Bhinneka News Online: On Fareed Zakaria GPS

Sunday, 19 January 2020

On Fareed Zakaria GPS

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

January 19, 2020

On Today's Show

On GPS at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN:

First, Fareed gives his take on President Trump's "phase one" trade deal with China—and what it says about the emerging US-China rivalry.

The deal accomplished almost none of Trump's central goals, and it "reflects something new on the international landscape, something the United States is going to have to grapple with for decades," Fareed says. "As I argue in an essay in Foreign Affairs, China is the first real peer competitor that the United States has faced in the modern era. (Even the Soviet Union was never really an economic peer.)"

As a one-party state, China has more flexibility to stay the course against adversaries; it also has economic and geopolitical heft that will be difficult for the US to confront. In the trade war, Trump has failed to recruit allies or use the international order to America's advantage, and the deal proves that "with China, the challenge is not how tough you can be, but how smart," Fareed concludes.

Next, as tensions endure between the US and Iran, Fareed talks with Carnegie Endowment Senior Fellow Karim Sadjadpour and RAND Corporation political scientist Ariane Tabatabai, who assess the situation and where it's heading.

After that, The Atlantic's Anne Applebaum and Carnegie Senior Fellow Alexander Gabuev join Fareed to discuss Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent power shakeup, speculation that he'll retain control (in one form or another) past his presidential term limit in 2024, and what's in store for Russia after him.

For our What in the World segment, Fareed talks with Morgan Stanley Investment Management Head of Emerging Markets and Chief Global Strategist Ruchir Sharma about the last decade's trends in business, economics, and politics—and whether we can predict what the next 10 years have in store.

As fires rage in Australia, Fareed sits down with former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, now president of the Asia Society Policy Institute, to discuss climate politics in that country—where for years, a conservative government has defied consensus on global warming, Rudd says.

Finally, Fareed reviews the crowdsourced predictions of the Global Judgment Challenge, wherein the prognostication platform Good Judgment Open—which collects the predictions of "superforecasters," regular people with above-average abilities to predict events—asked the GPS audience about geopolitical outcomes in the last year. Nearly 7,000 viewers went online to make over 41,000 forecasts; tune in to see how that collective intelligence fared in 2019.