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.

May 25, 2025

Today on CNN: ‘The War on Government’

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

DOGE has swept through the federal bureaucracy, slashing budgets and laying off workers. The Trump administration has sought to freeze certain kinds of spending, and President Donald Trump’s budget bill—currently under consideration in Congress—includes cuts to long-running programs and agencies.
 
Why?
 
Today CNN will re-air Fareed’s latest hourlong special report, “The War on Government.” In it, Fareed traces the decades-long conservative push to scale back the size of government and its role in the American economy and society.
 
The GOP’s budget-slashing agenda did not begin with Trump, by any means, Fareed explains: It dates to backlash against FDR’s New Deal and came into sharper focus with the low-tax, low-spending ethos espoused by Barry Goldwater. The small-government standard has been carried forward in subsequent decades by Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich and the tea party movement of the 2010s.
 
Examining lessons from past Republican attempts to shrink the federal bureaucracy, Fareed details how the Trump administration fits into that history.

‘The Stakes of the Birthright Citizenship Case’

The Supreme Court has not yet reached a decision on Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, as SCOTUSblog’s Amy Howe detailed after oral arguments last week. But the question seems, to many Trump critics, to be open and shut.
 
The Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” On Jan. 20, Trump issued an executive order to the contrary, pronouncing that “no department or agency of the United States government shall issue documents recognizing United States citizenship, or accept documents issued by State, local, or other governments or authorities purporting to recognize United States citizenship, to persons:  (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”
 
Birthright citizenship isn’t really the important thing being contested, however, The New Yorker’s Ruth Marcus writes, suggesting Trump’s order clearly violates the Constitution and should be struck down.
 
Rather, the government is contesting the validity of nationwide injunctions aimed at halting its policies of questionable constitutionality before the Supreme Court can rule. That practice began when a federal judge issued an injunction against former President Barack Obama’s extension of residency protections to the so-called DREAMers (people who were brought to the US illegally as children) not just in Texas, where the case had been heard, but nationwide. The question of nationwide injunctions by lower federal courts is important now, Marcus writes, because Trump has fired a volley of orders and actions that appear to contradict the Constitution or the law, and that has been met with myriad injunctions by federal judges seeking to halt those policies everywhere.
 
Marcus writes: “An hour into the oral arguments in the birthright-citizenship case at the Supreme Court last Thursday, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson offered a tart summary of the Trump Administration’s playbook in what will surely be its losing bid to end the constitutional guarantee. ‘Your argument,’ Jackson told D. John Sauer, the Solicitor General, would ‘turn our justice system’ into a ‘“catch me if you can” kind of regime,’ in which ‘everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights.’ Jackson kept going: ‘I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law.’” Sauer, for his part, argued citizens could file class-action suits. Nationwide injunctions have faced bipartisan criticism, Marcus writes, and there’s a case to be made that some judges have overstepped. But “birthright citizenship is particularly ill-suited as a vehicle for curbing them. Citizenship is, by definition, a national issue.”

Does the US Need a Better Taiwan Strategy?

The Economist famously called it “the most dangerous place on earth,” and some say tensions over the Taiwan Strait have only intensified. China’s latest military drills around Taiwan, conducted last month, reinforced views that in the future Beijing could attempt a blockade.
 
Two recent Foreign Affairs essays argued the US needs a better approach to managing this hotspot and the superpower relations that make it so fraught.
 
Much of the discussion about military eventualities in Taiwan center on the question of what the US might do if mainland China were to launch an invasion. For decades, the US has maintained “strategic ambiguity”: that is, deliberately not committing to defending Taiwan or not, to keep Beijing uncertain. Jennifer Kavanagh and Stephen Wertheim recently argued those are bad choices: “U.S. leaders need a way to escape the ghastly decision to either wage World War III or watch Taiwan go down. They need a third option. Washington must make a plan that enables Taiwan to mount a viable self-defense, allows the United States to assist from a distance, and keeps the U.S. position in Asia intact regardless of how a cross-strait conflict concludes. This way, the United States could abstain from sending its military forces to defend Taiwan if China invades the island and does not attack U.S. bases or warships.”
 
Looking at the problem differently, Oriana Skylar Mastro and Brandon Yoder argued Washington lacks a cohesive Taiwan policy and is failing to maintain the delicate balance necessary to deter China from invading. “[D]eterrence can fail in two ways,” they wrote. “Do too little, and Beijing may gamble it can seize Taiwan before Washington is able to respond. Do too much, and Chinese leaders may conclude that force is the only remaining path to unification. Navigating this dilemma … requires a calibrated strategy of rearmament, reassurance, and restraint that threads the needle between weakness and recklessness. Combined properly, forward-deployed capabilities, diplomatic restraint, and selective economic interdependence can reinforce one another to maintain credible deterrence while avoiding provocation. So far, however, the Trump administration’s approach to Taiwan has veered between harsh transactionalism … and quiet reaffirmations of support for Taipei … The administration still has time to settle on a coherent strategy, but the window of opportunity is closing.”

In Kharkiv, Opera Goes Underground

Like much of Ukrainian society was in the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kharkiv’s opera house has been forced underground, Ann-Dorit Boy writes for Der Spiegel, with photos by Fedir Petrov.
 
Among a handful of Ukrainian national opera theaters, Kharkiv State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre Mykola Lysenko is now operating from the basement of its large opera house, as most above-ground event spaces have been closed by authorities.
 
Der Spiegel’s Boy describes the basement performance space and the challenges for performers: “gray, concrete walls, dusty cement. Instead of an orchestra pit, there is just a yellow line on the floor. The stage is just six by eight meters and there is no curtain. … Five minutes before the director launches into the overture, [36-year-old soprano Yulia] Antonova [who is playing Verdi heroine Violetta in this production of ‘La Traviata’], dressed in a corset dress, gets into the elevator to head down. She’s going to have to run a fair amount this evening. Three costume changes across four floors, because there isn’t enough room down below. She will hardly be in a position to hear the prompter, who is sitting on the steps at the side of the stage. But she will sing and act, love and suffer, soak up the applause after her arias and then, with a shriek of pleasure, die of tuberculosis at the end. The loyal fans will line the stage to give the soloists flowers. And backstage, the old and new singers in Kharkiv will hug each other. ‘So spektaklem!’ they will say, just as they always have. ‘Congratulations on the performance!’”