View this email in your browser 

Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here.

April 24, 2025

Will Trump ‘Move On’

From Ukraine Talks?

Having boasted improbably that he could end the Russia–Ukraine war in a day, US President Donald Trump appears nearly ready to give up.
 
The US president has arrived at this moment after two months of stalled negotiations. The second Trump administration began its foray into Ukraine peacemaking by opening talks with Russia in February in Saudi Arabia. A month later, on a phone call between the US and Russian leaders, President Vladimir Putin avoided saying an outright “no” to a US proposal for a 30-day ceasefire, offering instead a temporary halt to energy-infrastructure attacks. Having seen no breakthrough yet, last Friday US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that the Trump administration needed to determine quickly if a deal is possible—and, if not, “move on.”
 
This crisis point comes as the Trump administration’s ultimate, proposed peace solution is beginning to come into focus.
 
Last week, the Trump administration said it was ready to recognize Russian control of Crimea, which Moscow seized from Kyiv in 2014. Axios’ Barak Ravid reported more details of a US peace proposal, outlined by unnamed sources. Those include a promise that Ukraine will not join NATO, the lifting of anti-Russia sanctions imposed since 2014, the return of some territory in Kharkiv Oblast to Ukraine, and a vague “robust security guarantee” for Kyiv from Western allies. As The Guardian’s Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer write, the reported proposal would mostly freeze lines of control.
 
That, some say, is much closer to what Russia has sought. Kyiv has insisted that without concrete security guarantees—and help obtaining weapons—it will be vulnerable to future Russian aggression. Russia has sought a neutral, demilitarized Ukraine and control of the Ukrainian land it has claimed. Trump has taken to social media to criticize Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for refusing to recognize Russian ownership of Crimea and Putin for continuing attacks.
 
To critics, this is more evidence of Trump caving to Putin. In an editorial, The Guardian argues Trump covets a US rapprochement with Russia more than he cares about Ukraine’s fate.
 
“Putin and his small team at the Kremlin have obviously succeeded in dragging Trump’s inexperienced negotiator, Steve Witkoff, down a rabbit hole of complex conditionalities and impossible demands,” former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt writes in a Kyiv Independent op-ed. Putin seems to know, as many do, that Trump is susceptible to flattery, Bildt writes—and flattery seems to be working. Europe, meanwhile, “holds a trump card,” Bildt writes. “If it can muster the political will, it is fully capable of preventing a shameful Munich-style betrayal of Ukraine. European leaders must make clear that they will proceed with their plans to support Ukraine’s defense and sovereignty no matter what. In theory, Trump himself could change course by applying serious pressure on Putin and stepping up support for Ukraine. If that were to happen, he might then achieve the ceasefire that he seeks. Otherwise, he will continue to fail—as Putin and his cronies laugh at him behind his back.”
 
It’s not entirely clear what will happen to US military and intelligence support for Kyiv, if a peace deal is not reached. Commentators have noted, however, Trump’s past hostility toward Zelensky and congressional Republicans’ opposition to extending aid last year. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Michael Allen, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, writes that if Trump cuts US support for Kyiv precipitously, Ukraine could become “Trump’s Afghanistan.”
 
“Mr. Trump shouldn’t repeat President [Joe] Biden’s mistakes,” Allen argues. “An agreement that involves zeroing out U.S. military assistance smacks of Mr. Biden’s willful blindness in withdrawing from Afghanistan. … The Afghan government wasn’t ready then, and Europe isn’t ready now, especially given Russia’s increasing might.”

The Supreme Court Speaks Up

Last weekend, a middle-of-the-night Supreme Court ruling brought another plot point in Trump’s rolling showdown with US courts—concerning, in particular, the administration’s controversial attempts to deport undocumented Venezuelan immigrants under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.
 
“In a rare overnight order handed down by the Supreme Court early Saturday morning, a majority of justices blocked the Trump administration from deporting a group of immigrants in Texas,” CNN’s John Fritze and Devan Cole reported. “The court’s brief order did not explain its reasoning. The court ordered the Trump administration to respond to the emergency appeal ‘as soon as possible,’ which it did later Saturday. In the meantime, the court said, ‘The government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court.’”
 
