Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Jason Miks.

January 9, 2018

Reagan's Big Lesson for Handling Iran

President Trump's upcoming decision on whether to renew temporary waivers for US sanctions against Iran is typically being framed as a simple choice between keeping or killing the nuclear deal. But keeping the deal shouldn't preclude the United States from backing the protesters in Iran—and putting significant pressure on Tehran. Just look to Ronald Reagan's example, write Richard Goldberg and Dennis Ross for Politico Magazine.

President Reagan "successfully negotiated a major arms control agreement with the Soviet Union—all while publicly calling it an 'evil empire,' building up America's strategic deterrence, promoting regime change and applying economic pressure tied to the Soviet record on human rights," they write.

"Iranian protesters are making a statement and we should not ignore it. The president would be well within his rights under the JCPOA and international law to follow Reagan's example and answer them with action. Just as the Iranian regime feels free to spread its power and reach within the region notwithstanding the JCPOA, so should the United States and Europe feel free to impose sanctions tied to human rights, terror and missiles notwithstanding the same."

The Dangerous Myth About Facing Down Kim

The announcement Tuesday that North and South Korea have agreed to military talks—and that North Korea will send a delegation to next month's Winter Olympics—is likely to ease tensions on the Peninsula, for now at least. That could be a welcome antidote to some of the speculation over America's military options, which Abraham Denmark suggests in Foreign Affairs tend to rest on a troubling myth: that a limited US strike is possible.

"A successful preventive strike would likely require surprise. If Pyongyang became convinced that a US strike was imminent, it might see itself in a 'use or lose' situation and attack before the United States has a chance to take out its weapons—in effect preempting the prevention," Denmark writes.

"Yet achieving surprise will be difficult. Washington would likely seek to work with Seoul and Tokyo to prepare their militaries for a potential North Korean response, which would involve moving troops and other resources into the region. South Korea and Japan would also want to ready their citizens to give them a better chance at survival in the event of a war. Finally, the United States might wish to evacuate the dependents of US military personnel (of whom there are over 10,000) out of South Korea prior to a strike. These are very large operations that would be all but impossible for North Korea to miss."

Russia's "Imitated Democracy"

The decision to bar Alexey Navalny—the most prominent Russian opposition figure—from running in March's presidential election underscored the true nature of democracy in the country, writes Christian Esch for Der Spiegel. It's "imitated," not real.

Navalny "was the only one to run a campaign worthy of the name, with trips across the country filled with passionate appearances, a permanent staff and rallies. His calculation was that if the Kremlin were to exclude the only real challenger, it would expose the election charade as a fraud, a scenario the Russian leadership would surely like to avoid," Esch argues.

"But the Kremlin took a different tack and prevented real politics from intruding on its simulated democracy. On a stage filled with fake props and actors posing as politicians, it is too dangerous to allow a real politician to be seen.

"Imitated democracy is a complex political entity. It comes without free and fair elections, an independent parliament and an independent judiciary. But neither does it come with the mass mobilization and mass repression characteristic of dictatorships. Imitated democracy relies more on deception than on violence."

One Issue That's Uniting Republicans – and Democrats

The United States might sometimes feel more divided than ever. But there is at least one issue that is increasingly uniting members of both parties, writes Walter Russell Mead in the Wall Street Journal: China.

"Within the Republican Party, China is what unites the Steve Bannon wing with the H.R. McMasters and the Rex Tillersons. Where the populists see a threat to American jobs and wages from unfair Chinese competition, the national-security types worry about protecting important sea lanes and American allies in the region from an aggressive, rapidly arming power. As many traditional pro-China voices in corporate America fall silent in the face of Beijing's mercantilism, the Richard Nixon-George H.W. Bush legacy of Republican friendship with China is on the wane," Mead writes.

"Democrats also are increasingly focused on perceived threats from Beijing. Organized labor has long argued that Chinese competition undermines American wages and jobs. But now China, not content with suppressing human rights in its own territory, is seeking to advance the cause of nondemocratic governance in places like Venezuela and Zimbabwe. That brings it into conflict with the powerful human-rights constituency in Democratic politics.

"Beyond that, the often left-leaning tech lords of Silicon Valley have been hit by some of China's most aggressively mercantilist abuses."

2017 Was the Best Year Ever

Washington might feel in constant turmoil, tensions with North Korea loom, and the situation in Yemen is bleak. But 2017 was probably the best year in human history, writes Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. Really.

"Every day, the number of people around the world living in extreme poverty (less than about $2 a day) goes down by 217,000, according to calculations by Max Roser, an Oxford University economist who runs a website called Our World in Data. Every day, 325,000 more people gain access to electricity. And 300,000 more gain access to clean drinking water," Kristof writes.

"As recently as the 1960s, a majority of humans had always been illiterate and lived in extreme poverty. Now fewer than 15 percent are illiterate, and fewer than 10 percent live in extreme poverty. In another 15 years, illiteracy and extreme poverty will be mostly gone. After thousands of generations, they are pretty much disappearing on our watch.

"Just since 1990, the lives of more than 100 million children have been saved by vaccinations, diarrhea treatment, breast-feeding promotion and other simple steps."

US Kids Far More Likely to Die Young Than Peers: Study

American children have a "70 percent greater chance of dying before adulthood than kids born into other wealthy, democratic countries," writes Sarah Kliff for Vox, citing a new study.

The 20-country study "shows that the United States lags far behind peer countries on child health outcomes. It estimates that, since 1961, America's poor performance accounts for more than 600,000 excess child deaths—deaths that wouldn't have happened if these kids were born into other wealthy countries."

Why? Kliff points to at least three possibilities noted by researchers, including America's fragmented health system, a high gun homicide rate, and a "rise in childhood poverty in the 1980s that coincided with the United States falling behind its peer countries on health outcomes."

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