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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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August 8, 2025

Fareed: We’ve Upended

the Global Economy

Based on Anecdotes and Lies

“As a horrified world watches the upending of an economic order that has brought it stability and prosperity for decades,” Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column, “the question I hear in country after country is the same: Why is the United States, the nation that has flourished so mightily under this system, tearing it down?”
 
Indeed, President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs—which took effect this week, bringing the aggregate US tariff rate to its highest level since the 1930s—mark a new economic order, experts have observed: one in which protectionism has replaced free trade. Fareed continues: “When I explain that many Americans—including the president—believe America has been the victim of this free trade system, the response is bewilderment. ‘How can you not see what is blindingly obvious: that you are the big winner,’ one senior foreign official said to me.”
 
The decline of US manufacturing jobs has produced much economic and political discontent, but Fareed points out that Americans’ real median income (adjusted for inflation) is up—50% since the 1970s, as the economics commentator Noah Smith notes. As of 2021, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a Paris-based consortium of the world’s leading economies, showed that by its measure, US median disposable income was higher than all but one member: tiny, wealthy Luxembourg.
 
Fareed concludes: “Change and disruption—caused by capitalism, globalization, technology or, crucially, a changing culture—have produced enormous anxiety among many. There are those who find these anxieties unbearable and want the world to return to what it once was. But—with or without tariffs—it won’t.”

Which World Capital

Suffered Deadly Floods?

Beginning late last month, a capital city suffered flooding that killed dozens of people. Which was it?

a) Phnom Penh
b) Dhaka
c) Beijing
d) Lisbon

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

Big Questions Surround Pending Trump–Putin Meeting

Trump said today that he will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska next Friday. After months of periodic talks between Trump and Putin over Russia’s war on Ukraine—and a moment of frustration in early July, when Trump said Putin feeds him and his White House team “a lot of bullshit”—The Wall Street Journal’s Alexander Ward, Alex Leary and Matthew Luxmoore describe this as a “make-or-break moment” for the two leaders. Trump had given Putin a 50-day deadline to reach a Ukraine peace deal. Twelve days ago, Trump said he would shorten the deadline to “10 or 12 days.” Remarking that he thought he already knew what Putin’s answer would be, Trump said: “There’s no reason in waiting.”
 
As always, one big question is whether Putin will stall for more time, dragging out his Ukraine-related negotiations with Trump further. Trump’s former national security adviser (turned critic) John Bolton predicted in a recent interview that Putin will “take advantage” of the meeting, possibly advancing his own plan to settle the war, “in order to have Trump take it” to Kyiv “and see if Zelensky rejects it.”

Another big question is whether Putin has miscalculated in his dealings with Trump. The Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire wrote last month that Putin had erred by continuing strikes on Ukrainian cities in the face of Trump’s requests for peace—a move that embarrassed the US president. As Trump changed his tone on Putin in recent weeks, he “did not abruptly become a believer in the traditional transatlantic alliances prized by his predecessors as a counterweight to Moscow,” Lemire wrote. “Rather, Trump got insulted” by Putin’s overt duplicity. As The Wall Street Journal’s Ward, Leary and Luxmoore write, Trump acknowledged Putin would tell him one thing and then do another, remarking: “I go home, I tell the first lady, ‘And I spoke with Vladimir today. We had a wonderful conversation.’ She said, ‘Oh, really? Another city was just hit.’” In an op-ed for the Globe and Mail, Ukraine expert Michael Bociurkiw writes that “it seems Mr. Putin has woken up to the realization that he may have overplayed his hand with U.S. President Donald Trump.”
 
There’s yet another question as to Putin’s level of interest in warm relations with Trump. Russian Journalist Mikhail Zygar notes in a New York Times op-ed that when Trump recently declared himself “disappointed” in Putin and threatened severe tariffs if Russia continued its war, Moscow brushed it off as bluster. “But there’s a deeper reason for the dismissive response,” Zygar writes. “Mr. Putin has, according to Kremlin insiders I talked to, concluded that negotiating with the United States makes no sense and that compromise is pointless. Hostility, not friendship, is the policy. … Mr. Trump might have soured on Mr. Putin, but Russia’s president couldn’t care less.”

Venezuela Falls

Off the Radar

Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro’s ruling party declared another victory in May in regional and parliamentary elections (which were boycotted by most opposition parties) and again in municipal elections late last month. At the World Politics Review, James Bosworth writes that Venezuela has disappeared from the regional and global agenda following a 2024 presidential election widely viewed as rigged.
 
“Reflecting the resignation that has taken hold within the country, the topic of Venezuela and its slide into all-out dictatorship has disappeared from the hemispheric agenda,” Bosworth writes. “It was not mentioned in the declaration released by the Organization of American States’ General Assembly in June. The recent Democracy Always summit of leftwing leaders in Santiago, which was hosted by Chilean President Gabriel Boric and focused on strengthening democracy in the hemisphere, didn’t even bother to mention Venezuela. … That is quite a contrast from recent decades, when so much of the hemispheric debate centered around Venezuela, its regional influence and its declining conditions. The international community has backed away from the Venezuela question because, like Venezuelan voters, they don’t see a path forward.”
 
