The Evening: Leaving Syria, New Green Deal, Jumpin’ Jack Flash and More

Target Date for Leaving Syria

The U.S. military is preparing to pull all American forces out of Syria by the end of April, even though the Trump administration has yet to come up with a plan to protect its Kurdish partners from attack when they leave, as the WSJ’s Dion Nissenbaum and Nancy Youssef report.

Dive Deeper: “How the United States Can Still Keep Faith With Its Best Allies in Syria,” by the Washington Institute’s David Pollock.

New Green Deal

Liberal Democrats put flesh on their “Green New Deal” slogan today with a sweeping resolution intended to redefine the national debate on climate change by calling for the United States to eliminate additional emissions of carbon by 2030 as the NYT’s Lisa Friedman and Glenn Thrush report.

Dive Deeper: “How to Grow the Green New Deal,” by CSIS’s Sarah Ladislaw.

Tariff Deadline

President Trump said he won’t meet Chinese President Xi Jinping before a March 1 deadline to avert new U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods, intensifying fears the two won’t strike a deal before the end of 90-day trade truce, as Bloomberg’s Justin Sink and Jennifer Jacobs report.

Dive Deeper: “US-China Economic Relations: From Conflict to Solutions,” by the Peterson Institute’s Ha Jiming and Adam Posen.

Your Questions

Do you have any questions about trade and how a changing U.S. trade policy may affect your life? If you do, please email me your question(s) to aschwartz@csis.org. We’ll publish some of the best questions and get our experts to answer them on an upcoming CSIS podcast.

By The Numbers

Sign up to receive CSIS’s new Sunday morning newsletter By The Numbers. Each week, we’ll share with you some of the most compelling numbers, statistics, and data in our studies. Subscribe here.

In That Number

5%

The United Nations estimates that corruption cost the world economy at least $2.6 trillion - 5% of the global GDP - in 2018.

Source:UN

Critical Quote

“The green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they're for it, right?”

— House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on AOC’s “Green New Deal”

iDeas Lab

CSIS's Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative has released an updated version of its South China Sea features map. Explore the various islands in English, Chinese, Vietnamese and Malay here.

The Andreas C. Dracopoulos iDeas Lab at CSIS enhances our research with the latest in cutting-edge web technologies, design, and video.

Optics

(Photo credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images). Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) (R) and other Congressional Democrats unveil their Green New Deal resolution.

Recommended Reading

"Europe in 2019: A Critical and Transitional Year," by CSIS's Rachel Ellehuus, Ricklef Beutin, and Quentin Lopinot.

This Town Tomorrow

At 10:00 a.m., join CSIS for a panel discussion with the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. The panel will discuss the state of their respective branches in anticipation of the Trump administration’s FY2020 budget.

Also, at 10:00 a.m. CSIS will hold a conversation with ambassador Prudence Bushnell to discuss her new book Terrorism, Betrayal and Resilience: My Story of the 1998 US Embassy Bombings.

And, at 9:30 a.m., the Atlantic Council will hold a panel discussion on China’s mass incarceration of the indigenous Uyghur population in the Xinjiang region.

Video

Today, CSIS hosted H.E. Roya Rahmani, the first female Afghan ambassador to the United States. The conversation focused on the major challenges facing Afghanistan post conflict, and how the U.S. might responsibly leave the region. Watch the full video here.

Podcasts

Trade experts Scott Miller and Bill Reinsch break down the buzz around trade, how it affects policy, and how it impacts your day-to-day. In this new episode, the State of the Union is front and center.

Listen on Spotify, SoundCloud, or Apple Podcasts.

Smiles

There’s no real reason for me to play this today except that it makes me smile. I hope it makes you smile too. I believe that the Rolling Stones at their peak were the greatest rock and roll band of all time. Here’s some evidence of that.