Mideast Tensions Grow, Consumer Electronics Show Spotlights AI, Divided U.S. Congress Returns, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, rising Mideast tensions spur a new round of U.S. diplomacy, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas spotlights AI and War, and the U.S. Congress is back in session with the government's shutdown looming. It's January 4th, 2024 and time for The World Next Week. I am Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Anne Robbins.

MCMAHON:
Carla, first off, welcome to 2024. It's already feels like a burdensome year, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. While we have been away, the world has not stopped turning and churning in turmoil. There is a conflict continuing in Gaza now three months or so already since October 7th. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is traveling to Israel for a fifth time since October 7th, and he has plans to visit other parts of the region. The most recent big news out of the region was the fatal drone strike on Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut. What sort of U.S. messaging can we expect?

ROBBINS:
Well, Bob, Happy New Year and unfortunately the news in the Middle East is as grim and if possibly even more disturbing as it was in the old year. So the latest developments as of Thursday morning when we're taping, this is on Tuesday, there was an explosion in a Beirut suburb killing Al-Arouri, who was the deputy Hamas minister, and he was the group's key liaison with Iran, and everyone is attributing this to the Israelis. They haven't claimed responsibility, but there were already taking something of a victory lap on it. Then on Wednesday there were two explosions in Iran, which left scores of people dead and the Israelis have a long history of assassinations in Iran, nuclear scientists blowing up missile facilities, but even Iran supreme leader who issued a statement and was threatening a response, he blamed the attack on malicious and criminal enemies, but he really stopped short of naming the Israelis.

And hours after this horrific bombings in Iran, the United States and a dozen allies warned Yemen's Houthis that they were going to face consequences should they continue attacks against ships in the Red Sea. And last weekend after the Houthis fired on U.S. helicopters who were protecting a cargo ship, the U.S. Navy sank three Houthi boats. But the U.S. has been pretty restrained when it comes to the Houthi. This is the first time they've really implied potential military consequences because I don't think they really want to threaten this really fragile truce in Yemen, but maybe there's more to come on that front. So all of these developments are really raising fears that what has been a really horrifying war in Gaza and Israel that has really mainly been contained with some shelling on the borders could now be spinning out of control.

So when we first heard of Secretary of State Blinken's visit to the region, and this is going to be as you said, his fifth to Israel and his fourth around the region since the war started, we really thought it was going to be primarily focused on urging the Israelis to reel back the war in Gaza. And now it seems to have a much wider agenda trying to stop the conflict from spinning out of control.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, that's a lot Carla. So on al-Arouri assassination, if that's in fact what it was, and again, as you said, it seems to be the case. Israelis rarely comment on such things, but it does really seem like it has, according to some experts, the Israeli markings. This is big on a number of fronts and some experts have said it signals as there's a troop pull down in Gaza, maybe the Israeli opening up a new chapter in their strikes against Hamas. They have already been threatening Hamas leaders in the past. Does this then pose a threat or should we look closely at what the Hezbollah leader had to say, Hassan Nasrallah, where he could have carefully parsed his words and it's still going to be contained?

ROBBINS:
Well, U.S. officials have been saying before this that they didn't think that the Israelis would do a strike in Beirut if they thought this was going to spark a full out war with Lebanon. But were they calculating that some other group was going to do something in Iran and you can't calculate these things. Bad things happen and there's always a potential for wider things. The U.S. has been pushing the Israelis really from the beginning of this. If you remember when Biden went to Israel right after the October 7th attacks and said, totally sympathize and empathize with this, "but don't let your rage consume you." And they've been pushing publicly, privately, privately, publicly to say to the Israelis blunt instruments is not what you want to do here. You guys are really good at targeted strikes. You guys have great special operators, and the Israelis haven't listened. More than 21,000 people have died in Gaza, and Austin in particular said they were really in danger of losing this war. They might've won some battles on the ground, but they're going to lose the war if they turn generations of people in Gaza against them. 

And so the Israeli announcement that they were going to be withdrawing several thousand troops from Gaza was being read as a shift to what the U.S. had been pushing for, potentially a more targeted war, more reliant on precision airstrikes, on special operations assaults inside of Gaza, outside of Gaza, something the Israelis have done for a long time.

So that's the hope, but you can't get away from the fact that these 21,000 plus reported killed by the Gaza Health Ministry, the fact that UN is saying that with aid delivery so restricted that half of Gaza's 2.2 million people are at the risk of starvation at this point, more than 85 percent of Gaza's people have been displaced, and these people are crowded ever smaller places. So yes, the U.S. may be getting its way finally with the Israelis, but it doesn't mitigate what's happened before and their terrible suffering. And maybe the Israelis are shifting to a new phase, but when you add to all this other disruption in the region, can you contain a wider war? I don't know.

