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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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April 4, 2024
‘Gloom in Ukraine’

Kyiv has addressed its widely noted manpower shortage, landing on a new
policy to conscript more soldiers by expanding its draft age. Still,
many assessments of Ukraine’s battlefield position—and how it will
evolve this year—are less than positive.

As keen war observer Michael Kofman surmised in the most recent War on
the Rocks podcast episode, Kyiv’s current top tasks are to replenish manpower; cope with a lack of artillery ammunition, as congressional Republicans block additional US military aid and as Europe has said it
can muster only half the million shells it promised; and building up
defensive fortifications, as some analysts expect Russia to launch a new offensive this year.

Writing of the “gloom in Ukraine” in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Tim Judah finds less optimism among Ukrainians than was palpable two years ago, after the stunningly successful defense of Kyiv
from Russia’s initial onslaught.

“More than 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been sent to NATO countries
for training, but it is common to hear that much of what they learned
was irrelevant,” Judah writes, reflecting on the dashed hopes for last year’s Western-trained and -equipped Ukrainian counteroffensive. “Their instructors’ experience in Iraq and Afghanistan held no lessons for
waging modern trench warfare, for dealing with hundreds of miles of
minefields, and for coping with a technologically advanced enemy who can
see you almost 24/7 and whom you can see on the front, too, thanks to
drones. And so, with the failure of last year’s counteroffensive to take
more than a few villages, and with Russia now launching its own counteroffensive, Ukrainian morale has plummeted, and many foreign
analysts are painting a gloomy picture.”

Observers in Ukraine and abroad been very wrong before: Expectations of
an immediate Russian victory proved too pessimistic, and expectations of
a romping Ukrainian counteroffensive last year proved the opposite.
Still, Judah writes that artillery shells “are not the only problem. In
the early months of the war tens of thousands of Ukrainians joined the
military to fight the Russians, but now that enthusiasm has evaporated …
Too many are spending too long at the front without being relieved, and
behind the lines you hear people asking questions they never would have
asked two years ago.”

One element of war analysis has remained constant: It is expected to
continue. In a Foreign Affairs essay, Branislav L. Slantchev and Hein
Goemans write that neither side has incentive to negotiate an end. Kyiv
will not accede to Moscow’s maximalist demands of ceding land and
installing a pro-Russian government, and Moscow will not accept an
independent, pro-Western Ukraine, Slantchev and Goemans write—so the
fighting figures to continue, even if the front lines move.


The State of ISIS

The brutal, genocidal terrorist group ISIS saw its territorial caliphate defeated in 2019. Since then, it had fallen out of international headlines—until the horrific attack on a Moscow concert venue last
month. Claimed by ISIS and said by US intelligence to have been
perpetrated by the group’s Afghan branch ISIS-K, the Moscow attack
raised new questions about the level of danger currently posed by
transnational jihadist terrorism.

In general, jihadists have proven resilient, but their threat is mostly
limited to places like West Africa, not strategically central to the
world’s major military and economic powers, Barak Mendelsohn wrote in
the current issue of the West Point counterterrorism journal CTC
Sentinel. As for ISIS specifically, Colin P. Clarke and Christopher J. O’Leary sound a more fearful alarm at the Foreign Policy Research
Institute. Noting recent disrupted ISIS-K terrorist plots in Europe,
they write that five years after the collapse of its caliphate, “ISIS
and its affiliates have demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt and
survive, transforming into a decentralized network of regional branches,
many of which retain the capacity to launch high-profile terrorist
attacks.” The Moscow attack “was a stark reminder of the group’s reach and demonstrated that, with the deadly marriage of capability and
intent, Islamic State jihadists could look to target US embassies,
facilities, or personnel abroad.” The caliphate may be gone, they write,
but ISIS’s “ideological appeal endures.” In a New York Times guest opinion essay, Clarke and Christopher P. Costa write that the US still
hasn’t figured out how to defeat the terrorist group definitively: “Stripping the Islamic State of its self-proclaimed caliphate is not the
same as beating it.”



Afghanistan presents its own problem. In a recent interview with ABC’s
Martha Raddatz, retired Gen. Frank McKenzie—who opposed the total US withdrawal from Afghanistan—argued the US left behind an environment in
which jihadism has festered. Despite the promises and intentions of
President Joe Biden when he pulled US troops from the country, The Wall
Street Journal’s editorial board writes, the US has little visibility
into what Afghanistan-based jihadists are doing. Then again, as Daniel
Byman of Georgetown University and the Center for Strategic and
International Studies told Fareed recently on GPS, it’s encouraging that
the US delivered a warning to Moscow before last month’s attack; that suggests US intelligence has some ability to monitor jihadist terrorists
around the world.

Milei’s Top Challenges

Argentine President Javier Milei took office in December with radical
plans. The libertarian economist had campaigned on a platform of
slashing state expenditures and delivering harsh medicine to stabilize Argentina’s long-dysfunctional, sovereign-debt-ridden, inflation-plagued economy. That has also made him something of a conservative darling. As
he tests his plans, Bloomberg’s Patrick Gillespie writes that Milei
faces four big challenges: taming hyperinflation, balancing government
books, getting lawmakers on board with his plans, and getting Argentina
back into international lending markets.



At Americas Quarterly, editor-in-chief (and recent GPS guest) Brian
Winter adds another challenge to the list: history. When debating the
cause of their country’s problems, Winter writes, Argentines blame
various episodes in their wildly differing series of governments
stretching back to 1930, when Argentina was one of the world’s 10
richest countries. As such, new and different plans mostly incur skepticism.



“Almost all mainstream economists … say the only solution is austerity,” Winter writes. “But in the short run, that only deepens the prevailing negativity—it causes wages to fall, and unemployment to rise. It makes
the pessimists say ‘Oh no, here we go again.’ Patience runs out, and
people take to the street, because history has taught them the promised
payoff will not come—or at least, it will not last. … At the same time, among all the Argentine presidents of my lifetime, Milei is the one who
sounds most like the people I’ve spent 1,000 hours listening to over coffee.”

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