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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 18, 2024

What Will Trump Deliver

for His Supporters?

Rural America supports Donald Trump strongly. Twice, the president-elect has won a national election largely by running up the score in rural counties in battleground states. They were Republican red before, but they turned even redder with Trump on the ballot.
 
Clearly, Trump has campaigned on themes that resonate: cultural conservatism, waging war on the globalization that ate into America’s manufacturing base, and sticking it to left-leaning urbanites and the coastal-dominated media. But when it comes to Trump’s policies, The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein warns that rural Americans could get the short end, writing: “Agricultural producers could face worse losses than any other economic sector from Trump’s plans to impose sweeping tariffs on imports and to undertake what he frequently has called ‘the largest domestic deportation operation’ of undocumented immigrants ‘in American history.’ Hospitals and other health providers in rural areas could face the greatest strain from proposals Trump has embraced to slash spending on Medicaid, which provides coverage to a greater share of adults in smaller communities than in large metropolitan areas. And small-town public schools would likely be destabilized even more than urban school districts if Trump succeeds in his pledge to expand ‘school choice’ by providing parents with vouchers to send their kids to private schools.”
 
What will that mean for Trump, politically? “Resistance to such measures in deep-red rural areas could represent one of the few obstacles Trump would face from a GOP-controlled Congress over implementing his agenda,” Brownstein writes. “Still, the most likely scenario is that elected Republicans who represent rural areas will ultimately fall in line with Trump’s blueprint.” Antipathy toward the Democratic Party appears to run deep in many red counties, Brownstein notes, so the GOP may not suffer as much as one might expect.

A New Syria

Now that rebels have ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad, Syria must remake itself. How? And what will it become?
 
The main rebel group that is now forming a government and seeking international legitimacy—Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS)—is just one of Syria’s factions, as The Economist has noted. Others include Turkish-backed rebels in Syria’s north and northwest and US-backed, mostly-Kurdish rebels in Syria’s northeast. Diving deeper into the panoply of groups in his This Week in Northern Syria newsletter, Alexander McKeever adds to that list a coalition of southern groups that reconciled with the Assad regime in 2018. “[T]he country remains divided between four primary actors,” McKeever writes, “three of which are nominally allied under a broad opposition umbrella.” (There are also pockets of ISIS and suspected sleeper cells.)
 
Despite the welcome news of Assad’s fall, James Corera writes for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s The Strategist blog, Syria might well succumb to fundamentalist Islamic rule or become a patchwork of fiefdoms. “[C]haos,” Corera writes, “is likely to follow” the collapse of Assad and the loss suffered by his Russian and Iranian patrons. As Fareed has pointed out, Syria risks devolving into civil war—as Iraq did after US-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003. Discussing the “jigsaw puzzle” of Syria’s territorial control on Sunday’s GPS, Fareed heard from veteran former US diplomat Richard Haass that it’s reminiscent of the Balkans.
 
The military commander of HTS tells The Economist that the new government will respect minorities—a key pledge, given the vicious dangers of sectarianism in a fragile country. He also says Syria’s rebel groups must be folded under control of the state. Given the different interests at play, that could be difficult. “There is no denying that many forces are conspiring to drag the country into further bloodshed,” The Economist writes. “Syria is a mosaic of peoples and faiths carved out of the Ottoman empire. They have never lived side by side in a stable democracy.”
 
To The Economist, “[t]he essential condition for Syria to be stable is that it needs a tolerant and inclusive government. The hard-learned lesson from the years of war is that no single group can dominate without resorting to repression.” Writing for Project Syndicate, Charles A. Kupchan and Sinan Ülgen argue Syria needs “an inclusive political transition” that brings together the various groups that hold territory—and “a new social contract that provides Syrians adequate levels of security and economic opportunity.”
 
The New Yorker’s Robin Wright notes uncertainty over the path toward such an outcome: “For the rest of the world, U.N. Resolution 2254 remains the legal premise for a transition. It calls for a new constitution and free elections stretched over eighteen months. But it was written nine years ago. Time is moving much faster now in a country where the economy is collapsing and millions have been displaced or forced into exile. ‘We should accept instability, because it is part of the process,’ Sawsan Abou Zainedin, who leads Madaniya, an umbrella organization for two hundred Syrian civil-society groups, said. ‘We’re all standing on good will, but we can’t stand on good will for long.’”
 
Regardless, Syria’s fate likely won’t become clear immediately, Collin Meisel writes for West Point’s Modern War Institute: “The truth is, we don’t know what the future holds for Syria. What we do know is that political events often have effects that unfold across many years, even decades, sometimes boomeranging in ways that are difficult to anticipate at the outset.”

Charting Syria’s Future

On Sunday’s GPS, Fareed discussed what Assad’s fall could mean for Syria with Richard Haass, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, and veteran journalist and author Kim Ghattas.

How Israel Became the Middle East’s New Superpower

In part two of their conversation, Haass and Ghattas talked with Fareed about Israel’s new role in the region after Assad’s ouster in Syria.

What China Is Learning From Ukraine’s Battlefields

Ukraine has offered a deadly laboratory in which military tactics—and especially various kinds of weaponry—are being tested. It has seen the rise in prestige of Javelin anti-tank missiles, the diminution of the tank itself, and the arrival of cheap drones as important weapons.
 
Russia and the West aren’t the only global powers learning from this grisly, real-time experiment. At Defense One, Tye Graham and Peter W. Singer write that China’s military is learning and implementing similar Ukraine-inspired adaptations. The Ukraine war’s “lessons are being methodically analyzed and adapted to reshape the PLA’s [Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s] own approach to conflict—whether in Taiwan, the Himalayas, or beyond,” they write. China is developing new kinds of drones, including cost-effective ones “for saturation attacks” and coordinated targeting of enemy air defenses, as well as first-person-view drones that have proven effective in Ukraine. China is also learning from Russia’s use of electronic warfare for “countering advanced Western systems” and has rolled out some so-called “slat armor” and “cope cages” on light tanks, which can deflect drone attacks.
 
“To be sure, questions remain about the PLA’s ability to operationalize these innovations effectively, particularly under the constraints of centralized command structures and the limited real-world testing of new tactics,” Graham and Singer write. “Yet they do indicate a serious intent to learn from others’ wars, the historic hallmark of successful military change programs.”