MCMAHON:
Well, and it's also been reported that al-Arouri had played an important role in the hostage releases that have taken place to date. There are still a number of hostages at this point, and it's not exactly clear where they are, presumably in hard to reach parts of southern Gaza, but it does raise the question of whether that is a stalled process and how much of a process is involved on that front while as you say, the humanitarian situation only gets worse and more challenging. And then you have all sorts of ongoing discussion about what to do with this large, increasingly displaced population, and that's raising a lot of ire as well in terms of reports that some officials would like to transport them out of the region to another country and so forth.

ROBBINS:
Well, there had been hope a few weeks back when we were last speaking that Bill Burns, the director of Central Intelligence, had been back in the region hoping that there'd be some sort of pause and another group of swaps of hostages potentially. But this strike on al-Arouri has raised fears that it was going to impede any further talks and leading to a pause of fighting and a freeing of hostages. That was basically the read out of Washington in the last few days.

MCMAHON:
On the issue of the Houthis that you mentioned, Carla, it does seem to be kind of interesting that whereas Hezbollah does very much seem to be following Iran's bidding on restraint in its response to Israel's war in Gaza, the Houthis are not-

ROBBINS:
Until now, until now.

MCMAHON:
Until now, until now.

ROBBINS:
Yeah.

MCMAHON:
Right. The Houthis have not, though, the Houthis possess some pretty impressive firepower themselves, have created havoc in the Red Sea and global supply chains in general, forcing the U.S. to get more heavily involved. Do we get a sense that the Houthis are their own operators or are they kind of sort of plausible deniability and their role also serves Iran's purposes?

ROBBINS:
That I don't know. I certainly don't know as much about the Houthis leadership as we have been watching Hezbollah for such a long time. I do think it was quite interesting that there were a dozen countries that were issuing this warning to the Houthis, but it was also really quite carefully couched. It said you will bear consequences, but it still didn't say military consequences because there is this other equity which is nobody wants to unleash the full war in Yemen again. So there's once again a careful balance that is there.

There is one other element that we need to be, I think thinking about, which is sort of the politics of all of this inside of Israel. There's a lot of pressure on Netanyahu to get these hostages released. The ones who one hopes are surviving, and you have to balance this of wanting to go after Hamas leaders wherever they are. Netanyahu is certainly feeling very vulnerable politically. There's a recent poll that came out that showed that only 15 percent of Israelis want Bibi to remain in power once the war against Hamas ends. And the high court struck down this judicial reform that we spent so much time talking about before. So Bibi has to weigh the need to get the hostages out, the need to show some sort of progress in this, and he's also been feeling a lot of pressure from the Americans. So this is quite the stew.

MCMAHON:
And we will continue to track this. It's become a bit of a tracking exercise in this podcast, I think, Carla.

ROBBINS:
Yes, a really frightening one. Quite grim. 

So Bob, let's talk about something happier. Las Vegas. No, the Consumer Electronics Show. This is the world's largest consumer tech trade show. Companies, Intel, Samsung, pretty much everybody else showing off their latest products. This is not open to the public, although lots of journalists get to go and it doesn't take us long to hear about all the cool stuff they want to sell us. So what are going to be this year's really cool items?

MCMAHON:
Well, we should first mention on sort of the scale of this, because Vegas does everything in a big scale, but this as the CES show organizers have touted, this is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, internationally attended event that the U.S. hosts on an annual basis maybe just competing only with say quadrennial Olympics in the event the U.S. hosts one of those.

ROBBINS:
Bigger than Comic-Con?

MCMAHON:
Well, that would be a great one to compare it to because Comic-Con's actually taking on a life of its own. So hold that thought. We'll do a Comic-Con discussion down the road, Carla, but the point is, it's enormous. It's highly sought after the tech world goes to this because it has gained a reputation over five or six decades of being a place with the big, shiny new things that will transform the tech world, but also the consumer world tend to appear, including one that's dear to my heart, which was the introduction of Pong, the great game that Atari released in the mid-seventies that transformed television screens and one Christmas for myself and looks laughably slow and ponderous these days. But the point is that it's where VCRs, it's where DVDs, all sorts of tech that's supposed to be getting polished and ready for distribution in the public gets turned out and shown off.

