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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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February 9, 2024

Fareed: The Border Compromise Would’ve Helped—a Lot

This week, congressional Republicans nixed a Senate compromise on immigration policy, criticizing the deal and claiming President Joe Biden should act more aggressively on his own to deter illegal immigration. That’s unfortunate, Fareed writes for CNN Opinion, arguing the bill would’ve gone a long way toward fixing a broken US asylum system.

Despite what some Republicans claim, Fareed writes, the problem with US immigration is the law itself. Currently, migrants cross the border, make contact with US law enforcement, and claim asylum. They can then remain in the US while their cases are adjudicated by a severely backlogged court system. The Senate compromise included provisions to raise the bar for claiming asylum and to allow the president to deny entry, if a certain number of daily irregular border crossings was met.

Former President Donald Trump opposed the bill and lobbied GOP lawmakers against it. Fareed argues that their criticism was disingenuous, writing: “The most obvious proof that Trump realizes that this bill would give the administration powerful tools to address this crisis is that he is so dead set that it should not pass. Were it to pass, it might well solve large parts of the border problem—which would not serve him politically. He wrote on social media, ‘This Bill is a great gift to the Democrats.’ The rest of the West is facing a similar challenge and is grappling with how to adjust immigration and asylum laws. Many countries have taken significant steps. Yet in America, one of its major political parties is determined to inflame the crisis rather than douse it, fiddling while the country burns, hoping that at least they can inherit the smoldering ruins.”

Israel’s Forever War?

While Israel and Hamas negotiate, through American and Qatari mediators, on a potential deal to release hostages and cease hostilities in Gaza, commentators wonder what will happen in Gaza the day after the war.

The US has reportedly pushed an ambitious plan to create a Palestinian state and arrange for Arab security assistance to Israel. Israeli defense chief Yoav Gallant has offered a plan that would see Israel maintain security control of Gaza while a multinational force helps transition governing responsibility to local Palestinians. Rob Geist Pinfold writes for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a British defense think tank: “Gallant’s vision for Gaza appears strikingly similar to the status quo in the West Bank, where Israel has long controlled the borders and key strategic points while outsourcing civilian governance to the Palestinian Authority.”

The West Bank analogy is also drawn by Yaakov Katz, who writes in a Newsweek op-ed that while the war in Gaza might end, the fighting likely will not. The West Bank isn’t at war, but Israeli raids are common there, Katz points out, writing that in the current Gaza war, “(w)hat Israel has essentially done is create the conditions needed to be able to continue to operate in the Gaza Strip in the weeks, months, and years ahead, just as the IDF has been doing since 2002 in the West Bank.”

In a Foreign Affairs essay, Colin P. Clarke warns that Israel could stumble into a long counterinsurgency operation reminiscent of America’s post-9/11 wars. Clarke writes: “(I)f Israel adopts a counterinsurgency approach, months could easily turn into years. Even without deliberately making that choice, Israel could find itself backing into it. That is what happened to the United States in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where mission creep allowed limited objectives to give way to murkier, more ambitious goals. For example, in Afghanistan, the United States started the war intending to destroy al Qaeda but eventually found itself trying to do nation building. In the end, Washington failed to achieve either outcome. The morass facing Israel in Gaza today could turn out the same way—or come to resemble what Israel itself encountered in southern Lebanon, when a campaign that began in 1982 with the goal of eliminating fighters from the Palestine Liberation Organization stretched on for nearly two decades, with Israel ultimately withdrawing unceremoniously in 2000 without removing the threat posed by Palestinian militants. To boot, Israel’s nearly two-decade occupation of Lebanon helped give rise to a new foe, Lebanese Hezbollah, a threat the Israelis are still grappling with today.”

Don’t Forget Syria

Syria’s long-running civil war fell out of international headlines, as President Bashar al-Assad has solidified control of his country in recent years. But in a New York Times guest opinion essay, Paulo Pinheiro, Hanny Megally and Lynn Welchman write of the situation in Syria now: “(A) steep escalation of violence that has forced the flight of tens of thousands more people in what remains the world’s largest displacement crisis is taking place largely unnoticed outside the region. … Syrian government and Russian forces are fighting armed opposition groups in the northwest; ISIS is stepping up its attacks across the country; Turkey is attacking Kurdish-led forces in the northeast; the Kurdish-led forces are fighting local tribes; and the United States and Israel are hitting back against forces linked to Iran.”

It’s … Not the Economy, Stupid?

Bill Clinton adviser James Carville famously summed up US politics by saying, “It’s the economy, stupid.” That may no longer be the case, Cullen S. Hendrix wrote recently for the Peterson Institute of International Economics.

As partisanship becomes more intense, politicians emphasize the economy less, focusing instead on issues like abortion and gun control that rally their political bases, Hendrix writes. (That’s bad for everyone, Hendrix argues, as there’s now less electoral incentive for politicians to advance sound and successful economic policies.)

Hendrix observes: “Several data points suggest economic voting—and economic evaluations of presidential approval in the United States—are in decline and have been for at least a decade. First, presidential approval no longer tracks gas prices. … Between 2011 and 2022, the correlation was, if anything, weakly positive … Second, Donald Trump became the first president not to be re-elected despite holding office during broadly prosperous times. Over the past 60 years, the one-term presidents (Ford, Carter, and Bush I) had all presided over challenging economies, especially when measured by ‘kitchen table’ indicators like unemployment or inflation.”