View this email in your browser Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by guest editor Jonah Bader.   November 19, 2018 The Incredible Shrinking Earth California continues to be ravaged by its deadliest wildfires in history, reflecting a monumental shift taking place in the world. "[T]he earth, for humans, has begun to shrink, under our feet," writes Bill McKibben in The New Yorker. "Until now, human beings have been spreading, from our beginnings in Africa, out across the globe," McKibben points out. "But a period of contraction is setting in as we lose parts of the habitable earth." Some places are being wiped off the map as sea levels rise, while other areas are becoming unbearably hot. "By 2070, tropical regions that now get one day of truly oppressive humid heat a year can expect between 100 and 250 days, if the current levels of greenhouse-gas emissions continue."  And don't expect global warming to turn "the Arctic into the new Midwest" anytime soon. The soil is poor and the melting permafrost layer "cracks roads, tilts houses, and uproots trees."    A New Geoeconomic World Order Trade tensions between the US and China were on full display this weekend at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit when leaders failed to agree on a joint statement for the first time ever. But what looks like an economic dispute may actually be a security dispute, suggest Anthea Roberts, Henrique Choer Moraes, and Victor Ferguson for Lawfare. After the Cold War, Western policymakers viewed trade as a boon to security because they believed "deepening economic interdependence would lessen the chance of war" and "incorporating hold-out states such as China and former members of the Soviet Union into the system would socialize them into becoming 'responsible stakeholders,'" the authors write. But today, there is "a greater focus on relative economic gains given their implications for security; and increased concern over the security risks posed by interdependence in terms of undermining state control, self-sufficiency and resilience." "We appear to be entering into a new geoeconomic world order, characterized by great power rivalry between the United States and China and the clear use of economic tools to achieve strategic goals." Living the Chinese Dream The American dream has moved to China, according to Javier Hernández and Quoctrung Bui of The New York Times. "China has risen so quickly that your chances of improving your station in life there vastly exceed those in the United States." We often hear about how well the top percentile of Americans is doing, and indeed their incomes grew by more than 200% from 1980 to 2014, Hernández and Bui show. But even the poorest Chinese saw their incomes grow by about 200% during that period. China's middle class enjoyed a roughly 500% increase and the richest percentile saw a staggering rise of more than 1500%. That explains why, "[i]n a country still haunted by the Cultural Revolution, where politics are tightly circumscribed by an authoritarian state, the Chinese are now among the most optimistic people in the world—much more so than Americans and Europeans, according to public opinion surveys." Bye-Bye Dubai Foreign investors have started to sour on Saudi Arabia in recent weeks, but things are also looking bleak in the country's neighbor and ally, the United Arab Emirates, suggests Zainab Fattah for Bloomberg. "Dubai prospered as a kind of Switzerland in the Gulf, a place to do business walled off from the often violent rivalries of the Middle East," Fattah writes, citing expert Jim Krane. Now the UAE "has become an active player in those conflicts, fighting in civil wars from Libya to Yemen and joining the Saudi-led boycott of Qatar." That has made investors skittish. Dubai has also suffered from low oil prices and the global lurch toward protectionism. Its rulers "built a fishing village into a hub for finance, trade and tourism in the region—but now that region is changing, perhaps for good."   The Simple Tool Empowering the World's Poorest Women "[T]he total number of women and girls using a modern method of contraception in the world's 69 lowest-income countries [grew] to more than 317 million," according to a new report by Family Planning 2020, an increase of 46 million since 2012.  The group estimates that modern contraception in those countries prevented a whopping 119 million unintended pregnancies, 20 million dangerous abortions, and 137,000 deaths in a single year. The impact is not only life-saving but life-changing. "When a woman or adolescent girl can decide for herself whether and when to get pregnant, she can shape the trajectory of her own life. She's more likely to finish school, pursue higher education, and embark on a career if she wishes."   Be the Global Briefing Editor! 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