At The Wall Street Journal, Americas columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady accuses the Trump administration of turning its back on Venezuela’s repression by granting (as the Biden administration did) a license allowing Chevron to do business in the oil-rich country. Noting that Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently announced the return of 10 Americans held in Venezuela, O’Grady writes that Rubio also “tried to rescue Mr. Trump’s reputation among liberty-loving Americans last month by designating Venezuela’s drug-trafficking Cartel de Los Soles, headed by Mr. Maduro, as a foreign terrorist organization. It was a good decision. But it hardly makes up for the harm that the Chevron license will cause.”

Unlikely Iran

Iran has been at the center of world politics this summer. By conducting airstrikes on Iranian facilities, the US and Israel did “what many had thought impossible, delivering an extraordinary setback to Iran’s nuclear program without igniting a wider regional conflagration,” Brookings’ Suzanne Maloney writes in a Foreign Affairs essay. Now, the question is whether Iran will regather and become even more dangerous.
 
On Sunday’s GPS, Fareed will take a historical look at Iran with Scott Anderson, author of the new book “King of Kings,” a history of Iran’s 1979 revolution that unseated the US-allied shah and installed the theocracy that remains in place today. In the current issue of The New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr reviews the book, writing that it presents questions as to whether history is driven by individuals of consequence, larger forces, consistent directional trends, or mere chance.
 
At the time of the revolution, few observers saw Iran as ripe for revolution, Immerwahr writes: “Even as a large Muslim autocracy in the Middle East weathering the boom and bust of the oil market, Iran wasn’t unique. Why did a revolution occur there but not in Iraq or Saudi Arabia? ‘The closer one examines it,’ Anderson writes, ‘the more mysterious and implausible it all seems.’ One of the best books on the topic, ‘The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran’ (2004), by the sociologist Charles Kurzman, considers various explanations but rejects them all in favor of an ‘anti-explanation,’ dwelling on the Revolution’s anomalousness. Gary Sick, who oversaw Iranian affairs at the National Security Council under Carter, sees it similarly. ‘I’ve studied this thing for the past forty years,’ he told Anderson, ‘and it still doesn’t fully make sense to me.’ Could one of the most consequential events of the twentieth century have simply been an accident?”

In Taiwan, Fears of

Subversion Simmer

In Taiwan, a recent recall campaign sought to unseat 24 lawmakers of the KMT party, on accusations (denied by the party) of coziness with mainland China. The effort not only failed, with all lawmakers retaining their seats, it also prompted debate about handling political disputes in this way. At the Journal of Democracy, Raymond Kuo suggested the campaign “may set a worrying precedent” of elections being relitigated the following year via recall campaigns, which would incentivize gridlock and effectively require politicians to win twice. Still, Kuo wrote: “Despite accusations of authoritarianism, the recall campaign was Taiwan’s political system working.”
 
The fears that underlay the campaign, however, were quite intense. The KMT is the descendant of the Chinese Nationalist government that fled to Taiwan in 1949 after its defeat in the civil war with Mao’s communists. Now, compared to its rivals, the KMT is seen as friendlier to Beijing, which views Taiwan as part of mainland China and intends to reunify. The KMT has rejected accusations of mainland Chinese influence, but the Financial Times’ Kathrin Hille writes that among some critics, suspicion is deep-seated. Western concerns about Taiwan’s safety “have centered on the risk of a [mainland] Chinese invasion,” Hille writes. “But many Taiwanese are far more concerned that Beijing could subvert their country from within, by tapping into long-standing cultural and economic links, grooming collaborators and sidelining the country’s elected government.”

News Quiz:

The Answer Is …

Beijing. The Chinese capital suffered deadly flooding late last month, as CNN’s Nectar Gan and Joyce Jiang reported on July 29: “In recent days, intense rainstorms have battered much of northern China—a densely populated part of the country home to massive metropolises as well as agricultural heartlands.” Reuters reported this week that by Monday, at least 44 people had died in Beijing, and authorities had evacuated more than 70,000 residents.
 
In Foreign Policy’s China Brief digest, James Palmer writes of a conundrum in the Beijing’s water management: The Chinese capital has serious flooding problems during summer storms, but the city also suffers from a severe water shortage.
 
Describing the water shortage problem, Palmer offers a history lesson: “Because of its size and location, the choice of Beijing as China’s capital doesn’t make a lot of ecological sense compared to China’s other historical capitals, such as Xi’an or Nanjing. But Beijing was preferred by northern conquerors, most notably the Mongol Yuan empire (1271-1368), for its proximity to their homelands. After the fall of the Yuan, the Han Chinese Ming Empire eventually moved the capital back to Beijing in 1421 as an act of defiance to the nearby steppe powers. But historically, Beijing’s population was far smaller than today, hovering at around a million people until the foundation of the People’s Republic of China saw it grow to today’s scale. With a fraction of today’s population, there was much more water to go around.”