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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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April 25, 2025

Fareed: Trump Is Wrecking a US Competitive Advantage

“As the Trump administration floods the zone with one radical shift after another,” Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column, “its tariffs have gotten the most attention. But the policy that could end up costing the United States even more in the long run is the White House’s assault on universities and on research more broadly.”
 
That’s because scientific research has given the US economy a notable edge. The Trump administration is reversing that competitive advantage by withholding research grants and gutting the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, Fareed argues. This is happening as China has emerged as a scientific rival of the US, one that already leads on key measures like its scientists’ quantity of publications in academic journals.

Another advantage the US has enjoyed, “and one that China could not match, is that it attracts the world’s best and brightest,” Fareed writes. “Between 2000 and 2014, more than one-third of the Americans who won Nobel Prizes in science were immigrants. In 2019, almost 40 percent of all software developers were immigrants, and in the major cancer centers, in 2015 the percentage of immigrants ranged from around 30 percent (Fred Hutchinson) to 62 percent (MD Anderson.) But this is changing fast. … [S]tudents are being rounded up to be deported, and graduate students and researchers from China now face the prospect of constant FBI investigations. China has created generous incentives to welcome its best and brightest back home. Many others are choosing to go elsewhere—from Europe to Canada to Australia. … These are the building blocks of America’s extraordinary strength, created over the last 100 years. They are now being dismantled in just 100 days.”

Trump’s Fedfare Flops—but Continues

President Donald Trump is still feuding with Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome Powell, and some say lasting damage has been done.
 
Last week Trump lambasted Powell, reviving a theme from his first presidency, during which Trump harangued Powell—whom Trump appointed—to keep interest rates low. Agitating for a swift rate cut to spur the economy as his tariffs harm growth projections, Trump posted last week to Truth Social that Powell is “always TOO LATE AND WRONG,” adding that Powell’s “termination cannot come fast enough!” After markets registered skepticism, Trump said Tuesday he has “no intention of firing” Powell. By Wednesday, CNN’s David Goldman reported, Trump had “renewed his line of attack on Powell … accusing him of playing politics with interest rate cuts. ‘He’s keeping rates too high,’ Trump said, as also he criticized Powell for acting too slowly to raise rates several years ago in the early days of the inflation crisis. ‘He historically has been late … he was recommended by a certain person I’m not particularly happy with.’”
 
This has raised concerns for one big reason: Independent central banks are a feature of consolidated democracies, the idea being that if central banks are subject to pressure from leaders, national monetary policy could be manipulated, for instance to boost growth before an election at the cost of long-term economic health. Le Monde makes that point in an editorial, writing that “a politicized Fed whose chair is a puppet of the White House would undermine the credibility of US monetary policy. Investors would turn away en masse from the dollar and US Treasury bonds, previously considered safe-haven assets in times of crisis. … Although Trump felt compelled to clarify on April 22 that he has no intention of firing Powell, his repeated attacks on the Fed show that he has not learned all the lessons from this episode.”
 
The Economist agrees, warning that Trump is likely to continue pressuring the Fed: “Mr Trump has always disliked tight money, and covets the lower rates in Europe and elsewhere. And, by contrast with his first term, when the economy was mostly strong, he now faces the threat of a recession caused by his own foolish trade policy. As a result, Mr Trump is now searching for a scapegoat. Mr Powell, whom he calls a ‘major loser’, is candidate number one.” Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett notes that “Powell’s defiance will be backed by the wider Fed board, meaning that Trump is not just fighting one man.” Still, Tett warns the showdown is likely to continue, “particularly if stagflation hits, which, of course, would put bond markets in even more danger.”
 
Powell is in a tough position, Le Monde notes. Lowering interest rates would spur the economy—but would also invite inflation, which has just stopped being a serious problem for the US economy. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Joseph C. Sternberg warns that by introducing political pressure into the US monetary policymaking process, Trump has ensured that Powell’s eventual successor will have a difficult job, too.

At the same time, Sternberg writes: “Mr. Trump’s perverse genius is that he has made it much harder for everyone to do what he wants them to do. Institutional reform of the Fed is off the table, given that investors and hostile politicians now could interpret any such move as an assault on central-bank independence. Mr. Powell may find it difficult to cut interest rates even if he otherwise would want to, for fear of creating an impression the Fed has caved. And Wall Street will cheer him on if so … Though it’ll surely frustrate Mr. Trump, this may be the best thing that could happen to the president. Inflation is the great popularity-killer of American politics, and he has now made it harder for the Fed to perpetuate inflationary errors for which he might have to pay a price. As always, one needs a healthy sense of irony to navigate the Trump era with sanity more or less intact.”