And so this year, the big thing on everybody's lips as it has been is AI. And one manifestation of that will be something that Microsoft is teasing out. Microsoft is adding a button to its Windows 11 PCs that is dedicated to its AI assistant co-pilot, and the button will be unveiled at the CES show in Vegas. You click on this button and it's going to be an AI powered chat bot that helps you research, draft texts, create images, prepare your podcast scripts maybe, Carla, turn your ideas into songs even is one of the touts for it. But it's the whole idea of the year of the AI PC as Microsoft officials are calling it. And that's going to be something that's rolled out, but it's also, AI is going to be demonstrated in cars on other mobile devices like scooters and cameras, television of course, and there'll be a product where you access a ChatGPT Q and A service integrated into all sorts of smart tech, all sorts of smart appliances.

I should focus on cars because that's a particularly big instance. This isn't the auto show and the auto shows themselves will be featuring this in much more detail, but there's a large presence, it's something like 300 auto and other companies that deal with mobile products like scooters, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Kia, and Hyundai are going to be showing off what they have in terms of EVs and other whizzbang things that are going to be on display. 

Health tech is going to be a really big deal, whether it's the AI capabilities in health tech or otherwise, but just in terms of tracking personal health, something that many of us have gotten accustomed to, whether it's just tracking our steps or heart rate or whatever, there's going to be added capabilities apparently demonstrated in these technologies to help older people, people with disabilities and so on.

So it's an event where hype is expected and you cannot hype enough, but also sometimes around the horizon type things that might not be ready yet. Robots performing wild tricks, but these are robots that are not going to be ready for primetime for maybe a number of years still. And then lots of startup firms, I should mention as a final note, thousands of them attend this to strut some of their stuff. Sometimes they get gobbled up by the bigger companies as a result of what they demonstrate. It's all to say it's an important kickoff event on a year where tech is going to again, be featured very importantly, especially the AI.

ROBBINS:
Aren't you struck by the sort of huge gap? I mean just a few months ago we had all these AI chiefs warning that this was going to be an extinction level event if we didn't use it carefully and now suddenly here we are in Las Vegas and everything you turn to, "I'm going to have a blender that's got AI in it. My car is going to be smarter than I am in a few years." I mean, isn't there just a huge gap here? This thing is just racing forward so quickly?

MCMAHON:
Yeah, I think it's because AI has become this amorphous term. AI was already influencing our lives and moving forward. It was just a year ago, launch of the ChatGPT and the generative AI, which spurred all sorts of discussions about the looming self-awareness potentially of AI and all sorts of things including launching weapons systems perhaps or turning against the human masters. I think regulation is something lurking in the background of all of the gee whizz stuff going on in Vegas, and so we'll have to keep an eye on that, the extent to which that gets discussed at all, it's still out there.

There's a lot of concern on another issue that you and I have talked about a lot and we'll be talking about a lot on this podcast, which is the upcoming series of elections around the world. It's an enormous election year and there's a lot of concern about AI being a source of sort of off-the-shelf disinformation by just about anybody who wants to create phony press briefings or phony statements, all sorts of things that used to be the purview of companies or bigger organizations or governments are now seemingly available to individuals who can use nifty AI technology to cause disruption. So I think that's in particular going to be something front and center for the world's governments to be dealing with on the regulation front, that's a departure from what's going on in Vegas, but it is again, I think a backdrop issue.

ROBBINS:
So last year at this meeting, this trade show, whatever it is, the celebration, it was all about blockchain and the metaverse. Nobody's talking about that anymore. I mean, I wonder whether the Facebook company now known as Meta is going to change its name again to I. Does that sort of wonder whether or not our enthusiasms should also be examined.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, that's a really good point. Where is blockchain now? It just still seems to be a pretty important way of dealing with cryptocurrencies and so forth, but it just seems like a remote thing now when we talk about AI, when we talk about smart machines and smart devices and as well as the EV revolution and how far electric vehicles are going to be able to perform and impress people and impress governments, local governments, national governments, whatever, in terms of embracing that. That gets us into a whole other discussion, Carla, about energy and energy transformations. 

But you're right, I think with all of the things that have emerged at CES in the past and gone on to be celebrated, Blu-Ray and DVDs, we should note that BestBuy has just announced they are no longer going to be selling either of those. Their time in the sunshine is now waning and people are ready for different tech. In terms of what we haven't anticipated yet, that's also going to be kind of intriguing what comes out of this that nobody saw coming? Stay tuned.

ROBBINS:
So they're not handing out free leftover Google glasses anytime soon?

MCMAHON:
I would love to have a swag bag from the CES show, Carla, really would. 

