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. July 12, 2022 |
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Will Biden Visit a Post-American Middle East? |
US President Joe Biden will travel this week to Israel and Saudi Arabia, and while much commentary has centered on Biden warming up to Saudi Arabia after lambasting it over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, not long ago some wondered if the US and the Middle East weren't drifting apart.
"The Middle East is learning to live without America," Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote for Project Syndicate in April, citing a "perceived" American pullback. Identifying a crisis of weak governance in the Middle East in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, F. Gregory Gause III argued for narrower US aims in the region. In the same issue, Michael Singh posed the Abraham Accords—the Trump-administration-brokered agreements to normalize relations between Israel and a series of countries in the region—as a US move to step away from direct and consistent involvement in regional dynamics.
While Biden's trip is presented in a Middle East Institute roundup of expert analysis as a signal of US recommitment, Mirette F. Mabrouk notes that regional actors have been working things out on their own of late, as the valuation of US allyship took a hit amid, among other things, Washington's chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. |
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Russian gas—and Europe's acute dependence on it—is in the news this week amid a maintenance shutdown of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline through which that gas flows west. At Foreign Policy, Christina Lu writes that as Europe worries that Russia could turn off the tap, "experts warn of a difficult winter: one of potential rationing, industrial shutdowns, and even massive economic dislocation."
Germany, in particular, has cause for concern, as its economy confronts inflation and recession fears driven partly by energy prices. "Replacement of Russian gas by LNG has largely reached its limit," Ben McWilliams and Georg Zachmann write for the Brussels-based economic think tank Bruegel, suggesting the EU would need to reduce demand by 15% to compensate, if Russia cut off its pipeline supply to Europe entirely—with that figure potentially ranging up to 54% in the Baltics.
Europe is preparing, The Economist writes, detailing a plan that includes "four pillars: boosting gas-storage levels, diversifying energy sources, encouraging demand reduction and rationing." |
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Where the World is Growing |
Released Monday, the latest UN global-population prospectus reflects the lowest growth rate since the 1950s and predicts that global population will reach 8 billion by Nov. 15, that India will surpass China in population in 2023, and that "(m)ore than half of the projected increase in global population up to 2050 will be concentrated in just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United Republic of Tanzania." Grouped separately, the same can be said of sub-Saharan Africa. "The 46 least developed countries are among the world's fastest-growing," per the UN report, with many of them "projected to double in population between 2022 and 2050." |
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Inflation and Shortages Drive Sri Lanka's Upheaval |
While marveling at images of Sri Lankan demonstrators swimming in the presidential-palace pool—or at the recounting by a high-ranking military source of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his family missing their exit flight, after refusing to join a regular passport-check line at the airport—consider this: In the Colombo neighborhood of Pettah (one of several locales where consumer prices are measured regularly by Sri Lanka's central bank), locally grown potatoes now retail for more than two and a half times their price on Oct. 1. The cost of beans has risen by nearly the same factor since late February. Add fuel shortages to that equation, and economic instability has rocked the country's politics.
"As the Rajapaksas borrowed their way to build infrastructure and boost Sri Lanka's GDP, what they didn't do was focus on building a sustainable economic base to pay for it all," Nikhil Kumar writes for Grid. "Mass protests will continue" until a "credible" government can be installed, Rathindra Kuruwita predicts at The Diplomat, chronicling the same problems.
As discontent simmered in April, Dushni Weearkoon wrote for Foreign Affairs of "(l)ong lines snake(ing) outside gas pumps," a "scarcity of many essential goods," devalued currency, and the "enormous blow" to Sri Lanka of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which shocked global energy prices. |
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