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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 18, 2021

How Should Biden Handle China?

As US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan meet for the first time with their Chinese counterparts in Alaska, two Foreign Affairs essays make broad recommendations as to how Biden’s America should approach the world’s other superpower.

After four years of Donald Trump, the present moment is a rocky one. “Not since President Richard Nixon’s visit in 1972 has such a fundamental shift taken place in American perceptions, strategies, and policies toward Beijing,” Evan Medeiros writes of the Trump years, during which the US pivoted to bombast and declined to coordinate its China policies internally. Following that act, President Joe Biden must now figure out what new shape the relationship might take.

Some have written off the idea of engagement, but Medeiros argues Biden should seek it. Where Trump courted risk, and where Barack Obama avoided it, Medeiros argues Biden should take a middle-road approach of “risk management.” The idea is to acknowledge that “tension will be part of the relationship and signals that the United States will tolerate this friction and perhaps even use it to Washington’s advantage.” Such an outlook would “suppor[t]” cooperation while “hold[ing] it to a high standard.”

As for the merits of engaging in an ideological rivalry, Hal Brands and Zack Cooper argue Biden and his aides should lean into the contrast between US democracy and Chinese authoritarianism. “Leaving values and morality the side would eliminate one of the United States’ greatest advantages and make it harder to rally coalitions at home and abroad,” they write. “It would play into Beijing’s hands by making the rivalry an amoral struggle over military dominance rather than a contest over what philosophical principles should structure domestic governance and the international order.”

‘How the West Lost’ Covid-19

At New York Magazine’s Intelligencer blog, a lengthy essay by David Wallace-Wells seeks to explain the vast disparity between North America and Europe on one hand, and Asian and Pacific countries on the other, in the face of Covid-19.

There have been degrees of difference within the West, but they’ve been relatively minor. “To judge by death, Germany has indeed outperformed the U.S., with fewer than 900 per million citizens, compared to our more than 1,600,” Wallace-Wells writes. But outside the Western geographical orbit, New Zealand has performed more than 100 times better, and in “Taiwan, the death rate is a minuscule 0.42 per million. The European Union performed, on average, 3,000 times worse … In Vietnam, there have been 0.36 deaths per million, in China 3.36. In Singapore, the number is around five; in South Korea, it is close to 32; in Japan … it’s about 67. Again, you can doubt some of these numbers, the Chinese figures especially. But in the U.K., remember, the level is north of 1,800.”

Confusingly, experts don’t seem to know why. Political culture, population age, geographical isolation, and social cohesion all vary across well- and poorly performing countries in ways that seem to rule them out as key variables. What some, like Harvard’s Michael Mina, tell Wallace-Wells is that the West seemed not to have been ready to react; Western officials and experts were painfully reluctant to push countermeasures that may have been imperfect but would have saved lives. Wallace-Wells seems to conclude that Western countries’ myths of “[i]nvulnerability” meant that they “[g]ave up most easily.”

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UK to Add Nukes for First Time Since Cold War

In a published review of its foreign and defense policies, this week the British government quietly announced that it will raise the cap on its number of nuclear warheads for the first time since the Cold War. While the strategic document itself does not say why, exactly, The Economist suggests reasons could include countering Russia’s advantage in lower-yield warheads or retaining an ability to target multiple adversaries at once.

Regardless, the move cuts against the grain of nonproliferation. “Whatever the precise reasoning, the timing could hardly be worse,” the magazine writes. “Britain’s move has prompted bafflement among most nuclear experts. It is unlikely to do much to boost deterrence, while doing real diplomatic harm. The [Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons]’s five-yearly review conference is five months away and the mood is mutinous. Many non-nuclear states are furious that nuclear-armed ones are doing little to slash their arsenals. China, India, Pakistan and North Korea have all been growing their forces.”

A Plan to Bring Science to the People

“The year 2020 saw a reusable rocket launch two astronauts into space, multiple COVID-19 vaccines developed in record time, and a robot that could write a persuasive op-ed,” Aaron F. Mertz and Abhilash Mishra write for Science. “In the United States, the year also saw public distrust of science contribute to the worst health crisis in modern history. This contrast highlights a sharp dichotomy in the role of science in American public life: breathtaking discovery and innovation alongside growing distrust of scientific evidence and recommendations. How can the country reconcile this dissociation?”

They have an answer: Create an “American Science Corps” to “elevate science as a central part of American culture,” along the lines of the teachers’ program Teach for America or the public-service program AmeriCorps. As conceived, such a federally funded body would “employ early-career scientists in underserved urban and rural communities,” giving them communications training and having them “listen to community needs and engage in forums that scientists have traditionally avoided, such as places of worship, state and county fairs, farmers' markets, town halls, local theaters, libraries, community colleges, and sporting events.”

Noting the underrepresentation of low- and middle-income students in university-level scientific research and development, they advocate for making science a more inclusive endeavor, de-cloistering it from the realm of privileged elites.