Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here. April 16, 2024 | |
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The Middle East Edges Closer to a Larger War |
"The inevitability of Iran's strike against Israel … does little to lessen the significant escalation it represents," writes Jeff Jager of the Middle East Institute's (MEI's) Defense & Security Program. On April 1, Israel struck an Iranian consular building in Damascus, killing Iranian military commanders. Observers had assumed Iran would respond, wondering only about the timing and scale. On Saturday night, Iran did retaliate, launching hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel. As Fareed noted on Sunday's GPS, the White House's advice to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after Iran's attack, has seemed to be along the lines of: "take the win." With the help of allies and partners, Israel downed nearly all of Iran's incoming missiles and drones, demonstrating it can thwart even a large aerial assault, as the MEI's Nimrod Goren writes. Iran reportedly put word out days ahead of time that it would attack, and it quickly announced it intended no further strikes. But as the MEI's Jager and others note, Iran crossed a significant line in launching the first direct attack on Israel from its own soil, even if both the damage and surprise were limited. Now, "[t]he biggest question is whether and how Israel will respond," writes The New Yorker's Dexter Filkins. If Israel decides not to simply "take the win," so to speak, and instead feels compelled to retaliate, it could strike Iran's regional proxies or its nuclear sites, or it could launch a cyberattack, Daniel Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack write for Foreign Policy. But the decision, The New Yorker's Filkins writes, will be a very important one, as it could determine whether the Middle East spirals into a larger war—one that could drag in the US—as analysts have feared since Oct. 7. That could still happen, Iran expert Ali Vaez writes for Foreign Affairs: "The Iranians have already said that they are willing to go up the escalation ladder if Israel does retaliate. Israel could then strike back again. The Middle East did not explode on April 13, but it is still at risk of a bigger conflict that would have no winners." |
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Not Iranians, Arash Azizi writes for The Atlantic, recounting a fearful phone call from a teenage cousin in Iran after Tehran launched its Saturday strikes. "The people of Iran know that their main enemy is at home, and that war will bring them only more repression and hardship," Azizi writes. "Many Iranians will hold their own regime accountable for the horror that a hot war with Israel could bring." Iranians may not want a war, but they fear their government will drag them into one, The Economist writes, noting that Iran's newly ascendant hardline officials are more ideological than even their conservative forebears. They've made the regime more "brittle" as they "are Shia supremacists who oppose any kind of compromise with anyone inside or outside Iran," the magazine writes. Netanyahu does want a direct confrontation with Iran, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft's Trita Parsi alleges in a Foreign Policy op-ed, arguing that over the years Netanyahu has consistently pushed regional dynamics toward an Israel–Iran war that would draw in the US on his country's side. It's up to US President Joe Biden to de-escalate, Parsi writes. Washington certainly does not want a larger war to unfold, and de-escalation appears to be Biden's plan. For years, the US has hoped to pivot away from the Middle East and toward the challenge of China's rise. That priority fits with US public opinion, according to a recent Chicago Council on Global Affairs/Ipsos poll, which found respondents wanting American leaders to pay more attention mostly to the US–Mexico border and to China, as far as foreign-policy issues go. |
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Will Israel 'Take the Win'? |
After downing almost all of Iran's drones and missiles Saturday night, will Israel retaliate? Or will it decline to, considering its successful countermeasures as a great advertisement for its missile-defense capabilities, an episode that will deter adversaries in the future? On Sunday's GPS, Fareed discussed what might come next with Vali Nasr of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and New York Times National Security and White House Correspondent David Sanger. |
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War Fakes Are Now a Reality |
Fake videos of Iran's attack quickly proliferated online, Vittoria Elliott writes for Wired, citing research by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). "Just 34 of these misleading posts received more than 37 million views, according to ISD," Elliott writes. "One X post claimed that 'WW3 has officially started,' and included a video seeming to show rockets being shot into the night—except the video was actually from a YouTube video posted in 2021. … Iranian media also shared a video of the wildfires in Chile earlier this year, claiming it showed the aftermath of the attacks. This, too, began to circulate on X." |
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'What Gun Laws Can't Stop' |
The presence of guns could have made them much worse, but two knife attacks in Sydney show that gun laws can't prevent certain kinds of violent impulses, author and former Sydney Morning Herald international correspondent Latika Bourke writes for CNN Opinion. A deadly stabbing attack in a suburban Sydney mall on Saturday appeared to target women in particular: The attacker killed six victims, five of them women, and injured 12 more people. The stabbing of a bishop at an Assyrian Orthodox church on Monday, meanwhile, was labeled a "terrorist attack" by police. "Multiple people, including a new mother, slaughtered in daylight in an affluent suburb, is something Australians read about in the news when it happens in other countries," Bourke writes for CNN Opinion. "Rarely does it occur in their backyard. When it did in 1996 after the Port Arthur Massacre when a lone gunman killed 35 people, then-prime minister John Howard acted. He enacted strict gun control laws and initiated a massive buyback scheme. He had to stare down political opposition from his own supporters at the time, but his tough stance has been vindicated by the lack of mass shootings ever since. But restricting public access to weapons with the capability of mass lethality cannot stop hateful ideologies mixing with other noxious ingredients including radicalization and mental health issues. This includes misogyny." |
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