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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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July 6, 2025

On Today’s Show

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

Hosting this week’s GPS from the Aspen Ideas Festival, Fareed discusses some of the most urgent questions facing the US, the world, American cities and society.
 
Should the US push for regime change in Iran? How differently does President Donald Trump treat America’s friends and foes? And what is his worldview? Those are some of the many questions Fareed poses to three of the most experienced voices in American foreign policy: President Barack Obama’s former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton and former CIA Director and retired four-star US Army Gen. David Petraeus.
 
New York’s railway hub Penn Station has been in desperate need of an overhaul for decades. Why can’t anyone get it done? Fareed sits down with architect Vishaan Chakrabarti and “Why Nothing Works” author Marc Dunkelman to discuss why New York—and America more generally—struggles to get big projects built.
 
As war grinds on in Gaza and Iran reels from Israeli and US strikes, how can we best understand the complicated geopolitics of today’s Middle East? Fareed talks with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
 
Finally: Fareed and historian Walter Isaacson discuss the explosion of wealth in America, and what—besides wealth—a society needs to function.

Moscow’s Weird Summer

Polling in an authoritarian country like Russia is difficult, but surveys by the independent Levada-Center have hinted that young Russians are not enthusiastic about the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine, Thomas Sherlock writes for the Journal of Democracy.
 
“If most young Russians seem to approve of or at least accept [President Vladimir] Putin’s rule, their weak support for aggression against Ukraine shows the limits of his militant narrative despite the Kremlin’s enormous efforts to promote patriotic mobilization,” Sherlock writes. “[T]he political disillusionment and disengagement of much of Russia’s youth undermines Putin’s efforts to subjugate Ukraine. The stance of young Russians erodes the societal resolve and supply of manpower that significant progress on the battlefield, let alone decisive victory, requires.”
 
The same is true among some of the educated elite in Moscow, The Economist writes, while noting that the capital city is putting on quite a show this summer, with flowers everywhere and open-air stages for operetta, art and circus performances around the Kremlin. It’s part of a three-month festival called “Summer in Moscow.”
 
“All this co-exists alongside an intensifying ideological campaign,” the magazine writes. “On June 29th the Kremlin published a new order which classifies any preparations for the [war-related] mobilisation of society or institutions as a state secret. It also prohibits sharing data from vast areas of civilian-state interaction, from trade to science. Contact with the West is perilous. Prison sentences of up to eight years chill debate.” One photographer “says the experience is psychedelic. ‘You can walk along beautifully decorated streets, then turn the corner and see a line of people outside a prison queuing up to hand parcels to those who have been jailed for protesting against the war.’ … For now, people are living the only life they have and doing their best to ignore Mr Putin’s obsessions.”

‘The Arctic Great Game’

A recent book—“America in the Arctic,” by former diplomat and current US Naval War College professor Mary Thompson-Jones—argues the US is moving too slowly to reestablish its Arctic presence amid a Russian military buildup and intensified Chinese attention on the region. An Arctic great game is coming, Thompson-Jones writes, and the US is under-prepared.
 
Reviewing Thompson-Jones’ work and offering her own analysis in a Foreign Affairs essay, former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and current American Enterprise Institute fellow Heather A. Conley writes that even in the few months since Thompson-Jones wrote and published “America in the Arctic,” geopolitical stakes in the Arctic have risen even further, with Trump setting his sights on acquiring Canada and Greenland as US territories.

“Cooperation between Russia and China, meanwhile, has been growing since their 2022 announcement of an ‘unlimited partnership,’ which in the Arctic has translated to joint scientific, space, and military operations, including coast guard and naval patrols,” Conley writes. “Whatever happens, a contest over critical minerals, maritime routes, fisheries, natural resources, seabed mining, and satellite communications is coming, and the United States is not ready for it. For years, Russia and China have been preparing to take advantage of new Arctic shipping routes, improving their undersea military and scientific capabilities, and honing their hybrid warfare tactics while U.S. attention has been elsewhere. To compete, the United States will need to dramatically increase its military, economic, scientific, and diplomatic presence in the Arctic, in close cooperation with U.S. allies. If Washington does not resolve the deficiencies and contradictions of its Arctic strategy soon, it may find that it has already lost the new great game.”

Iran: The People

vs the Regime

In the Journal of Democracy, Ladan Boroumand writes of widespread dissatisfaction among Iran’s public; the government’s efforts to crack down on the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests that began in 2022; and the theocratic regime’s long history of repression.
 
That recent protest movement has trailed off, with some activists having been executed. But Iran has witnessed protests every few years—from the Green Movement in 2009 to unrest over fuel prices that began in late 2019. Experts have suggested Iran’s theocratic regime has only a minority of public support.
 
Boroumand writes: “We are witnessing today a showdown between a regime that is ideologically defeated and paralyzed in its governance, and a civil society that shows liberal-democratic leanings and aspirations but is under sharp duress … Dissidents inside and outside Iran are striving to overcome a toxic disinformation war … While their enemy commands Iran’s military, financial, and economic resources—and benefits from the support of superpowers such as China and Russia—Iranian dissidents rely on their faith in democracy and not much else. They need intelligence to identify the sources of the attacks they face, and physical as well as legal protection to resist and withstand these multifaceted assaults. Only democratic states, equipped with a long-term strategy for the global defense of liberal democracy, can provide this kind of support.”