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PROGRAMMING NOTE: As I mentioned a few days ago, this will be our last regular FX roundup for September as I will be spending the rest of the month getting my daughter moved in to college and spending a bit of time with her before school starts. I appreciate everybody’s patience as I manage this process and adjust to not having her around, which I have to confess is making me a little sad even as I’m excited for her taking her next major life step. I will be back hopefully to our regular schedule on October 1.

TODAY IN HISTORY

September 12, 1683: In the first major engagement of the 1683-1699 Great Turkish War, an army led by Polish King Jan III Sobieski defeats the Ottomans at the Battle of Vienna and thereby breaks up the in-progress siege of that city. The Ottomans retreated in disarray, allowing the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Habsburgs to take advantage and grab chunks of formerly Ottoman territory. By 1687 the Ottomans had been driven out of Hungary and were well on their way to the first major military defeat the empire had suffered in centuries.

September 12, 1974: A committee of Ethiopian military officers, called the “Derg,” overthrows Emperor Haile Selassie in a coup amid mass unrest caused in part by a serious famine. The Derg, which refashioned itself as the “Provisional Military Government of Socialist Ethiopia,” ruled the country until 1987, when it further transformed itself into the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.

September 13, 533: A Byzantine army under Belisarius defeats the Vandals in the Battle of Ad Decimum, near Carthage. This was Belisarius’s first victory in his invasion of North Africa and kicked off his campaign to restore the western Mediterranean to Roman control.

September 13, 1993: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization chair Yasser Arafat sign the Oslo I Accord in Washington, DC. Oslo I established a Palestinian government of sorts, the Palestinian Authority, and included provisions for the eventual withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Occupied Territories and economic cooperation between the Israelis and Palestinians. It was supposed to be an interim agreement on the road to Palestinian statehood, though the parameters of the “state” that was on offer are debatable to say the least and at any rate the agreement collapsed in large part because it simply put off discussions of any of the really challenging issues (settlements, Jerusalem, Palestinian right of return, etc.) in the Israel-Palestine crisis.

MIDDLE EAST

LEBANON

Reuters reported on Sunday that the Israeli and Lebanese governments will hold their next round of US-brokered negotiations in Rome next month. There doesn’t appear to be any more specificity as to the date than that. There’s been some question as to whether this eighth session would actually go forward, given that the Israeli government has not really limited its military activity in southern Lebanon despite various agreements reached during previous sessions. The Lebanese and Israeli ambassadors to the US are scheduled to meet next week in Washington to make arrangements for the Rome meeting, so it sounds like they’re still on track.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Authorities in Gaza reported on Sunday that the Israeli military (IDF) had killed at least ten people in the territory since Thursday night. That includes a pregnant woman gunned down by Israeli soldiers in the Mawasi displacement camp in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis area. The IDF says that it is “looking into the incident.”

YEMEN

Fighting continued along Yemen’s Red Sea coast through the weekend, as forces aligned with the nominal Yemeni government indicated that they intend to try to recover the territory they’ve lost to Ansarullah over the past several days. Ansarullah also continued its drone strikes against targets in Saudi Arabia, while the Saudis have continued carrying out airstrikes against Ansarullah targets.

CNN recounted Ansarullah’s seizure of the coast on Saturday, attributing the collapse of government-aligned forces in Mokha and around the Bab al-Mandab strait to a lack of air support and to their own internal weakness. In terms of the latter, this report claims that when Ansarullah advanced into the port city of Mokha on Thursday it found that “the actual strength of the army [defending the city] was only about 20% of what it was on paper.” Apparently it was mostly “staffed” with “ghost soldiers,” fictional personnel invented by somebody who was scamming the government and its Saudi backers for their salaries.

The pro-government coalition has also undoubtedly been weakened by the tension between Saudi-backed factions and the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council, which erupted into conflict late last year that ended with the STC largely sidelined. Although the STC has formally dissolved it still reportedly has thousands of fighters in the field, but they’re unwilling to volunteer themselves in defense of the government under the circumstances and it’s not clear that the Saudis would be willing to accept their assistance anyway.

