View this email in your browser Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good.   January 17, 2019 Britain's Own Partition If Britain leaves the European Union with no Brexit deal, it will gain a new border—with Ireland—and checkpoints to control it. This is Britain's partition of India coming home to roost, author Pankaj Mishra writes in a damning New York Times piece that suggests violence could ensue and sees in Brexiteers the same privately educated ruling class that drew borders around the world, including the hastily executed 1947 partition of India that cost over a million lives—and the same hubris over Britain's place in the world and recklessness with planning. "As partition comes home, threatening bloodshed in Ireland and secession in Scotland, and an unimaginable chaos of no-deal Brexit looms, ordinary British people stand to suffer from the untreatable exit wounds once inflicted by Britain's bumbling chumocrats on millions of Asians and Africans," Mishra writes.   The Shutdown Is a Bad Look for US Diplomacy The State Dept. is calling furloughed diplomats back to work, Reuters reports, but the shutdown has offered a bad look for the US, former US ambassador to Indonesia, Algeria, and South Africa Cameron Hume told reporters on a conference call. The problem isn't just US diplomats not getting paychecks, but the foreign nationals who work with US embassies around the world. "It sort of makes us look like Marie Antoinette in the French Revolution to say to these local employees and these junior officers who are not being paid, 'Let them eat cake,'" Hume said—particularly as top US diplomats have been flown back to Washington this week for a conference. Congo's Transition and Africa's Democratic Slide The Democratic Republic of Congo's first peaceful transition of power since independence has been fraught with claims of election fraud—including data obtained by the Financial Times suggesting the surprise winner announced last week, opposition candidate Felix Tshisekedi, may not have really won. The African Union is calling for a delay in releasing final results. As the country awaits 17-year president Joseph Kabila's exit, perhaps most troubling are so-far-unsubstantiated theories Kabila may have cut an election-rigging deal to retain influence: Foreign Affairs' Nic Cheeseman and Jeffrey Smith situate the controversy within a broader decline of freedom and democracy in Africa, noting the importance of leaders leaving power and going so far as to allege that Kabila, "unable to anoint his chosen successor thanks to his unpopularity … manipulate[d] the polls to ensure the victory of an opposition leader he hopes will be weak and pliant, empowering him to govern from the shadows." Al-Shabbab's Deadly Resilience The attack on a hotel in Nairobi this week that killed at least 21 was claimed by al-Shabaab, the Islamist militant group that perpetrated the 2013 shopping mall attack in the same city, and it shows the group's continued threat despite Western efforts. The group has "increased in strength even in the face of a relentless counter-terrorism campaign backed by the United States that saw 45 publicly confirmed airstrikes in Somalia in 2018," security and intelligence firm The Soufan Group writes, pointing out that al-Shabaab has "consistently demonstrated an uncanny ability to adapt in the face of adversity" in the region. Fighting it will fall to African coalition forces, if the Trump administration's global retrenchment reaches East Africa, the group writes. US Army Reflects on Iraq The Iraq war involved a series of mistakes, but they were honest ones, the US Army War College concludes in two lengthy retrospective volumes on Iraq released today. The US strategic failure in Iraq "came as a byproduct of a long series of decisions—acts of commission and omission—made by well-trained and intelligent leaders making what seemed to be reasonable decisions" at the time, the authors write—from failing to understand militia groups' aims to withdrawing too quickly, only to return three years later as ISIS rose. Tragically, after the 2003 invasion, the "resulting power vacuum and governance gap have never been fully filled by the post-Saddam Iraqi state." And more-powerful adversaries will draw lessons to use against the US in its next war, which might not be of America's choosing, the authors write. Share Tweet Fwd unsubscribe from this list update subscription preferences  Copyright © 2019 Cable News Network, Inc. A WarnerMedia Company., All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you subscribed to CNN newsletters. Our mailing address is: Cable News Network, Inc. A WarnerMedia Company. 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