On GPS: Zelensky on Ukraine’s Path Forward

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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On Today’s Show

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

After last weekend’s meeting between Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Fareed says there is nothing wrong with seeking a deal with Putin, nor with wanting a settlement in which all sides gain something.

But diplomacy begins with understanding the person across the table, Fareed argues, assessing that Witkoff and Kushner see a businessman looking for a win-win. Putin’s record suggests he is something very different: a man who has repeatedly been willing to impose costs on Russia, destabilize other countries and risk losses if doing so weakens the US.

After that: In Kyiv, Fareed has a wide-ranging conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The war in Ukraine has entered an even more dangerous phase, as Russia and Ukraine trade aerial assaults—with Russian missiles pummeling Ukrainian cities on a near daily basis. At the Yalta European Strategy Annual Meeting, Fareed asks Zelensky about the path forward as the US tries to restart peace talks.

NATO members have seen a surge in mysterious incidents, many of which have been blamed on Moscow. Such threats to NATO were part of the reason why, according to CNN reporting, CIA director John Ratcliffe made a surprise visit to Moscow last month to deliver a warning. For more, Fareed is joined by Poland’s foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Radosław Sikorski.

As Russian missiles fly in, Ukraine has flexed its own impressive ability to strike with drones, far behind enemy lines. Fareed talks about the all-important air war with a Ukrainian drone commander who goes by the call sign Vector. His unit was the first to strike deep inside Russian territory.

Finally: Fareed talks with Iryna Chochetkina, who in 2005 launched a company that has since become an e-commerce giant and the backbone of Ukrainian retail. That has made it a target of Russian attacks.

China: Still Rising

Venture outside the US, and you might find yourself hailing a rideshare in a BYD, looking out the window at a sign advertising Huawei electronics. At the European Council on Foreign Relations, Mark Leonard writes that China’s global economic footprint has coincided with something else: growing cultural reach.

“Just as Hollywood once showed the world what modern life looked like, China is showing African, Latin American and even American young people what an economy built on green energy, mobile payments and other services, and advanced robotics looks like,” Leonard writes. “In many parts of the West, disillusionment has given rise to Chinamaxxing on social media, with American and European influencers performatively embracing Chinese mannerisms and aesthetics. And in the global south, young people aren’t just imitating Chinese practices like drinking hot water or trying out tai chi. They are watching as China reshapes their daily experiences.”

‘The Emerging US–China Détente’

Happily, a stronger China might mean a more stable US–China relationship and less likelihood of a new superpower war, Da Wei argues in Foreign Affairs. Under President Donald Trump, the US has levied tariffs, limited access to US-designed microchips, and sanctioned Chinese tech giants. China has mostly responded in kind, raising its own tariffs on US goods and answering US sanctions with export controls on minerals critical to high-tech goods. The strategy has worked: faced with China’s retaliations, Trump has backed off some of his economic threats. As Da writes, this has begun to produce something like a stable equilibrium in US–China relations—and as Beijing gets more confident and comfortable with the idea of competition, it is more likely to accept and work through America’s proposed diplomatic frameworks that center on it.

Who Won the War on Terror?

With the passing of the 25th anniversary of 9/11 on Friday, debate rages as to who (if anyone) won the multi-decade “war on terror.”

The US has not suffered an attack similar to 9/11 since that day, and in a Foreign Affairs essay, Daniel Byman writes: “A quarter century after Osama bin Laden gave the order for the 9/11 attacks, his successors have not built a durable transnational movement capable of repeatedly attacking the United States and forcing governments to bend to their demands. The sense of historic possibility that once made the jihadi movement so threatening to Western countries has faded. The United States may not have won the war on terrorism, but the jihadis clearly lost.”

Arguing the counterpoint, Ali Soufan writes for The Atlantic that al Qaeda successfully wrong-footed the US into failure of a larger kind. “As 9/11 and its aftermath have shown, American security depends on many kinds of faith,” Soufan writes. “Allies must trust U.S. leadership. Citizens must have confidence in their government. Policy makers must believe in America’s deepest norms and values. Over the past 25 years, the U.S. has frayed each of these bonds of trust. This is exactly what bin Laden sought to achieve.”

The New Yorker’s Robin Wright notes that the very definition of terrorism has changed, as Trump has labeled Latin American drug cartels as terrorist groups. Meanwhile, the threat of foreign terrorism may have diminished, but the threat of domestic US terrorism has risen.

Today, “terrorism is enormously more complex and diffuse” than it was on 9/11, Wright writes. Quoting Georgetown professor and Inside Terrorism author Bruce Hoffman, Wright observes that “current trend lines ‘harken back to the 1990s,’ when the threat from Al Qaeda was ‘dismissed’ as ‘local and inconsequential.’”

Wright concludes: “For all the lives lost and treasure spent, ‘the underlying causes of international terrorism that led to al Qaeda’s anti-Western bent remain largely unaddressed,’ William Braniff, a former senior Homeland Security official who is now the executive director of the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University, explained. ‘Most terrorist organizations today seem to be channelling that violence more locally,’ he told me. ‘That, of course, was probably what most analysts would have said of overseas terrorist organizations on September 10th, 2001.’”