IRAN

Somebody attacked an Iranian cargo vessel near Qeshm island in the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday morning, killing at least one person and wounding four others. To my knowledge the US military has not (yet) commented on this incident, which is unusual if this was in fact a US attack (the Pentagon isn’t usually shy about claiming responsibility for these sorts of things). When asked about the incident later in the day, Donald Trump replied “I don’t want to say,” which could be a coy way of claiming responsibility or could just mean he didn’t know anything about it.

On the subject of the strait, the Omani government was supposed to host a meeting on Monday involving representatives from Iran and several Gulf Arab states to discuss the Iranian-Omani arrangement for managing that waterway as well as regional tensions overall. But Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi announced on Sunday night that the meeting had been postponed “in the interests of consensus.” He didn’t offer any additional details.

In other items:

• The New York Times’ Farnaz Fassihi has a new report alleging that “a fringe hard-line faction” inside Iran was responsible for a July attack on three commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz that contributed significantly to derailing the US-Iranian “memorandum of understanding.” Supposedly this faction—led by Hossein Taeb, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Basij paramilitary wing—acted even without the knowledge of IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi but may have had the approval of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. That’s hard to know for sure because, according to Fassihi, Khamenei is still only communicating through a small group of intermediaries (if in fact he’s communicating at all). Khamenei’s absence from normal government functions has, in this narrative, led to factional infighting within the Iranian elite, in particular between this “fringe hard-line” group and more moderate voices who wanted to maintain the MOU rather than return to conflict. The appointment of Mohsen Rezaee as secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council in early August was supposed to tamp down that infighting because he’s apparently seen as someone who has credibility with all of the factions. I don’t know how much credence to give any of this but the report has gotten a fair amount of attention so I felt it was worth at least noting it.

• AFP reported on Sunday that Iranian products (foodstuffs in particular) are still making their way to markets in Dubai even though the UAE ostensibly suspended all economic activity with Iran last month. While the suspension is having an effect and probably a significant one, the continued trade highlights the difficulty in completely severing those economic links.

• The Iraqi government closed three checkpoints along the border between Iran and Iraq’s Maysan province on Saturday after determining that Friday’s drone strike on Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline originated there. It began reopening the checkpoints on Sunday after Iraqi security forces apparently tracked down and seized the equipment used in the drone launch.

• A clash between Iranian security forces and unspecified armed militants left at least three of the former and five of the latter dead in the city of Saravan on Saturday, according to Iranian state media. Saravan is located in the eastern part of southeastern Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province, which regularly sees activity by a host of non-state groups including Sunni jihadists, Baluch separatists, and criminal/smuggling gangs. It’s unclear who was involved in Saturday’s incident. A Basij commander was killed in the same province on Tuesday, though it’s also unclear whether the two incidents are connected.

ASIA

INDIA

Leaders of the BRICS member states met in New Delhi this weekend for a summit that was expected to be hindered by the Iran war, especially given that both Iran and the UAE are members. As far as I can tell it hasn’t resulted in any major developments but to some mild surprise The Gang did reach unanimity on a joint statement on Saturday that expressed “deep concern over the continued escalation of tensions” related to the war while calling for “maximum restraint.”

MYANMAR

Myanmar’s ruling junta said on Sunday that it is revoking the status of United Nations ambassador Kyaw Moe Tun over what it called “illegal activities.” Kyaw Moe Tun is a “holdover” from Myanmar’s previous civilian government, and I put “holdover” in quotes because the junta tried to fire him after the February 2021 coup that overthrew that government. But the UN Credentials Committee has refused to take up the case of Kyaw Moe Tun’s legitimacy or to consider accepting an ambassador from the junta, which is still regarded as illegitimate by most of the rest of the world. The committee may reconsider Kyaw Moe Tun’s status after the UN General Assembly later this month.

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AFRICA

SUDAN

Sudan Tribune is reporting a major drone attack on the capital of Sudan’s Blue Nile state, Ad-Damazin, that began on Sunday evening. It reported on Friday that the Rapid Support Forces and Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (al-Nur) were advancing on that city so the drone strikes could be the first wave of a larger assault, or the militants may just be softening the city up.

