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   Sept. 20, 2019 Fareed: The Central Flaw in Trump's Iran Strategy "'The enemy gets a vote.' US military leaders are fond of using that line," Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column. "It describes the central mistake of President Trump's Iran policy." Trump's mistake, Fareed argues, has been ignorance of the enemy and a failure to plan. When he withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal and replaced it with a "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran, Trump failed to anticipate what might come next or garner support from allies. As a result, the current crisis seems beyond Trump's control. What the Whistleblower Story Reveals About Intelligence Oversight Speculation has swirled over reporting that an unnamed whistleblower claimed President Trump made promises to a foreign leader—but while we wait for facts to shake out, the story has revealed an ominous politicization of US intelligence oversight, former acting CIA director Michael Morell and former assistant attorney general for national security David Kris write for The Washington Post. While the current director of national intelligence and the intelligence community's inspector general, have disputed how to handle the complaint, Morell and Kris argue that Congress's role is being threatened. The New York Times agrees, writing in an editorial: "Maybe there's not that much to the complaint; we can't know yet. What we do know is there is an important principle at stake: that Congress is supposed to have oversight." The Next Wave of Climate Action: Pressure the Banks In a New Yorker essay, Bill McKibben writes that banks and hedge funds do more to promote carbon emissions than oil and coal companies themselves. (He calls out Chase bank as a leading carbon funder, at orders of magnitude greater than ExxonMobil.) With climate activists organizing a global strike today, McKibben suggests the best way to fight global warming is to pressure banks to yank investment—which would downgrade fossil-fuel stocks and force an energy transition. The Economist, which dedicates its current issue to climate change, makes an argument we've heard before: that capitalism is failing to self-regulate in a way that reduces emissions—generating political momentum against it. If free-market capitalism is to survive global warming, The Economist writes, "it must up its game." The US Has Fought Iran's Enemies Writing in The National Interest, Ali Demirdas offers a view of recent Middle East history that runs counter to the current talk of US-Iran enmity. America, in Demirdas's assessment, has been fighting Iran's enemies for decades—from removing Saddam Hussein from Iraq, to toppling the hardline Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan, to ousting Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, to taking on ISIS. "More than seven thousand American servicemen have been killed, over 53,000 have been wounded, and more than $5.9 trillion in American taxpayer money has been spent since 2001, only to serve Iraq and Afghanistan to Iran on a silver platter," Demirdas writes. Is the Next Terrorist Threat Already Brewing? ISIS was famously hatched in a prison camp in Iraq, and Colin P. Clarke of the Foreign Policy Research Institute cautions that history may be repeating itself. With tens of thousands held in Syrian detention camps, Clarke writes, conditions "have fueled radicalization and the most extreme detainees, including hardline female ISIS members, patrol the camps in an attempt to replicate the austere version of sharia law that prevailed in the caliphate." His warning: As the West fails to repatriate its citizens who left to fight for ISIS, conditions are ripe for a new wave of radicalization. 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. One CNN Center Atlanta, GA 30303 Add us to your address book What did you like about today's Global Briefing? What did we miss? Let us know what you think: GlobalBriefing@cnn.com Sign up to get updates on your favorite CNN Original Series, special CNN news coverage and other newsletters.​   Sign Up for Fareed's Global Briefing