belgium, according to Chris Dalby of World of Crime, an investigative outfit based in the Netherlands.”

Can Putin Afford Ukraine?

By most accounts, the Russian economy has survived President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. Despite a US-led effort to punish Russia’s state finances and national economy with sanctions, Russian GDP is expected by some economists to grow this year. “Key sectors of Russia’s economy are adapting and in some cases completely rebounding from unprecedented international sanctions imposed over the war in Ukraine,” Bloomberg reported in November. Russia’s financial technocrats have received plaudits for successfully navigating rough waters.
 
But not all is well, Alexandra Prokopenko argues in a Foreign Affairs essay, writing that strong economic indicators are “symptomatic of overheating.” Prokopenko identifies economic problems in Russia that suggest “Putin is facing an impossible trilemma. … (H)e must fund his ongoing war against Ukraine, maintain his populace’s living standards, and safeguard macroeconomic stability.”
 
War spending has artificially propped up Russian output, Prokopenko writes. Inflation in Russia currently sits at 7%; interest rates, at 16%; and continued borrowing at that rate suggests Russians expect inflation to continue. Putin may “splash” even more government spending into the economy before the spring election, feeding the sugar high even further. Prokopenko’s broader point: “With the war unlikely to end soon, the financial and economic costs will mount and are likely to bite Russia several years from now. This process could be speeded by a major global recession or a slowdown of the Chinese economy, which would hit Russia hard because of its heavy dependence on revenues from commodities exports. The specter of a bitter economic hangover looms large unless a new and sustainable Russian economic model emerges.”