Salient to Investors:
Fareed Zakaria said:
- History shows that the more countries integrate within the global community, the less incentives they have to be spoilers.
- Iran and the US share common interests on the threat from ISIS, the stability of Iraq and Afghanistan.
- The most successful and dominating countries in the Middle East are all non-Arab: Iran, Turkey and Israel.
- In 2014, the number of global refugees reached 60 million: 20 million had to leave their own countries, 40 million had to move within their own county.
Robin Wright at the Wilson Center said:
- The majority of Iranian people and voters in Iran were born after the revolution, and very much want to be part of the 21st century.
- Diplomacy failed to prevent the last four countries from joining the nuclear club – Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea.
- Iran is one of the most stable states in the region.
Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal said:
- Iran put its 2009 midlife crisis in jail. We are not dealing with the Iranian people but an Iranian regime that thinks it is winning regionally and internationally on many fronts.
- The nuclear deal will turbocharge Sunni-Shia competition – the Saudis are not going to take this lying down. Expect more radicalism and more regional confrontation as a consequence of the Iran nuclear deal.
Vali Nasr at Johns Hopkins said:
- Iran’s major headache in the region is ISIS. Iran is very much in a defensive mode and why they wanted the nuclear deal.
- Iran spends less in absolute terms per capita on defense than all of its neighbors who have much more technologically advanced weaponry.
- Want ISIS defeated but not by the Iranians or for the benefit of the Iranians.
Patrick Radden Keefe at The New Yorker said the escape of El Chapo will be a huge problem for security cooperation between Mexico and the US.
Paul Krugman at the New York Times said:
- The Greek bailout deal humiliates Greece and does not end the crisis. The strategy of cut, cut, and austerity your way back to solvency remains unchanged: it was not working, has never worked in this kind of situation, and will not work. The trap that the euro has turned into, along with the austerity policies imposed to try to keep Greece in the euro, are really responsible for the disaster.
- In the end, Greece will get either the enormous debt relief it is not getting now or have to exit the euro, which would have huge implications for the future of the EU. Greece would start to recover, which would encourage other challenges to he euro. But no repeat of 2008.
- This is not a Lehman-like crisis. A Lehman event would not cause a Lehman-like event now because of buffers since erected.
- Despite the holes, Greece collects a lot of taxes – a higher share of GDP than the US. Greece is not as overregulated and problematic an economy as it once was and has done far more reform than people think.
David Miliband at the Intl Rescue Committee said:
- World political fragility is not surprising given that a country like Niger, twice the size of France, has an average per capita income of $1 a day.
- 30 to 35 fragile states in the world cannot contain ethnic and political and religious difference within peaceful boundaries and lack the anchor of either regional or international sponsors to keep order. Globalization is operating with an assertion of local, ethnic, religious identity.
- There is no real poliitical power that will bring a diplomatic solution in Syria. This is has become a Syria and Iraq problem and is worse than a year ago and will be worse again in a year because the humanitarian catastrophe is feeding the political instability.
Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times said:
- The rise in world refugees reflects the decline of the Cold War where states are no longer pawns to be supported in a larger game.
- There is a weariness, an exhaustion, with these crises around the world.
- US food aid programs are not based on saving people from starvation but are essentially US agriculture support programs and US shipping programs.
Watch the video at http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/category/gps-episodes/ or read the full transcript at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1507/19/fzgps.01.html
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