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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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March 29, 2024

Fareed: Don’t Use Illiberal Tactics to Save Liberalism

“The hiring and firing of Ronna McDaniel as an NBC News political analyst might seem like a small media tempest,” Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column, “but it does force a reckoning with a much larger issue that will come up again and again in this campaign: how to deal with [former President] Donald Trump and his supporters.”

McDaniel’s hiring drew sharp criticism, including from NBC’s own Chuck Todd, given McDaniel’s questioning of the 2020 election’s fairness and, more broadly, what Todd described as “gaslighting” and “character assassination” that Republican operatives have deployed in response to journalists’ challenging questions during the Trump era.

But shutting out voices like McDaniel’s entirely is not the right answer, Fareed argues. That’s especially true, Fareed writes, for those who adhere to liberalism—not political leftism but the broad liberal principles of openness, free speech, and the rule of law. Trump’s “brand of right-wing populism is illiberal, xenophobic, and takes America into dark dead-ends,” Fareed argues. “But the way to defeat it in a liberal democracy is not by using legal mechanisms that take him off the political playing field and canceling those who support him. Rather it is to debate his allies, to put forward powerful and persuasive positions that show Americans that you can address their concerns, and to confront Trump on the political battlefield—and beat him.”

EVs: A Problem for the German Auto Industry

While Tesla has become the US electric-car champion, Chinese producers loom large. BYD—which overtook Tesla in EV sales by volume in the final quarter of last year—has grown so big it has expanded into the shipping business, chartering its own cargo vessel to send cars overseas.

Chinese EVs present a new challenge for the West, Edward Shite and Peter Campbell wrote in a Financial Times feature in January. Global auto markets are about to be flooded with Chinese EVs, which will boost protectionist impulses and disrupt politics, Howard W. French suggested in a Foreign Policy column earlier this month.

At Der Spiegel, six coauthors write that German automakers are struggling to go electric in a marketable, profitable way: “No German manufacturer currently has an electric car on the market that costs less than 25,000 euros, and most prices are well over 30,000 euros. The e-up!, a compact bestseller for years, was taken off the market by Volkswagen in 2023—allegedly because it was no longer profitable. VW has no plans to bring cheaper electric vehicles back onto the market until 2026. Meanwhile, Mercedes and its Chinese partner Geely keep adding extras to the E-Smart, making it more expensive. In most cases, it costs several thousand euros more to buy an electric car than a comparable combustion engine. Added to this is an economic environment that makes the change seem unattractive: recession, inflation and highly volatile electricity prices, which were among the highest in Europe in 2023. The German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA) expects sales to fall by 14 percent this year.”

Gaza After the War

What will happen to Gaza after the Israel–Hamas war ends? On Sunday’s GPS, Fareed heard an optimistic take from New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who suggested Gulf Arab funding could transform Gaza into something more akin to Dubai, and an only somewhat less-optimistic one from former US Ambassador to Israel and Egypt Daniel Kurtzer.

Has the Tide Turned Against Myanmar’s Junta?

Myanmar’s ruling junta has been on the back foot since late October, when the so-called 1027 offensive—launched Oct. 27  by a coalition of ethnic militias—succeeded in taking swaths of territory. Since then, commentators have wondered if army chief Min Aung Hlaing’s military rule will hold.

“The escalation in fighting has underlined Myanmar’s strained relations with Beijing, one of its few remaining allies,” Aung Naing Soe and Rebecca Ratcliffe noted in The Guardian in November. Earlier this month a Nikkei Asia editorial posited, of plans to introduce a new military draft in April: “What triggered this move is the breakdown of military rule.” The Economist writes: “Operation 1027 inspired others,” noting that anti-junta militias outside the alliance behind the 1027 offensive have achieved gains of their own. “The junta’s response, as ever, is indiscriminate violence.”

The Diplomat’s March cover story, by Thomas Kean, offers a comprehensive picture of military and political difficulties the junta faces. Some within the pro-junta community seem dissatisfied with Min Aung Hlaing, who has mismanaged both the military situation and Myanmar’s economy, Kean writes, noting a rare protest in a military stronghold in January. China is a key but ambiguous player.

Of China and the 1027 offensive, Kean writes: “Chinese authorities allowed the offensive to proceed because they were incensed at the military regime’s failure to rein in cyberscam operators in the Kokang region, where tens of thousands of people had been put to work fleecing people around the world out of billions of dollars, in what are known as ‘pig butchering’ scams. Many were human trafficking victims, effectively forced to work as slaves; the United Nations estimated last year that in Myanmar at least 120,000 people were likely being ‘held in situations where they are forced to carry out online scams,’ along with another 100,000 in Cambodia.” Some of the scams target Chinese citizens, Kean writes. The military situation is complex, as Kean depicts it, with myriad ethnic militias aligned against and for the ruling junta. Fighting against the army is much easier in the country’s fringes, where ethnic militias have made their gains, Kean writes; the Burmese-dominated lowlands are much easier to defend, constituting a core territory the regime “cannot afford to lose.”