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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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September 8, 2024

On Today’s Show

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

Will a strong economy keep Democrats in power? Not necessarily, Fareed says, noting the close race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump—and the reasons to believe right-wing populism is here to stay.
 
Recent state elections in Germany, where the far right soared to new heights, reminded us that discontent and anti-elite resentment still simmer in the Western world. Immigration remains an important political issue. Trump could lose in November, Fareed says, but larger forces mean right-wing populism isn’t going anywhere.
 
After that: So far, negotiators have failed to reach a ceasefire in Gaza. What could a broader war settlement look like? Fareed talks with two former high-ranking officials—former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister and PLO representative to the UN Nasser al-Kidwa—who have released a rare joint proposal: a framework for a prospective two-state solution. The war in Gaza, they say, has left both Israelis and Palestinians tired of conflict and perhaps ready for enduring peace.
 
Then: What can America’s deadliest election tell us about our polarized present day? Fareed talks with CNN anchor Dana Bash, coauthor of the new book “America’s Deadliest Election: The Cautionary Tale of the Most Violent Election in American History.” The 1872 vote in Louisiana, which resulted in a massacre of Black men, bears some similarity to today’s disputes over voting in the US, as Bash details.
 
What’s so different about AI? Fareed talks with historian and author Yuval Noah Harari, whose forthcoming book is “Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI,” about why artificial intelligence could be more significant than other major technological developments like the printing press.
 
Finally: The Covid-19 pandemic is behind us, but disease outbreaks still warrant attention and resources. From polio in Gaza to mpox in Africa to the flu and strep throat, Fareed examines important reasons to get over our pandemic disease-prevention fatigue.

A Return to Isolation?

If Trump wins in November, European leaders might face another four years in which Washington questions the value of alliances, the depth of security commitments, and what allies have done for America lately. They also might need to ensure NATO survives without active US participation and support Ukraine without US help.
 
“To avoid the worst-case scenario, European countries and institutions must start planning now,” Phillips P. O’Brien of the University of St. Andrews and Edward Stringer of the UK think tank Policy Exchange write in Foreign Affairs. “They must be ready for a Trump presidency that could result in a U.S. withdrawal from Europe, which might go so far as to leave the continent unprotected, save for U.S. naval and air forces that could easily be redeployed elsewhere. As they face the dangers of such an eventuality, the continent’s leaders will need to grapple with many hard questions. The most urgent among them fall into three categories: how to structure European security, who should lead the effort, and what capabilities Europe must acquire. From this starting point, Europe can begin to prepare for the potential loss of the continent’s strongest defender by far.”
 
In another Foreign Affairs essay, former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice argues against America’s turn inward, a feature of the Trump years. To introduce and augment her argument, Rice contemplates historical analogies for our fraught, competitive geopolitical moment. Rice concludes that we’re not really in a second cold war, this time with China—which, as Rice writes, bears distinct differences from the Soviet Union.
 
“So if the current competition is not Cold War 2.0, then what is it?” Rice asks. “Giving in to the impulse to find historical references, if not analogies, one may find more food for thought in the imperialism of the late nineteenth century and the zero-sum economies of the interwar period. Now, as then, revisionist powers are acquiring territory through force, and the international order is breaking down. But perhaps the most striking and worrying similarity is that today, as in the previous eras, the United States is tempted to turn inward. … American leaders should remind the public that a reluctant United States has repeatedly been drawn into conflict—in 1917, 1941, and 2001. Isolation has never been the answer to the country’s security or prosperity. Then, a leader must say that the United States is well positioned to design a different future.”

NAFTA’s Bitter Fruit

The rise of populism and Washington’s turn toward protectionism have multiple causes, but deindustrialization ranks high among them. NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement signed in 1993 by Bill Clinton, is not only a vilified political object but a direct contributor to the plight of the American working class, Dan Kaufman writes in this week’s issue of The New York Times Magazine.
 
That trade agreement, others like it, and economic changes that followed from them will hang over the consequential US presidential election this November, Kaufman writes: “While deindustrialization has many causes—in a recessionary four-year period that ended in the early 1980s, a quarter of Milwaukee’s manufacturing jobs were wiped out—a central driver has been free-trade agreements with developing countries, of which NAFTA was the first. According to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, Americans without college degrees have lost nearly $2,000 a year in wages owing to trade with low-wage countries, even after accounting for cheaper consumer goods. The economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case have documented how the loss of jobs has led to falling life expectancy for working-class people: College-educated Americans can now expect to live eight years longer than those without a college degree. … The passage of NAFTA remains one of the most consequential events in recent American political and economic history. Between 1997 and 2020, more than 90,000 factories closed, partly as a result of NAFTA and similar agreements. The coming presidential election, like the previous two, is likely to be determined by three of the ‘blue wall’ states—Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania—which have all been ravaged by deindustrialization.”