MALI

CNN reported on Saturday on the extent of the Ukrainian military’s activities in Africa and particularly in Mali:

The conditions are grueling. Temperatures regularly soar above 110 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, then drop sharply overnight. Water is scarce and the dust and sand get everywhere. But at least they are working above ground. This elite group of Ukrainian drone operators has spent years hunting Russians from dugouts in Ukraine. They are still doing the same – but in the desert in northern Mali.

Some 15 Ukrainian specialists have been deployed to the junta-led country in Africa’s Sahel region to assist local rebel forces who are fighting Russian troops – part of Kyiv’s mission to weaken its enemy wherever it operates. And Kyiv has also branched out to other theaters of conflict, capitalizing on its hard-won expertise in drone warfare to forge new anti-Russian partnerships.

Speaking to Ukrainian soldiers and officers involved in operations in Mali and Libya, CNN can reveal for the first time the extent of these operations on other continents. A Ukrainian Defense Intelligence source with knowledge of the operations told CNN that several Ukrainian specialists were also stationed in Sudan and that troops from Chad, Niger and Burkina Faso had previously traveled to Mali to receive drone training from Ukrainian soldiers there.

Reporting on the Ukrainian presence in Mali goes back to 2024, when officials in Kyiv hinted at Ukrainian involvement in the Azawad Liberation Front’s (FLA) ambush (along with Jamaʿat Nusrat al-Islam wa’l-Muslimin jihadists) of a column of Malian soldiers and Russian mercenaries at Tinzaouaten, in Mali’s Kidal region. Ukrainian advisers also apparently played a role in the FLA/JNIM offensive in northern Mali earlier this year. According to CNN they are providing the FLA with “support, training and operational help.”

EUROPE

UKRAINE

Russian attacks killed at least nine people across Ukraine on Saturday and at least six people on Sunday, while Ukrainian strikes killed at least two people in Russia on Sunday. One Russian strike on Sunday may have targeted a train carrying several Western “advisers” to the Ukrainian government, including former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and former US Central Intelligence Agency director David Petraeus. The strike hit a different Ukrainian Railways train at a station near the Ukrainian-Polish border that the Johnson-Petraeus train had just left. Also on Sunday, Donald Trump called on the Ukrainian government to stop attacking Russian refineries because he’s worried about the political ramifications of the price of diesel fuel. Russia has suspended diesel exports due to those Ukrainian attacks, which coupled with the effects of the Iran war has driven domestic diesel prices in the US over $6 per gallon.

KOSOVO

The Kosovan parliament reelected Prime Minister Albin Kurti on Sunday but it may not matter because, somewhat inexplicably, it still failed to elect a president. While the two largest parties in the legislature—Kurti’s Vetëvendosje and the Democratic Party of Kosovo (LDK)—agreed a couple of weeks ago to back a joint candidate for president, several of the latter’s MPs have decided to revolt against that deal. Any Kosovan presidential vote requires a two-thirds quorum in parliament to be official and those LDK rebels are able to join with other MPs to prevent the legislature from reaching that threshold. Failure to elect a president will trigger a snap election, which would be Kosovo’s fourth in the last two years.

SWEDEN

Swedish voters headed to the polls on Sunday for a general election whose main plot-line was whether the far-right Sweden Democrats party would wind up as part of the country’s governing coalition. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson had indicated that he was willing to incorporate the party into his government if it meant keeping his right-wing majority. He’d already tacked to the right on issues related to immigration in order to court the party’s support.

Full results won’t be known until Wednesday at the earliest but at this point it looks like Kristersson’s embrace of the far right may not be working out. Preliminary results give the center-left opposition, headlined by the Swedish Social Democratic Party, 176 seats, which is enough for a bare single seat majority in the 349 seat parliament. If that holds, and it’s much too early to say, it would probably mean that the Sweden Democrats would remain out of government. Kristersson has suggested that he will still try to form a centrist coalition that keeps him in place as PM, taking advantage of the fact that the opposition coalition is ideologically very tenuous. But he would presumably have to abandon the Sweden Democrats to make that work.

FRANCE

The French UN mission in Geneva has apologized for a social media post it made back in July that questioned the US government’s commitment to human rights and prompted US delegates to walk out of a subsequent UN Security Council session while French representatives were speaking. I can’t think of anything that is less important than this but as I did note the spat when it occurred I figured I should also note the apology.