Kashmir Attack Raises India–Pakistan Temperature

The last significant clash between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan came in 2019, when a bombing linked to an Islamic militant group killed dozens of Indian paramilitary personnel in Kashmir. India responded with airstrikes in Pakistan.
 
On Tuesday, militants massacred tourists at a popular Kashmir travel destination. Some observers say the two neighboring powers will be pushed back to the brink of war.
 
“Relations between India and Pakistan are cratering following a deadly militant attack in Indian-administered Kashmir,” CNN’s Rhea Mogul, Aishwarya S. Iyer and Sophia Saifi report. “All but one of the 26 tourists massacred in the attack on Tuesday were Indian citizens. New Delhi swiftly pointed the finger at Pakistan, downgraded ties and suspended its participation in a crucial water-sharing treaty. Pakistan has denied involvement and said that any attempt to stop or divert water belonging to Pakistan would be considered an act of war.”
 
“Without significant international pressure to de-escalate,” Chietigj Bajpaee writes for the British international-affairs think tank Chatham House, “the only real restraints on both parties are concerns of a possible nuclear escalation and the impact of a conflict on their economies.”
 
At the Australian Lowy Institute, Abhijnan Rej argues the attack was designed, in part, “to provoke a strong, possibly military, reaction from [Indian] Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. Such a reaction would mire India in yet another conflict with Pakistan and reinstate, in a manner of speaking, Kashmir in global conversations about India.” Bloomberg columnist Mihir Sharma writes: “After the Uri attack in 2016,” during which militants rampaged in Mumbai, “Modi authorized a special forces strike on a Pakistani military encampment; after the car bomb in 2019, he sent the Indian Air Force raiding across the border. It will take great resolve, and be a political risk, for him to avoid military action this time around.”

Canada’s ‘Trump Campaign’

Canada will hold a national election on Monday, and current Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney, the former Bank of England governor, is viewed by commentators as likely to win. The vote itself, many say, will be a referendum on the anti-Canadian turn taken by the US under Trump. The US president insulted Canada by suggesting it could become the 51st US state—Trump maintains that is a serious proposal, not mere trollery—and levied new tariffs, claiming a US national emergency over fentanyl and border security.
 
Running against Conservative candidate Pierre Poilievre, Carney “frames Mr Trump’s aggression as a national crisis and is reaping rewards for doing so,” The Economist writes, suggesting Carney has emerged as a patriotic “Captain Canada” facing down Trump. It’s rare for one party to control Canada’s government through four consecutive mandates, but that is what Carney is seeking, and The Economist writes that Trump’s tariffs and insults have put him on solid footing. Some observers say Trump’s attacks have flipped the likely outcome in favor of Carney’s Liberals.
 
“At a recent campaign rally, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney addressed the nation but spoke to the world,” the Financial Times’ Ilya Gridneff, Harriet Agnew and Antoine Gara wrote earlier this month. “‘We are going to fight, and we are fighting the Americans,’ he declared.  Speaking just days after Donald Trump had launched a trade war on the world and unleashed mayhem on global markets, Carney was positioning himself as a wartime leader and an antidote to the US president. … The emergency now facing Canada—and its need to stand up to the US—have become common themes for Carney.”

Benoît Gomis writes for the World Politics Review of anti-US sentiment Trump has stirred up in Canada: “In addition to castigating Canada for what he portrayed as freeloading militarily on the U.S., Trump stated that he wants to renegotiate what he described as the two countries’ ‘artificial’ border and unfair water-sharing agreements. As a result, a ‘wave of patriotism’ and national unity has swept over Canada to a degree rarely seen in modern history. The perceived threat from Trump has also sparked the electoral resurrection of the Liberal party, which was considered doomed to lose the next election amid extensive popular resentment targeting [Justin] Trudeau, the Liberal prime minister who had been in power from 2015 until last month. But with Prime Minister Mark Carney having now succeeded Trudeau atop the Liberal party and the government, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s repeated personal criticisms of Trudeau no longer strike home. Nor has Poilievre found a coherent message in response to the looming threat now posed by the U.S. under Trump, with whom Poilievre had previously sought to draw some ideological parallels.”
 
“The 2025 federal election will be remembered, when the books are written, as the Donald Trump campaign,” columnist Richard Warnica writes for the Toronto Star. “For the first time in more than 150 years, the president of the United States was publicly and literally threatening Canada’s sovereignty. For Carney and the Liberals, that existential menace has been a boon. Dead in the polls last year, the party rose again through the winter by pitching Carney as the anti-Trump, a serious and sober grown-up who could guide Canada through these troubled years.”