That was the clearest and most authoritative court order yet declaring that the administration must stop—for now—using the 1798 law to justify deportations. The administration has been chided in court for resisting previous orders concerning Venezuelans deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, including a judge’s verbal order to return deportation flights to the US. It has also faced criticism for its resistance to working to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an undocumented Salvadoran immigrant who was sent to the notorious Salvadoran prison despite a 2019 ruling barring his deportation to El Salvador.
 
“Now, finally, clarity plus backbone,” writes The New Yorker’s Ruth Marcus. “What happened? In all likelihood, the Trump Administration’s behavior became too much for the Court to ignore—that is, with the exception of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who dissented. … The Justices, most of them, must now understand: we are not dealing with an Administration that deserves the benefit of the doubt. And so, when A.C.L.U. lawyers raced to the high court with an emergency petition indicating that another group of Venezuelan migrants was receiving the scantiest semblance of due process—notices of removal in English only, with no information about how to contest designations as ‘enemy aliens’ and no suggestion that there was any opportunity for judicial review—their pleas had new resonance. The ensuing 1 A.M. order represented the Administration reaping the results of its own bad-faith arguments and behavior with the Court.”
 
In a New York Times op-ed, Jeffrey Toobin likens the Trump administration’s deportations (and hoped-for deportations) in the face of court challenges to the judicial crisis over Arkansas’ refusal to immediately implement the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education school-desegregation ruling. Then, the Supreme Court declared its interpretation of federal law to be “supreme,” asserting the Brown ruling must be heeded.
 
Last weekend’s Supreme Court “ruling, by a presumed 7-to-2 vote, signaled genuine fury at the failure of Trump officials to abide by the law and, even more to the point, the directives of judges, including those on the Supreme Court,” Toobin writes. “The choice for the court is clear: Either the justices will reaffirm the holding” of Cooper v Aaron, the 1958 Supreme Court decision in which the justices reinforced the authority of their Brown v Board ruling, “that the federal judiciary is ‘supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution’ or they will cede that authority to Mr. Trump and his aides. Abdicating its role to the executive branch would not only demean the judicial function but also invite chaos, as the nation wonders, case by case, which branch of government has the last word. To preserve their authority, as well as the rule of law, the justices must reclaim what their predecessors in 1958 knew to be the only honorable and lawful course. And when they do, it would be even better if all nine of them in 2025 also signed their names.”

Michael Lewis on What DOGE Gets Wrong About the Federal Workforce

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) eliminated more than 280,000 federal jobs in February and March. In the second part of their conversation on Sunday’s GPS, author Michael Lewis told Fareed what he thinks Musk doesn’t understand about federal workers.

Hope and Fear in Post-Assad Syria

Sectarian relations have been shaky in post-Assad Syria.
 
As Le Monde’s Hélène Sallon reports from Aleppo, two Kurdish neighborhoods are tentatively transitioning to being governed by the new regime in Damascus. (Throughout Syria’s long civil war, Kurds governed their own enclave in the country’s northeast, and Kurdish leaders now favor a federal system that would allow them to retain much of that autonomy.) Last month, however, an attack by Assad loyalists was followed by reprisal massacres of Alawites, the minority Islamic sect to which former President Bashar al-Assad belongs. At the New Lines Institute, Ralph Outhwaite warns that such persecution is threatening needed international sanctions relief.
 
In a Journal of Democracy essay, Lisa Wedeen writes of hope and fear after last month’s reprisal killings: “In the immediate aftermath of Assad’s fall, many Syrians dreaded the eruption of renewed war fueled by sectarian hatred from decades of the majority Sunni population’s historical oppression. When that did not happen, the experience of euphoria seemed to solidify, gaining a kind of traction that pushed away fear and the immediate desire for score-settling. Joy was allowed its moment—along with the sadness and grief. But as the [Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS] regime missed additional opportunities … to commit to an inclusive democratic government, as people continued to experience everyday hardship, and as security arrangements remained precarious in Homs and the coastal regions, that sense of joy curdled, and residual feelings of rage and revenge came to expression in devastating sectarian violence. … [Syrian interim President and HTS leader Ahmad al-Sharaa] has promised to establish an independent committee to investigate the killings [of Alawites] and to hold the perpetrators accountable, but many have doubts that justice will be served. The videos of bodies dead in the streets, of HTS-affiliated fighters celebrating victory and hurling insults at Alawites, as well as mosque sermons intensifying sectarian hatred, have all cast a new pall over Syria’s future. And more grief. Grief for what has changed—and for what has stayed the same.”