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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 14, 2021

On Today’s Show

On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET:

First, Fareed argues that the surge in migrants at America’s southern border could prevent needed changes to the US immigration system.

Former President Trump, who “already smells blood,” has attacked President Biden over the uptick in those seeking to cross. “The tragedy,” Fareed argues, “is that this border crisis—and Trump’s demagoguery around it—could well stop the momentum for the much larger and more important changes that Biden is trying to make to immigration policy.”

The US needs more immigrants, Fareed argues, but the anti-immigration politics around this crisis won’t help. “With coronavirus restrictions on top of everything else,” Fareed says, “some of the world’s best and brightest are choosing to go to more hospitable countries, from Canada to Australia.” Without a healthy flow of immigration, the US will have “fewer people and especially fewer young people, which would mean less growth, dynamism and opportunity for everyone. This is the real immigration crisis, not the one at the southern border.”

Next, Fareed talks to two economic heavyweights, Nobel Prize winning New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, about America’s new $1.9 trillion relief package. Fareed asks about the economic impact, whether the US can afford such hefty spending, whether this much of it was necessary, and what kinds of public investment might be needed next, as infrastructure and climate change loom on Biden’s agenda.

After that: What is “the Quad”? This week, Biden met with leaders of Australia, India, and Japan to help solidify a new bloc that could deter China. Will it work? Fareed asks former US diplomat Susan Thornton, now a senior fellow with Yale Law School and the Brookings Institution.

Fareed then talks with Walter Isaacson, who profiles a groundbreaking technology and the scientist who pioneered it in his new book, “The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race.”

‘The Declining Market for Secrets’

Is classified intelligence overrated? Yes, according to Zachery Tyson Brown and Carmen A. Medina, who write at Foreign Affairs that America’s vaunted intelligence community produces much boutique work that can only be viewed in secure facilities, and little of it is collated into easily consumable form. Meanwhile, open-source intelligence is flourishing, they write: “Firms such as Recorded Future, DigitalGlobe, and McKinsey offer not only intelligence-like products, such as news aggregation and data analytics, but also such services as on-demand overhead satellite imagery and long-term strategic forecasting that were previously the purview of governments alone. Some organizations, such as Bellingcat, have blurred the line between journalism and intelligence by pioneering open-source techniques that exploit social media, commercial imagery, and gray literature.”

That suggests to the authors that the intelligence community should divert its energies toward “synthesis,” with collection resources dedicated to pilfering the most valuable informational gems.

Amsterdam Is the Brexit Winner, So Far

As Brexit prompts a financial exodus from London, Philip Stafford, Mehreen Khan, and David Keohane write for the Financial Times, Amsterdam seems to be the big winner—at least for now. “Investment bankers are now talking of it as a European hub for the global boom in blank-cheque companies known as special purpose investment vehicles, or Spacs,” they write. 

And yet, Amsterdam’s potential may be limited. While 7,000 financial-services jobs have left London since the Brexit referendum, Amsterdam has gained only 1,100, according to the mayor’s office, Stafford, Khan, and Keohane write. Pay regulations may hamper its appeal: The Netherlands “limits banks, insurance and investment companies to offering bonuses of no more than 20 per cent of an employee’s annual salary, against an EU-wide average of 100 per cent. In 2018, only 37 people in financial services in the Netherlands earned more than €1m compared with 3,614 in Britain, according to the European Banking Authority.” For that reason, they suggest, Paris and Frankfurt might be better positioned as future financial hubs.

Eyes on the AfD

This month, news emerged that Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) has moved to place the country’s main far-right party, the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), under surveillance. Unless the BfV is blocked by a court, its decision will make the AfD the first German party to be tracked in this manner since the end of the Nazi era.

At Der Spiegel, Jörg Diehl, Ann-Katrin Müller, Ansgar Siemens and Wolf Wiedmann-Schmidt detail the BfV’s reasons, citing an internal report that CNN has not verified. One of the most disturbing facets of the AfD, they observe from the report, is the alleged linkage of some members to extremist groups outside the party. As factions vie within the AfD, the Der Spiegel authors write, it seems extremist sentiment may no longer be limited to the party’s fringe.

Will the GOP Whig Out?

Political parties are by no means permanent, Jelani Cobb writes in the current issue of The New Yorker, tracing the demises of the Federalists and Whigs—and asking if the same will happen to today’s GOP.

“The Federalists collapsed because they failed to expand their demographic appeal,” Cobb writes, noting that the party saw its “élitist-oriented” coalition narrowed to the Northeast amid ill-fated opposition to the Louisiana Purchase and the War of 1812. The Whigs split “because of internal incoherence over what they stood for in the nation’s most crucial debate,” on the issue of slavery, with the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act driving a wedge through the party. “Among the more striking dynamics of the Trump-era G.O.P. is the extent to which it is afflicted by both of these failings,” Cobb suggests. Republicans have pivoted from being a Northeastern regional party in the mid-20th century to a white-conservative party on overdrive, committed to Trumpism for the foreseeable future, Cobb writes. Its coalition may not remain viable: As former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele points out to Cobb, the GOP has lost three statewide votes in Georgia since November—a bad omen, if the South is to be the party’s bastion.

Not everyone thinks the GOP is likely to disintegrate. At The New York Times, columnist Jamelle Bouie offers a nuanced rejoinder, arguing the Federalists’ collapse was more “contingent” on the particular issues of the day, while the Whigs faced demographic disadvantages that today’s GOP doesn’t, as Republicans retain broad geographical appeal. Bouie proposes a more disturbing analogy: to the Democratic Party of the 1850s, “with its structural advantage in federal elections, its ideologically aligned majority,” and “acute grievance … Of course, when that Democratic Party finally went too far, it plunged the country into the worst, deadliest crisis of its history,” Bouie writes. “Let us hope, then, that that particular resemblance is only superficial.”