On Fareed Zakaria GPS

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

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September 15, 2024

On Today's Show

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

In Kyiv this week, Fareed sat down for an exclusive interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is still very much at the center of global politics as his country seeks to hold its ground against Russia's invading army.

Can Ukraine stave off a recent Russian advance in the Donbas—and continued attacks on Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure? Will Ukraine's surprise incursion into Russian territory pay dividends? And what are the prospects for navigating this deadly conflict toward an end? Fareed hears Zelensky's answers to all those questions and more.

Fareed also gives viewers his take on Kyiv and how it has changed since Fareed's visits in the last two years. The threat of Russia's invasion is felt more acutely, and the commitment of Western allies is in doubt; to Fareed, this reveals an urgency that is sensed much more intensely in Kyiv than in allied Western capitals.

After that: Fareed visits with a Ukrainian teenager, Masha, whom GPS viewers met in 2022 along with her fellow students. Fareed interviewed Masha again last year as she continued her life in Kyiv anxiously, with her father serving on the front lines. A year after Masha's father was killed, Fareed talks with her again about the war.

Finally: Ukrainian troops are holding a tenuous front line in the east of their country. Fareed talks with Yegor Firsov, a chief sergeant in the army who recently returned from the front lines, about life on the front and how Ukrainian forces are faring.

Whither the Tank?

For Ukrainians, the war is real life. For global military analysts, it is rife with strategic questions and insights. One of them is whether the tank still enjoys the battlefield importance it has since World War II.

Early in the war, David Johnson wrote for War on the Rocks that tanks had taken a backseat to smaller weapons like drones and portable Javelin anti-tank missiles. Later, the Western clamor for German Leopard II tanks to be delivered to Ukraine saw the tank come back in style.

In The Wall Street Journal, Alistair MacDonald, Gordon Lubold, and Ievgeniia Sivorka observe that tanks face new skepticism among world the world's militaries, given how the Ukraine war has gone. In some cases, tanks are being modified to defend against drones or to make them more maneuverable. They write: "Even as tanks help Ukraine push into Russia, armies are rethinking how the powerful vehicles are made and deployed after a recent history of being humbled in combat. Tanks were once the king of the battlefield. But the proliferation of drones in Ukraine means the large, noisy vehicles can be spotted and targeted within minutes. That has seen dozens of cutting-edge Western tanks used only sparingly in the battle they were meant to shape, while others have been damaged, destroyed or captured."

What Kind of Economy Is This?

The US economy is at a crossroads. Growth and employment are stronger than many expected heading out of the pandemic crash. A "soft landing" appears to have been achieved, as inflation has been tamed without incurring a recession. But prices are still high, and the purchasing power of many Americans has not caught up to the high inflation that outpaced their wages.  

At the same time, the Federal Reserve might lower interest rates to give the economy a kickstart—or so investors appear to think. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently made headlines by not ruling out stagflation.

Far below all those ambivalent topline indicators, a Financial Times feature by Gregory Meyer examines another: sales at discount stores, which can reflect how the low-income segment of the economy is faring.

Meyer writes that "for many years," the business strategy of these companies "generated impressive returns for investors, even during recessions in the wider economy. But in recent weeks, both Dollar General and Dollar Tree have cut their sales outlooks and warned of pressure on their core consumers, triggering fierce sell-offs in their stock prices. Raging inflation and the rising interest rates that followed it disproportionately affected lower-income customers. Dollar stores have become real-time indicators of the financial strains at the lower end of America's income distribution. How working class Americans feel about the economy will be pivotal in November's presidential election. … Analysts and executives debate the extent to which dollar stores' current slowdown is a portent for the US economy or a sign of a shift in the hyper-competitive retail marketplace. Walmart, famous for its aggressive competition on prices, reported a robust increase in US sales during its latest quarter."

'Living the Nakba'

The British withdrawal from post-Ottoman Palestine in 1948 resulted in religious–ethnic conflict and a scramble for territory between Jews and Arabs. Israelis know it as the creation of the State of Israel. Palestinians know it as the Nakba, or "catastrophe," a tragedy of mass displacement and historic loss.

In The New York Review of Books, Tareq Baconi reviews two books about Palestinian displacement: Raja Shehadeh's "We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir" and Fida Jiryis' "Stranger in My Own Land: Palestine, Israel and One Family's Story of Home." Explaining the former, Baconi notes the intergenerational quality of Palestinians' political struggle, as Shehadeh's book details his relationship with his lawyer-activist father and his own similar path. In the latter, Jiryis observers that Palestinians "were becoming accustomed to living as outsiders in their workplaces, schools, social settings, and homes," Baconi writes.

In reviewing these two accounts of Palestinian life, Baconi stresses a theme. Both authors "likewise grieved as the Nakba continued to break their homes apart," Baconi writes. "Palestinians have long argued that the Nakba is not a finite event but an ongoing process of violent dispossession."