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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 19, 2025

On Today’s Show

On GPS, at 10 a.m. ET:

As the long-awaited Gaza ceasefire agreement takes effect, Fareed brings viewers the latest on fast-moving events in the Middle East.

Assessing the current status and future prospects of this phased truce, Fareed hears from Times of Israel senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur.

Amid cautious optimism and concerns that the ceasefire could collapse, Fareed hears a Palestinian perspective from Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian politician and legislator.

Then: Trump 2.0 begins tomorrow, as the president-elect is inaugurated in Washington for the second time. What can we expect in terms of economic and foreign policy? Fareed talks with the Hoover Institution’s Niall Ferguson about Trump’s likely agenda.

Lessons for the US Under Trump 2.0, Courtesy of Brazil

Brazil faced its own version of Jan. 6, when supporters of electorally defeated President Jair Bolsonaro stormed federal buildings in the capital Brasilia in January 2023. The victorious President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) soon began his second presidential tenure with Brazil’s democratic health in question.
 
Two years later, Omar G. Encarnación writes for Foreign Affairs that Brazil’s democratic institutions, which Bolsonaro had besieged politically during his time in power, have held up.

“There are many reasons why political institutions in Brazil were able to respond to democratic threats with greater resolve and efficiency than their counterparts in the United States,” Encarnación writes. “But one explanation towers above the rest: the need to protect democracy is felt much more deeply. In the United States, a broad swath of voters and politicians appear unconcerned by the threat that a caudillista [strongman-like] leader poses to democracy. But in Brazil there is a keen sense of what it means for a country to lose its democracy. Between 1964 and 1985, the country endured a military dictatorship. The collective memory of that brutal regime has made it difficult for Bolsonaro to stage a political comeback. It has motivated politicians and lawmakers to make it an urgent priority to uphold and strengthen democratic institutions and norms. Just as important, if not more so, has been the robust civic response to Bolsonaro’s democratic threats and the possibility of his comeback. It stands in striking contrast to the tepid interest of the American public, during the 2024 election campaign, about the threat to democracy posed by Trump’s return to power.”

Divided Europe?

“It wasn’t meant to be this way,” Isaac Stanley-Becker writes in a New York Times guest opinion essay.
 
“When I crossed a bridge spanning the Rhine last year, a checkpoint blocked the route between France and Germany, on the Pont de l’Europe,” Stanley-Becker writes. “Borders are closing in Europe, for reasons ranging from ongoing crises in Eastern Europe and the Middle East to increasing migratory pressures and the risk of terrorist infiltration. France cites ‘threats to public policy, public order.’ Germany names ‘the global security situation.’ Austria and the Netherlands point to ‘irregular migration’ and Italy to the influx ‘along the Mediterranean route and the Balkan route.’”
 
The Schengen Area, through which European residents can travel without visas or passport checks, is at the heart of Europe’s identity as a supranational bloc. But extra-European immigration and various security threats are, in Stanley-Becker’s telling, undoing the project at its foundations. “Schengen once symbolized liberal internationalism, a landmark of the European unity built after World War II. Today it’s a symbol of Europe’s migration crisis—a crisis driving the backlash against globalization and the ascendance of illiberalism.”
 
The Economist sees other fundamental problems. “Europe’s divisions were once simple,” the magazine writes. “Fiscal policy and sunshine? That was a north-south carve-up: grey, abstemious north; sparkling, spendthrift south. Migration and wealth? Newcomers were mostly tolerated in the rich west and despised in the poor east.” Now, new dividing lines have emerged: Large and small countries will face different challenges and incentives when dealing with American tariff threats and navigating relationships with China. Countries in the east are more nervous about Russian aggression, which may lead them to reject retaliatory tariffs against Trump’s US.
 
Domestic politics in important countries have muddied the situation further. “Germany will be consumed by an election until late February, with the likely result another constrained centrist coalition,” The Economist writes. “In France Emmanuel Macron is struggling to form a stable government. … [M]any of the EU’s problems touch upon matters at the heart of national politics: security, the state’s role and taxation. … For Europe, this will be a year of crisis management.”