By Peter Fragiskatos, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Peter Fragiskatos teaches at Western University in London, Canada. You can follow him @pfragiskatos. The views expressed are his own.
Amidst the horror that continues to plague Syria, a glimmer of hope emerged last week as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced they will try to bring together the Syrian state and its opponents by convening an international peace conference.
In principle, negotiations are the right way to go. Had talks taken place earlier, the bloodshed, which has now claimed the lives of more than 70,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands more, could have been vastly reduced. The only way it can be stopped is if there are some compromises, and this will only happen when the warring sides start talking in earnest. Yet reports that Russia is sending advanced anti-ship cruise missiles to Syria are a reminder that Moscow's commitment to the process remains an unpredictable wild card.
In preparing for the discussions, a division of labor appears to have been set – the Americans are trying to persuade the rebels to take part, while Russia is pressing the al-Assad regime. And there are some promising signs on both fronts. According to Kerry, Salim Idriss – chief of staff for the main opposition Free Syrian Army – has expressed strong interest in negotiations, while reports suggest Lavrov has received a list of negotiators from the Syrian government.
By Fareed Zakaria
“Thanks to ambiguity about what it means to be ‘primarily’ concerned with ‘social welfare,’ political activists have reaped a bonanza for years while the IRS ignored their chicanery," writes Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times.
“And once again, now that the agency has tried to regulate, the regulated parties have blown its efforts up into a ‘scandal.’ It's amusing to reflect that some politicians making hay over this are the same people who contend that we don't need more regulations, we just need to enforce the ones we have. (Examples: gun control and banking regulation.) Here's a case where the IRS is trying to enforce regulations that Congress enacted, and it's still somehow doing the wrong thing.”
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In normal presidential elections, it is only the candidates and their platforms that matter. Not so in Iran, argues Mohsen Milani in Foreign Affairs.
“There, the key player in the upcoming presidential elections is the septuagenarian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is constitutionally barred from running for the office. He recognizes that the election result will have a profound impact on his own rule and on the stability of the Islamic Republic. So behind the scenes, he has been doing everything in his power to make sure that the election serves his interests. But the eleventh-hour declarations of candidacy by Hashemi Rafsanjani…and Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei…have made his task more difficult.”
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“I think the question of whether the U.K. should remain part of the EU is a closer call than either side wants to admit, writes Clive Crook in Bloomberg, suggesting Britain might really be poised to leave the European Union.
“If the EU responds to the economic crisis with new strides toward a United States of Europe, the costs for the U.K. will surely outweigh the benefits: Britain just doesn’t want to be part of that enterprise. If EU membership will require eventual membership of the euro area – and that’s the prevailing model, as though the crisis had never happened – Britain should again say no thanks.”
By Alex Vines, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Alex Vines is director of Area Studies and International Law and heads the Angola Forum at Chatham House. He is also a senior lecturer at Coventry University. The views expressed are his own.
Twenty years ago this Sunday, the United States belatedly recognized Angola. Today, Angola is the second-largest trading partner of the U.S. in sub-Saharan Africa, a country at peace and enjoying one of the fastest rates of economic growth in the world. It is the second largest producer of oil in sub-Saharan Africa and an OPEC member that has allowed major U.S. oil companies to prosper. But all is not well in the relationship.
Angola achieved independence from Portugal in 1975 and immediately became a major battle ground of the Cold War. The U.S. refused to recognize the pro-Soviet and Cuban backed MPLA government, encouraged apartheid South African military incursions and trained and supplied the rebel UNITA forces. At one point, Angola became the second largest recipient of U.S. covert aid after the Afghan Mujahedeen.
Fast forward to today, and the MPLA is still the ruling party, with President José Eduardo dos Santos having been in power since 1979. And, despite the many global suitors, dos Santos said recently that Angola has only four strategic partners: Brazil, China, Portugal and the United States.
"Fareed Zakaria GPS," Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN
America’s economy is showing further signs of slower growth, Reuters reported today, with “factory activity slipping in the mid-Atlantic region while groundbreaking declined at home construction sites.”
How much of a concern are these latest numbers? How big an impact has sequestration – the forced budget cuts in Washington – had on the economy? And what can we expect going forward, in the U.S. and globally?