Well, I want to stay in the United States, Carla, and take us back to the reality of the swamp, as they say, or as some people call Washington, both chambers of the U.S. Congress will be back in session. There are already signs of intensifying discussions over matters in and around the funding of the government. There's looming deadlines this month and early next month. One of the issues that permeates is U.S. border security as well. So is Congress divided as ever as we kick off a major U.S. election year?

ROBBINS:
Yes.

MCMAHON:
Okay, that's good. We're done with that then.

ROBBINS:
We're done. So here's an interesting and depressing fact. Last year, only thirty-four bills were signed into law, and that's the smallest number in more than seventy years. So when Congress comes back to town on January 8th, it's going to have an enormous amount of work to do, but the chances that it's going to be any more productive I fear are not great. We've got the same deep partisan divisions at play and as are the same ideological divisions within the GOP that paralyze so much action. And all of that exacerbated by the fact that it's a presidential election year. So if anybody's going to be posturing, and it's not just a presidential election year, every house member and a third of the Senate is up for elections. So what's the chance we're going to get thirty-four through? So that's all that is the context as we'd like to say.

So what are the top issues to watch? First, whether they can head off a government shutdown. There's actually two deadlines. The first deadline is January 19th when the money is supposed to run out at the Department of Agriculture, Energy, water bills, military construction, Veterans Affairs, Transportation, and HUD. And then there's a deadline on February 2nd when funding for defense, labor, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services runs out. 

And you recall we came close to a shutdown twice last year. Then House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted after he broke with his party's hardliners who were demanding he go back on the budget deal, negotiated with the White House and make far deeper cuts in social programs. And he decided it was not politically sound or good for the country to go ahead with the shutdown. And he agreed to a continuing resolution which temporarily fund federal agencies at then current levels. And this bill was passed in October with Democratic support. And what happened? McCarthy lost his job and then his successor, Mike Johnson made the same decision in November. And again, he had to rely on democratic votes to keep the government running, which is how we got these current deadlines. 

Johnson could make the same decision again when they come back, but his honeymoon is likely over and his right wing caucus could try to oust him just like McCarthy if he decides to compromise. He's caught in this political situation in which nobody wants to shut down, at least nobody who makes a good sound political calculation in an election year. People may hate government until they start losing their checks and there's not a lot of time to make that decision on Johnson's part or on any of the politicians' part because the first deadline is eleven days after they come back.

So that makes it all incredibly contentious. So that's the shutdown issue. That clock is tick, tick, ticking. And then of course we've got the Ukraine funding issue, and that is not just Ukraine funding, Israel funding, Taiwan. And that's all caught up with the immigration debate. Ukraine, as we've talked about a lot, desperately needs the aid just after Christmas, the Pentagon announced it was sending its last package of military support and the mood on the hill among Republicans in particular shift radically against Ukraine. And the only way they're going to get that money through is some sort of a deal. In the Senate they've been talking for weeks and weeks and weeks and Democrats are open to some changes, but they're adamantly opposed to radically expanding the deportations, particularly the Republicans in the house are demanding. So we'll see whether or not even if they can get a deal through in the Senate.

Mike Johnson, the new speaker, took more than sixty members yesterday, Wednesday, of his caucus to Eagle Pass, Texas to highlight the border crisis. And he's insisting that they're not going to expect anything other than this H.R.2 that they passed and that would insist on construction of a border wall completing that, the "Remain in Mexico" practice keeping migrants seeking asylum in detention facilities, expedited deportation including of unaccompanied children, E-Verify back, and criminalizing visa overstays, really hard line Trump policies, which the Democrats say they'll never accept.

MCMAHON:
So yes, that puts it in pretty stark terms then. And just on the border side of things, that visit by Johnson with the delegation of the border according to reports seemed to be particularly interesting because it was occurring amid a real surge in migration across the border, including some people visible from where the delegation was appearing seeking to get into the country. There is this-

ROBBINS:
Although it was pretty quiet yesterday, I think, during the visit. Quieter than I think they hoped for the cameras.

MCMAHON:
It wasn't maybe the photo op they wanted. Partly, I guess Mexico's been taking steps to try to interrupt some of the so-called caravans and do its part to restrict the flows.

ROBBINS:
Well, that said, listen, the numbers are huge.

MCMAHON:
The numbers are huge, and there's a broken system that speaks to years of dysfunction, political dysfunction in doing something serious about the country's border and migration policies that has to be dealt with some point if the air ever clears on this issue for both sides to sit down and work out something they really need to. It's something that is being grappled with worldwide. It's particularly acute in the U.S. at the moment certainly, but European states are also, they are taking a harder line on migrant policies. You've seen it really happening around the world wherever there are havens and there are growing numbers of migrants and it seems to be virtually everywhere, this is becoming a broad issue. So this is a year of elections, this is also a year of migration. There's definitely a sort of a crossover on the two that we should keep an eye out for.

