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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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March 14, 2024

US House to TikTok: 🙅‍♀️

Ban TikTok?!?!? Lol yes, says the US House of Representatives.

On Wednesday the House passed a bill to require ByteDance, the Chinese social-media giant that owns TikTok, to either sell the app or stop operating it in the US. (The Washington Post’s Aaron Gregg and Cristiano Lima-Strong explain succinctly what the bill would do and what might come next. The legislation would ban distribution within the US of any application “controlled” by a “foreign adversary”—in this case, China.)

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board calls the bill a tough message to China, noting that “TikTok hoovers up personal data that Beijing could use for political-influence campaigns.” The Post’s editorial board disagrees, arguing that “threatening a one-off ban against a tech firm, arbitrarily overriding the government’s existing process for assessing foreign corporate threats, is the wrong way” to address privacy concerns and force TikTok to separate from ByteDance, if that’s the end goal. Last spring, Fareed argued against banning TikTok because of its Chinese ownership but for regulating the app because of “just how scarily addictive it is,” particularly for young people, plus the ominous privacy-related issue of collecting data on teens.

As for where this is heading, The Economist notes a murky future for the just-passed House bill. Former US President Donald Trump, who attempted to enact a similar policy through an executive order as president, now opposes it, and Republican senators could follow his lead, the magazine notes. Court challenges could emerge based on free speech; China’s government could oppose a TikTok sale. Ownership aside, the magazine points out: “In less than a decade a Chinese-linked TikTok has managed to upend the social-media business in America and beyond. An untethered one would keep being disruptive—if it is allowed to exist.”

Trade: Front and Center, Again

The politics of trade will soon return with force, according to various recent analyses. At The New York Times, Keith Bradsher reported this week that “China’s factory exports are powering ahead faster than almost anyone expected, putting jobs around the world in jeopardy and setting off a backlash that is gaining momentum.” The US and EU are eyeing new tariffs in response, Bradsher wrote.

Most prominent in this new wave, some say, will be Chinese-made electric vehicles. China’s EV sector has grown massively: Chinese automaker BYD overtook Tesla as the world’s largest EV seller in the fourth quarter of last year, and China overtook Japan as the world’s largest auto exporter, per yearly data on 2023.

At Foreign Policy, Howard W. French writes: “Despite a flourish of attention during the Trump administration, it has been a while since international trade was a front and center agenda issue in international relations. But the challenge that BYD embodies may soon bring trade ragingly and lastingly back to the foreground. By no means is BYD the whole story, but the company … is at the center of a thorny and potentially existential new challenge that rising sectors of China’s industry pose to their rich world competitors.”

The Shame of Al-Hol

The al-Hol camp in eastern Syria houses tens of thousands of detainees, wrangled there as the ISIS caliphate collapsed. Some are former ISIS members and actively support its violent, fundamentalist ideology. Others, as Anand Gopal writes in a feature on al-Hol in the current issue of The New Yorker, are there “by association”: wives and children of ISIS fighters, for instance, grouped in with the rest for want of a judicial system to weigh their affiliations.

Of the children growing up there, Gopal writes: “For many … the realm beyond the camp fence is mysterious, and possibly dangerous. I spoke to dozens of children, and they knew next to nothing about life outside Al-Hol. Many had not heard of Syria, Iraq, America, or even television. (When Abu Hassan, the ISIS commander [with whom Gopal spoke for the feature], smuggled in a flat-screen television, his daughter exclaimed, ‘Look how big that phone is!’) I met Aisha, a seven-year-old, who explained that she was from Aleppo, but when I asked her what Aleppo was she drew a blank. She didn’t know why she was in the camp, and her days consisted of getting in line early to use the bathroom and of avoiding security guards, whom she believed would shoot if she got close. … Another child boasted that she’d once seen ‘moving drawings,’ which I guessed was a cartoon, and she queried where she might see more. I asked a group of children if they’d ever seen a clown; one child said yes, but I realized that he was talking about a smuggler—in Arabic, the words sound similar. … I asked the children what they thought lay beyond the fence. Among the answers I received: ‘nothing,’ ‘hungry people,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘soldiers,’ ‘stairs,’ ‘houses,’ ‘gardens,’ ‘infidels,’ ‘my father.’”

How Close Have We Come to Nuclear War in Ukraine?

Closer than anyone would hope, according to CNN Anchor and Chief National Security Analyst Jim Sciutto. On Sunday’s GPS, Sciutto spoke with Fareed about his new book, “The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War,” in which he writes that senior US officials took very seriously the possibility that Russia would use a nuclear weapon in its war on Ukraine.

Poland’s Messy Re-Liberalization

What happens when centrists retake power, after eight years of a right-leaning populist government that was accused of subverting institutions and the rule of law?

Poland is finding out. After October elections, Donald Tusk returned in December to the office of Polish prime minister, following a populist Law and Justice (PiS) government that had butted heads with the EU over judicial independence in particular. In January, The Economist outlined a broad agenda by Tusk and his government to undo PiS reforms, from state media (Poland’s state TV channel had become “little more than a propaganda outfit for PiS,” the magazine wrote) to government appointments and clashes with a constitutional court “stacked with PiS loyalists.”

In a Foreign Affairs essay, Jaroslaw Kuisz and Karolina Wigura write: “Tusk’s forceful approach has also stirred mixed feelings among many who had expected Poland to easily revive its democracy overnight. … Indeed, it may be difficult for outsiders to understand the legal battles taking place over literally every state institution. But the intensity of these fights speaks to how much damage Law and Justice did to Poland’s democratic institutions while in power, and to populism’s continued popularity in Poland and beyond. Today’s fight to restore democracy in Poland is exactly that—a fight—and it requires the resolute methods that Tusk is employing if democracy is to have any chance of prevailing.”