Zanny Minton Beddoes, the economics editor for The Economist, will be taking readers’ questions tomorrow. Please leave a question you would like us to ask Zanny in the comments section below.
"Fareed Zakaria GPS," Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN
On April 17, a U.S. drone strike killed an al Qaeda militant and four others in a remote village in Western Yemen. CNN’s Jessica Gutteridge talks to Farea Al-Muslimi, a former U.S. exchange student who grew up in the village.
“I grew up in Wessab, a remote the mountain in Yemen. It's nine hours south away from the capital, a very deprived area where mostly farmers live there. It’s a place where there is no electricity, even today, not a single hospital, not a single school. It’s a very miserable area.
I lived here in high school with a host family, as an exchange student. The best year of my life – ever. It's beyond imagination. It was the richest year of my life, I think, in every sense – education-wise, knowledge-wise, friendship-wise, school-wise, because it's just like taking someone from the seventh century in a time machine to the 21st century. I became technically an ambassador for Americans for the rest of my life. The people, I think, are the best, the very best part about my year in America.
There was at the day of the strike, there was a plane hovering over the head of the village, though people didn't know that this plane was targeting someone or looking for someone. And it was…not a physical strike, but a heart and mind strike for the people.
By Fareed Zakaria
America has risen to global might, and yet it has not produced the kind of opposition that many would have predicted. In fact, today it is in the astonishing position of being the world's dominant power while many of the world's next most powerful nations–Britain, France, Germany, Japan–are all allied with it. This is the exception that needs to be explained.
The reason surely has something to do with the nature of American hegemony. We do not seek colonies or conquest. After World War II, we helped revive and rebuild our enemies and turned them into allies. For all the carping, people around the world do see the U. S. as different from other, older empires.
But it also has something to do with the way that the U.S. has exercised power: reluctantly.
Read the full column at TIME
By Soner Cagaptay and James F. Jeffrey, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Soner Cagaptay is the Beyer Family fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute. James F. Jeffrey is the Institute's Philip Solondz distinguished visiting fellow and former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Iraq. The views expressed are their own.
This week’s summit between President Barack Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan reflects the extraordinary development of relations between the United States and Turkey.
Ankara faces a civil war in Syria that is forcing Turkey to contend with a weak and divided state on its borders. This disintegration brings the dangers of chemical weapons proliferation and al Qaeda infiltration on Turkey’s doorstep. Coping with these challenges will be near impossible without U.S. support, particularly after the May 11 bombings that devastated Reyhanli, a Turkish border town near Syria. Erdogan is therefore sure to make the Syria issue one of his key “asks” during his conversations with Obama on Thursday.
The fact is that Turkey has not faced a threat on the scale of the Syrian crisis since Stalin demanded territory from the Turks in 1945. In 2011, hoping to oust the al-Assad regime, Turkey began to support the Syrian opposition. But, thus far, this policy has failed, and exposed Turkey to growing risks.
By Sahar Aziz, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Sahar Aziz is an associate professor at Texas Wesleyan School of Law where she teaches national security and civil right law. She previously served as a senior policy advisor at the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The views expressed are her own.
Reports that the Internal revenue Service has been targeting Tea Party-affiliated nonprofit organizations has grabbed headlines, but should come as no surprise. In part because of ten years of expanding government powers, much of it under the guise of national security, selective enforcement of the law has increasingly become a norm rather than an aberration.
But some in the Muslim community might have a question – why are conservatives so surprised (and outraged) by this news when Muslim nonprofits and their leaders have been under intense scrutiny for over a decade? And when so many Muslim groups and individuals have faced scrutiny simply for the religion they follow?
By Bruce Stokes, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Bruce Stokes is director of global economic attitudes at the Pew Research Center. The views expressed are his own.
The Great Recession and the ensuing euro crisis have wreaked havoc with the European economy and now threaten to undermine the European Union itself. As Washington prepares to begin negotiations with Brussels on a U.S.-EU free trade agreement, America’s European partner has never been weaker. Europeans’ lack of faith in the European Project and the fissures that have emerged in European public opinion between the French and the Germans bode ill both for efforts to revive the European economy and for effective transatlantic cooperation in the near future.
Support for European economic integration – the idea that if nations lower their trade and investment barriers they will all be better off – is down over the last year in five of the eight European Union countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center in March 2013.