But I would just add on your point about the U.S. budget shutdown, it also doesn't do anything to the ongoing concerns about the U.S. political stature and the U.S. image abroad. I had good fortune to travel in the Czech Republic during the recent holiday and there's a lot of concern about the U.S. There's still a lot of Ukrainian flags flying in places like Prague and support for Ukraine. But there's a lot of questions about what is going on in the U.S. and what is going on in Washington in particular. And I don't think we're starting the year with any sort of clear sense of where this is all going.

ROBBINS:
No, the fact that U.S. dysfunction, the idea that we can't fund our own government is not a good look and certainly this profound concern that the leader of the transatlantic alliance is going to bug out on funding Ukraine. Yes, we have major immigration challenges and we have a dysfunctional system and one would hope that we could finally develop sound immigration policy, but developing that in the midst of a presidential election and holding funding to Ukraine hostage or funding for the federal government hostage is probably not the environment to do it. And so Mike Johnson's got some really big decisions that he has to make. And so does Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer, this is a really challenging time.

So Bob, let's move to the audience figure of the week. This is the figure listeners vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at CFR_org's Instagram story. And this week our audience selected "South Korea Opposition Leader is Stabbed." So what do we know about Lee Jae-myung's condition and is this a random, crazy or does it say something even more disturbing about the state of South Korean politics?

MCMAHON:
Well, that last part in particular is resonating because this is occurring just a few months ahead of parliamentary elections in South Korea. But first regarding Mr. Lee, at last report that I saw, Mr. Lee is now out of intensive care after having surgery at Seoul National University and had been wounded near his jugular vein, which is always very concerning. And it was by a person, a sixty-six-year-old person named Kim Jin-song who's been described as a real estate agent who has admitted an intent to kill Mr. Lee. Now, South Korea has had political violence in the past. It has had attacks against prominent opposition figures in the past, but this is one of the worst in about two decades to hit the country. And as I said, it's happening in the run up to parliamentary elections. And we should say Lee was a very close second in the elections that took place for president and had intention to run again in 2027.

We're waiting to see what comes out about the person involved and about any sort of other fomenting of political violence for South Korea itself. It's dealing at a time of its own growing polarization. The elections that resulted in his loss further polarized the country, the peninsula of Korea is going through a particularly tense moment. North Korea is continuing to ratchet up its missile capabilities. Its nuclear saber rattling. There's expected to be another nuclear test not too long from the north, but also making noises about its posture towards the south that is always very disturbing as well. And there have been alternating administrations in South Korea that have taken different tacts against the North in terms of trying to be more accommodating and trying to be more hard line, neither of which seemed to worked too effectively with Kim Jong-un. But still in all this type of political violence in the south in what has been a very robust democracy is very disturbing. And it also sets a ominous model for other elections that are playing out this year in large democracies around the world.

ROBBINS:
And we used to think that we were the country that had political assassinations, and this seems to be, unfortunately—we saw Japan—other places seem to be having this problem too. Other democracies seem to be having this problem too, and we seem to be going through a really frightening, not only polarized, but increasingly violent in more and more democratic countries.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, it's worth noting that the current President Yoon Suk-yeol came out with a statement strongly condemning the attack, and that was seen as important and that South Korean society is trying to rally around some sort of a strong stance against this attack against political violence and it's towards a sort of shared political culture. But still in all, there are big differences in worldview. And again, seeing something like this play out in a country like South Korea at this moment in time is certainly quite disturbing. And we'll just have to see how the country handles it, what other intel might emerge on the attacker and whether or not the country can mount a campaign, an election campaign that is free and fair. And also, we haven't yet heard a great deal about any sort of disinformation campaign and meddling from outside countries, whether North Korea or others. But that's a concern as well because these open transparent democracies that run these elections are vulnerable to that kind of thing as well.

Well, that's our look at The World Next Week as 2024 gets underway. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on. In terms of elections, both Bangladesh and Bhutan hold general elections and Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi visits Turkey.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review while you're at it, we appreciate the feedback. If you'd like to reach out, please email us at [email protected]. The publications mentioned in this episode as well as the transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on CFR.org. Please note that opinions expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the host, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

Today's program was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra, and special thanks to Sinet Adous for her research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Markus Zakaria. This is Carla Robbins saying so long and a happier new year.

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye and be especially careful this year.