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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 19, 2021

Fareed: Welcome to a New Era of Big Pentagon Spending

Noting that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently pledged the US will maintain a military edge over China, which he called as America’s “pacing threat,” Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column that the Pentagon has found a new pretext for huge spending.

“Welcome to the new age of bloated Pentagon budgets,” Fareed writes, “all to be justified by the great Chinese threat.”

China has made some advancements, but Fareed writes that the US has no reason to panic. America has 11 aircraft carriers, which are technically superior to China’s two. It spends more on defense than the next 10 biggest defense-spending countries combined; by comparison, when Britain ruled a quarter of the world’s population in the late 1800s, it only sought to maintain a navy larger than its next two competitors combined.

“Having spent two decades fighting wars in the Middle East without much success,” Fareed writes, “the Pentagon will now revert to its favorite kind of conflict”: an expensive cold war with a nuclear-armed rival.

The China Conundrum: Solving the Riddle of Autocratic Growth

Predictions of a testy first encounter were fulfilled: As US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan met for the first time with their Chinese counterparts Thursday, tensions played out in front of reporters. That spat aside, The Economist writes that the West faces a basic quandary in dealing with China: The massive Chinese economy is appealing to countries and businesses alike, and it’s not going anywhere.

Despite dovish hopes, China did not grow “freer as it became richer.” Now, it’s an economic behemoth, accounting for 18% of world GDP. If the West wants to beat back China’s authoritarian model, it might have trouble swaying other countries to its side. And it may not be able to change China by refusing to do business with it. “In the long run, unlike the oil-soaked Soviet Union, China is big, diverse and innovative enough to adapt to outside pressure,” and its massive domestic market is now where global “firms discover consumer trends and innovations.”

“China’s rulers believe they have found a way to marry autocracy with technocracy, opacity with openness, and brutality with commercial predictability,” The Economist writes. To compete with that model, “free societies … now need to muster a response—and to prepare their defences for the long struggle ahead.”

The End of Hong Kong’s Democracy?

In Beijing last week, China’s National People’s Congress approved changes to Hong Kong’s electoral system, including a provision that the city’s legislative and bureaucratic posts must be filled by “patriots.” At CNN, the Human Rights Foundation’s Joy Park suggests this could spell the end of Hong Kong’s democracy.

Experts tell ChinaFile that it remains unclear whether Western businesses will remain in the city, but a key to Hong Kong’s economic future may depend on its judiciary—and whether the mainland applies a similar rule to judges. Part of Hong Kong’s economic success rests on its status as a “legal hub,” the experts note; for now, that facet of the city’s separate governing system remains intact.

Another European Election, Another Mixed Message About the Far Right

In Dutch elections this week, center-right Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s party held onto power with the largest vote share, but results were mixed. In a “big surprise,” a left-leaning, pro-European party took second place, while Rutte himself tacked left during the campaign, The Economist writes. “For a country that spent last summer leading Europe’s ‘frugal’ club of countries opposed to greater fiscal integration and nearly torpedoed the bloc’s €750bn ($900bn) covid-19 relief fund, the election may signal an important shift.”

And yet, the Dutch far right saw its vote share grow, even as it was spread among more parties. At The Washington Post, Henry Olsen writes that across Europe, the populist right appears durable: Three far-right parties took 29 of 150 seats in the Dutch legislature, and right-leaning populist coalitions enjoy strong support according to polls in Italy, Finland, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Portugal, and Austria.

Silver Linings Pandemic

At The Atlantic, Zeynep Tufekci writes that as awful as the pandemic has been, it has also ushered in some notable improvements.

For one, it proved the theory of mRNA vaccines, which could be used to treat cancer or other diseases. (With this new biotechnology, scientists have figured out “how to code” vaccines as if they were software, Tufekci writes.) We’ve also “learned how to use our digital infrastructure”: “Internet connectivity is far from perfect or equally distributed, but it has gotten faster and more expansive over the past decade; without it, the pandemic would have been much more miserable and costly.” Commutes have gone by the wayside, conferences became easier to attend, and the mainstreaming of tele-health meant, for Tufekci herself, much faster treatment for a recurring neck problem.

Finally, science itself has improved, as the stodgy, for-profit model of peer-reviewed journals has given way to preprint servers and a fast-paced form of peer review that has played out on Twitter—a revolution of collective intelligence that Tufekci hopes is here to stay.