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? Subscribe here. April 28, 2021 The Biden Agenda Keeps Expanding In his first address to Congress, tonight President Joe Biden will propose a $1.8 trillion plan to invest in education, child care, and paid family leave. For anyone losing count of Biden's big spending initiatives, this "third leg of the US president's multitrillion-dollar economic agenda" follows a "$1.9tn fiscal stimulus bill enacted in March, and a second plan, which has yet to be passed by lawmakers, to plough $2.3tn in federal funds into infrastructure spending, to be paid for with higher corporate taxes," as noted by the Financial Times' James Politi.
Before this new proposal, Biden's agenda had already earned him comparisons to FDR, including from Fareed. Not everyone anticipated this: In October, The Economist declared that Biden's intrinsic centrism meant he "would not remake America's economy"; at The Washington Post, Ashley Parker writes that Covid-19 redirected a more cautious course Biden set early in his presidential campaign.
Remaking the country wholesale is just what The Wall Street Journal's editorial board accuses Biden of doing, suggesting the President has been enabled by his predecessor in indirect ways. "Donald Trump's raucous Presidency has let [Biden] sell a radical agenda in the soothing tones of a return to normal, while the vaccine project known as Operation Warp Speed has teed up the end of the pandemic and an economic revival," giving Biden some "good political fortune." The paper cites both Biden's big-ticket spending proposals and his "agenda of critical race theory," as the editorial board calls it.
Bloomberg's Noah Smith notes elements of a leftward US lurch on fiscal policy, but he thinks everyone should calm down. Maybe government largesse will lead to waste, inflation, or a too-generous welfare system—but maybe it won't. "All of these future overreaches are easy to imagine, but they haven't happened yet," Smith writes. "… Bidenomics needs to take its swing—it needs a chance to solve the problems of today, even if it ends up being inadequate to the problems that crop up 40 years from now." Runaway Infections Are a Danger to Everyone As India and Brazil suffer new waves of Covid-19, Marian Blasberg, Rafaela von Bredow, Veronika Hackenbroch, Kunal Purohit and Christoph Schult write for Der Spiegel that when the virus runs rampant anywhere, the whole world is at risk.
Both Brazil and India have seen new variants emerge (more is known about the one first observed in Brazil), and scientists tell the Der Spiegel authors they're worried conditions are right for the virus to continue to mutate, with a small but significant chance that a variant could emerge with more meaningful immune evasion. In both India and Brazil, governments and resource allocation have come under criticism. Both public restrictions and genomic sequencing remain far too sparse for experts' liking, they tell the Der Spiegel authors, while one Brazilian virologist tells Nature's Luke Taylor that cuts to science funding have made it harder to track the virus's evolution there. Are Israel and Iran 'Pulling the US Toward Conflict'? At Foreign Affairs, Daniel C. Kurtzer, Aaron David Miller, and Steven N. Simon argue that Israel and Iran are making it more likely that the US will be pulled into a serious conflict, noting the appearance of tit-for-tat aggression in an incident at Iran's Natanz nuclear facility this month (which quickly prompted speculation of covert Israeli responsibility) and Iran's acceleration of uranium enrichment.
"The scenario is an ugly one whose long-term stability may not hold, either because Israel's real objective is to provoke an Iranian response that would provide cover for an attack on Iran's facilities or simply because neither country's strategy is as clever or finely tuned as it imagines," Kurtzer, Miller, and Simon write. "… Israel cannot know which of its incremental attacks will incur an Iranian response that could lead to spiraling escalation—and no one knows what level of nuclear enrichment or accumulation of fissile material will trigger an all-out Israeli assault on Iran."
Noting that the US is working toward a nuclear rapprochement with Iran over Israeli objections—and that the Biden administration is occupied with a busy domestic agenda—Kurtzer, Miller, and Simon call Israel's suspected needling of Iran an "open challenge to the United States" that could mark a "pivotal moment" in regional geopolitics. Germany will move on from Chancellor Angela Merkel after elections this fall that will bring an end to her chancellorship, which began in 2005. As Merkel prepares to leave office, her center-right party, the CDU, appears to be struggling amid the pandemic, and at Der Spiegel, a deca-bylined article suggests Green Party candidate Annalena Baerbock could emerge as a post-election power player—or even as Chancellor.
With Baerbock representing a new guard as she vies against longer-tenured competitors from the CDU and Social Democrats, the Der Spiegel authors sum up the race as "[t]wo men against one woman. Two 60(ish)-year-olds against a 40-year-old. Two lawyers against a political scientist with a focus on international law. Two governing professionals against a parliamentarian with no executive experience. Two representatives from Germany's traditional big-tent parties against the candidate of a party hoping to become the next big-tent party." Baerbock and the Greens stand a chance at offering that wider appeal, the authors suggest, as climate change is "the biggest issue facing the country."
It can be tough to predict what governing coalition might arise from the Sept. 26 vote, the Der Spiegel authors write, but they suggest the likeliest outcome is a governing alliance between the Greens and CDU, with Baerbock becoming Chancellor if her party bests the latter at the polls. |
