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.

August 7, 2025

Israel’s Muslim-Majority Ally

Which Muslim-majority country maintains a friendly relationship with Israel—including trade and weapons purchases—even as the Gaza war heightens tensions between the Jewish state and the Muslim world?
 
a) Indonesia
b) Bahrain
c) Azerbaijan
d) Albania

To see the answer, scroll to the end of this newsletter.

Trump’s Tariff

Hammer Falls

President Donald Trump’s sweeping, country-specific tariffs took effect today, levying taxes of varying rates on imports from most US trading partners. Per the Yale Budget Lab, imports into the US now face aggregate tariffs of 18.6% (which will fall to 17.7% after price-based consumption shifts), the highest rate since the 1930s.
 
The Financial Times’ Aime Williams underscores the severity of the moment, hearing from Washington-based trade lawyer Ted Murphy of the firm Sidley Austin: “This is the dawn of a new trade order, and the end of an old order.” Chad Brown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics offers: “We are now in a new world. Even to trade nerds, the complexity of this is just bonkers.”
 
And the tariff war is not over. As the FT’s Williams points out, Trump has said he may impose new tariffs on particular goods, beyond the country-specific rates imposed today. Pharmaceutical imports could face tariffs of up to 250%. Trump said Wednesday he will impose a 100% tariff on imported microchips and semiconductors. “US trading partners are now bracing themselves for enforcement of the new regime, while unsure if the president is open to negotiating deals to soften the levies,” the FT’s Williams notes.
 
Trump’s tariffs threaten to raise costs for US consumers, as The New York Times’ Kailyn Rhone writes: “Fresh produce prices are expected to increase 7 percent. The average price of a new car could jump by $5,800 in the short run. These price increases could add pressure to household budgets already straining to keep up with inflation.” But they’re also bringing in new revenue for the US Treasury, as CNN’s Elisabeth Buchwald details: “Since April, when the president began imposing a 10% tariff across nearly all goods, among several other steeper levies that followed, the government collected a total of $100 billion in tariff revenue, three times the amount collected during the same four months last year.”
 
For complicated reasons, The Economist argues, Trump’s tariffs could remain in place well past his presidency: “Shoppers will lose out on innovation and choice.” But they will not be able to observe how prices and product selections would have unfolded over time without Trump’s tariffs in place, so “voters may not realise what is hurting them. That is one reason why the Trumpian system will be hard to dislodge. If future presidents want to cut tariffs, they will be met by furious lobbying from American firms that got used to sheltering behind them and have thereby become globally uncompetitive. Few consumers will clamour for change, if they do not know how much more choice they could have enjoyed. Lawmakers, too, might be reluctant to lower trade barriers if it means giving up tax revenues today for broader prosperity tomorrow.”

Will Trump’s Tariffs

Help or Hurt America?

On Sunday’s GPS, Fareed discussed Trump’s sweeping new tariffs with The Economist Editor-in-Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes and Oren Cass, founder and chief economist of the conservative think tank American Compass.

Netanyahu: Israel Seeks

Full Control of Gaza

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now says Israel intends to take full control of the Gaza Strip before handing over civilian control to an entity other than Hamas. While that would cross a threshold, especially in the eyes of those who support Palestinian statehood and territorial integrity, it reflects what the Middle East Institute’s John Calabrese calls Israel’s newfound military “maximalism”: a sense that after the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, Israel cannot continue to simply “mow the lawn” with periodic, limited operations to degrade (but not eliminate) entrenched enemies like Hamas.
 
Calabrese writes today: “In essence, Israel is trying to replace a localized, cyclical ‘mowing the lawn’ in Gaza with a maximalist, decisive campaign, while simultaneously expanding the concept regionally to continuously degrade a constellation of Iranian proxies through periodic, limited actions. This layered approach acknowledges both the political and military limits in Lebanon [home to Hezbollah] and Iran but increases the overall regional risk profile, making the strategic environment more unstable and unpredictable than before.”

Iran: Down but Not Out

Did US and Israeli strikes set back Iran’s nuclear program and expose embarrassing weaknesses in a once-feared regional power? Or did they provoke a dangerous regime to regather, build a nuclear bomb secretly and become more threatening than ever? Both may be true, according to a new Foreign Affairs essay by Brookings Institution Iran expert Suzanne Maloney, who argues that it’s too soon to pronounce the US–Israeli mission as fully accomplished, as “Iran is down but not yet out.”
 
Maloney writes: “As the writer James Baldwin once remarked, ‘The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.’ That description might now apply to the men who preside over the ruins of Iran’s revolutionary system. With their proxy network degraded, their air defenses demolished, and their great-power alignments exposed as hollow, the debilitated guardians of the Islamic Republic require new tools to keep the wolves at bay. It is difficult to predict with confidence how factional dynamics will evolve in the aftermath of the regime’s humbling; further surprises may be in store. But there can be little doubt that the most powerful set of players in Tehran will seek to reconstitute the remnants of its nuclear program and reassert the regime’s dominance over Iranian society. … Ultimately, by resorting to military force, Israel and the United States may have accelerated the very outcome they sought to forestall: an even more repressive and adversarial Islamic theocracy with a bomb in the basement and a score to settle in its backyard.”

On Sunday’s GPS, Fareed will discuss Iran with Scott Anderson, author of the new book “King of Kings,” a history of the Iranian revolution.

News Quiz:

The Answer Is …

Azerbaijan. The Economist details in a brief video how oil-rich Azerbaijan, located on the Caspian Sea, ships oil exports to Israel and receives weapons from the Jewish state.
 
Fuad Shahbazov wrote for the Stimson Center last summer: “[T]he Azerbaijan–Israel partnership is not based only on trade and energy agreements but also on shared geopolitical concerns, especially over a mutual arch-foe, Iran. In this regard, Israel has proven a useful ally, particularly during a recent Azerbaijan–Iran confrontation between 2022-2023. Indeed, these factors explain Baku’s long-term sympathy for Israel, even as it tries to show sympathy for the Palestinian cause.” Reuters’ Gram Slattery reported last week that Trump may be considering bringing Azerbaijan and other Central Asian countries into the Abraham Accords, which normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and a handful of Arab states during Trump’s first term.