What Actually Mattered This Week: January 6 Texts, Israel and UAE's Historic Meeting
WHAT ACTUALLY MATTERED THIS WEEK
My thoughts on some of this week’s biggest news stories:
What to think about these 1/6 texts?
1) Fox’s lead Trump cheerleaders and Don Jr privately opposed the violent occupation of the Capitol.
2) None were prepared to say that publicly.
3) Trump didn’t care and refused to listen.
Many of those closest to President Trump recognized the events of 1/6 were beyond the pale.
This is an indictment of the former President. It also shows there was not a broad conspiracy to overthrow the government.
Challenge: If Trump-supporting media doesn’t write about the 1/6 texts, Trump voters won’t know about it or believe it.
The US media and social media landscape increasingly incompatible with functional democracy.
This meeting went extremely well. This was probably President Trump's largest and most unexpected foreign policy success, The Abraham Accords, which meant opening diplomatic relations between Israel and the UAE, in addition to other countries in the region.
We're seeing more investment, more tourism, and we're also seeing more intelligence cooperation, especially around issues like Iran, where frankly, both the Arab governments and the Israelis have problems.
Big question everyone's watching out for is when are the Saudis going to open up to Israel? The UAE is one of the most cosmopolitan populations out there, frankly, whereas the Saudi population is more conservative.
Time will tell.
TRUTHS, DAMNED TRUTHS, AND STATISTICS
# of international tourists Bali received in:
2019 6.2 million
2020 1.05 million
2021 45 (not a typo)
THE GZERO WORLD WE’RE JUST LIVING IN
GRAPHIC TRUTH?
领英推荐
YOUR GZERO WORLD
According to the 1619 Project's’ Nikole Hannah-Jones, America was founded on liberty, equality, and…slavery. The institution of slavery, she argues, was the foundation upon which the country achieved its economic and political greatness. It’s a claim that set the cultural world on fire when the 1619 Project was published in the New York Times in 2019 and now, as she compiles and expands upon that project in a new book, controversy has erupted once again.
For a longer, more in-depth version of my interview with Hannah-Jones, check out the GZERO World podcast.?
WORLD IN 60 SECONDS
How did Naftali Bennett's first official visit to the UAE go?
How will China "strike back" responding to recent US sanctions?
Elon Musk, Time Person of the Year. What are my thoughts?
Find out in this week’s World in 60 Seconds!
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BECAUSE THE INTERNET
Two Brazilian politicians settling a dispute over a waterpark project with a three-round MMA fight.
Petition to introduce this to Congress.
Source: Vice News
WHAT TO READ THIS WEEK
The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal by William J. Burns
Current CIA director and career ambassador William Burns wrote The Back Channel in 2019—a diplomatic memoir that stories some of the more seminal moments in Burns’ career and makes the case for the renewal of diplomacy as a first resort in the US foreign policy playbook. Burns draws on newly declassified materials, demonstrating how critical decisions were shaped and how they informed future decision-making, while offering well conceptualized critiques about the world’s leading multilateral organizations and Washington’s place in them. The Back Channel is an ode to American diplomacy and largely reflects the Biden administration’s foreign policy goal to reimagine US leadership on the world stage.
DEEP THOUGHTS
“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” – George Bernard Shaw
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Ian Bremmer is president of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media and foreign affairs columnist at TIME. He currently teaches at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and previously was a professor at New York University. You can follow him on?Twitter,?Facebook,?and?Instagram.
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Stay at home Dad
2 年Elon Musk reminds me of Henry Ford in that both established completely new industries but made mistakes in geopolitical areas. Ford and his bromance with Hitler and Musk in his anger guided move from California to Texas.