Fewer than a third of Europeans surveyed now think European economic integration has strengthened their economy. This includes just 11 percent of Greeks and Italians and only 22 percent of the French, the latter two citizens of founding members of the European Community. Since the fall of 2009, meanwhile, support for a more integrated European economy has dropped sharply: by 21 points in France, 20 points in Italy, and 16 points in Spain.
By Fareed Zakaria
The likelihood of ethnic cleansing in Syria’s coastal regions is high, argues Joshua Landis on Syria Comment.
“It will rise even higher should Assad’s troops begin to lose. The Sunni populations of the coastal cities will be the first to be targeted by Assad’s military, if it is pushed out of Damascus. Should the Alawites be compelled to fall back to the predominantly Alawite region of the mountains stretching along the western seaboard of Syria, the Sunnis of the coastal cities and eastern plan will be the first to suffer.”
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“The mismatch between the Himalayan haystacks of data and the limitations of the human beings trying to find the needles and read them like tea leaves is matched by the mismatch between the data-surveillance state and the panel charged with taming it,” writes Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker.
“The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has four part-time members and, as yet, no permanent staff. Until last year, it hadn’t had a
meeting in five years.”
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“Between 1971 and 2007, U.S. hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, rose by 4 percent. (That's not 4 percent a year; it's 4 percent over 36 years!)," writes Barbara Garson in the Los Angeles Times.
“During those same decades, productivity increased by 99 percent — that is, it nearly doubled. In other words, the average worker's productivity rose 25 times more than his pay. But we Americans sell more than 70 percent of what we produce to one another. If the majority was earning less and producing more, who was going to buy all the stuff?”
By Ibrahim Sharqieh, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Ibrahim Sharqieh is deputy director of the Brookings Institution’s Doha Center, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University in Qatar. You can follow him @sharqieh. The views expressed are his own.
On May 15, the Palestinians will commemorate 65 years of their “Nakba” – “the Catastrophe.” This is how they describe 1948, which saw the destruction of Palestinian society, 750,000 Palestinians forced from their homes, and over 450 Palestinian towns wiped off the map. Today, there are over 5 million Palestinian refugees registered with the United Nations’ UNRWA. But while 1948 was a terrible trauma for the collective Palestinian memory, the reality is that it was only the beginning of a long journey of displacement, dispossession, and exile. The real Nakba is ongoing, and the Palestinian people live it on a daily basis both inside and outside the Palestinian territories. As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry throws himself into the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, we have to ask: Will his efforts bring this human tragedy a step closer to the end? Or only make it worse?
On a recent trip to Lebanon, I made sure to visit the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. While under control of the Israeli army that occupied Beirut in 1982, approximately 800 to 3,500 Palestinian refugees were massacred at the hands of Christian militias. In the camps today, the bitter reality of the Palestinian refugees’ life in exile is on full display: an enormous mass grave in the camps’ center holds the victims of 1982 massacre. It is a daily reminder to the refugees of their continuing human tragedy.
By Kerry Brown, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Kerry brown is executive director of the China Studies Center at the University of Sydney and associate fellow at Chatham House. The views expressed are his own.
Reports suggesting that India withdrew from a planned naval exercise with the United States last month out of fears it might upset Beijing are only the latest reason to grapple with an increasingly pertinent question: What are the costs these days of hurting the feelings of the Chinese people?
Finding the answer to this question – and a way to overcome associated potential problems – has become ever more urgent as China’s perceived assertiveness has grown. And two recent diplomatic spats in particular are worth paying attention to: the fights China has picked with Britain and Norway. Both involved differences over values and human rights. Both saw a stiff political response from Beijing. And both say much about China’s changing role in the international system.
For the U.K., the trigger was British Prime Minister David Cameron’s meeting with the Dalai Lama in London last May. Almost immediately, high level visits from China were pulled. The former head of the National People’s Congress and second ranking member of the Politburo Standing Committee at the time, Wu Bangguo, cancelled a visit. Over the ensuing months, there were no further high level visits. Last month, it was reported that Cameron had dropped a planned trip to Beijing because there were no promises he would be met at the right level. In view of the warm reception accorded earlier in the month to President Francois Hollande, this would have been a bitter pill to swallow.
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