IRELAND

Donald Trump visited Ireland over the weekend and decided to create a minor international incident by telling reporters that he thought it would be “fantastic” if Ireland and Northern Ireland were to unify. Needless to say that comment did not go over terrible well in London and even Irish Taoiseach (PM) Micheál Martin, who was sitting next to Trump when he said it, apparently seemed somewhat uncomfortable. The UK government has no intention of holding a Northern Ireland status referendum anytime soon, and polling suggests that if it did hold one most residents would vote to remain in the UK. Trump may have intended more to send a message to Irish-American voters than to announce any new geopolitical agenda.

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AMERICAS

CANADA

The Wall Street Journal reports that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is responding to his country’s trade war with the US by pursuing a closer relationship with the European Union:

Carney has instructed his special envoy to Europe to scope out the most ambitious possibilities short of full membership in the EU or its common market, according to people familiar with the matter. The details are still being sketched by technical working groups for what the prime minister has told his aides will be the reorienting of an economy and a society that for half a century has been dominated by the U.S.

To European leaders, Carney has even suggested Canada take on a new title: “Associate Member of the European Union.” The EU, not known for its flexible enforcement of membership rules, is open to the idea, officials from both sides say.

Alongside Carney’s established emissaries are informal advisers drawn from the worlds of finance and politics. Some are fellow members of a Book Club in Ottawa that he no longer has time to attend, who quip that they abide by the code of the movie “Fight Club”: “The first rule of Book Club,” several told the Journal, “is you do not talk about Book Club.”

The result of the monthslong talks: European and Canadian officials are eyeing ways in which Canada could informally lock into Europe’s $21 trillion single market in strategic supply chains such as energy, AI, the critical minerals needed for batteries or semiconductors and, most urgently, defense.

According to the WSJ “the idea has even come up to allow Canadians to live and work in Europe visa-free.” The domestic political considerations of such a major geopolitical shift may be too much to overcome, but the fact that they’re even discussing this is arguably the first real indication that Carney intends to back up his rhetoric about Canada-US relations with some action.

UNITED STATES

Finally, at Foreign Affairs Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon take stock of the costs of the now-25 year old US “War on Terror”:

Typically, when policymakers and analysts speak of the global war on terror—the defining fact of international affairs for two decades—they discuss the damage done to terrorist groups, the plots that have been thwarted, the rise and fall of jihadi ideology, the many intelligence failures, and, perhaps above all, the two forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are the scorecards of contemporary counterterrorism. But left out of this framing are the profound effects of this vast war on terror on domestic politics and society.

The human statistics alone tell an appalling story: more than 7,000 U.S. troops were killed in action, 53,000 were wounded, and well over 30,000 took their own lives—a staggering number. According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, these conflicts added $8 trillion to the U.S. national debt, with trillions more projected in the future for veterans’ health care, including for the half million GIs with traumatic brain injuries and posttraumatic stress disorder.

Yet even these numbers fail to show the myriad ways in which two decades of war transformed the United States. For years, the fixation on Islamist terror shaped a culture drenched in fear, as voices from politics, the media, civil society, and a swelling counterterrorism-industrial complex insisted that the country faced an existential threat. Amid this climate, the government was given broad new powers to root out and prosecute potential jihadi activity wherever it might be, and the widespread assumption that there might be another terrorist attack began to reshape American society itself. Rather than bringing the country together behind a shared—and narrowly defined—enemy, however, the result has been a dramatic decline in social cohesion. It has contributed to the demise of political bipartisanship, already weakened in previous decades. At the same time, the war on terror fueled an alarming rise in xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment and discredited the country’s political and foreign policy elites.

Above all has been the uncontrolled expansion of executive power. This impetus did not begin with the war on terror; generations of American leaders and scholars have sought to increase presidential power, drawing up mechanisms that could sideline civil liberties and intertwine military and police activities. But after 9/11, these contingencies were used to give the executive branch sweeping new authority in the name of domestic security. And today, an authoritarian president is using these powers to target his political enemies. The United States, then, is overdue for a reckoning with the political legacy of the war on terror.

TODAY IN HISTORY

September 11, 1714: The Siege of Barcelona ends with the French-Bourbon besiegers victorious over the city’s Habsburg defenders. The siege was one of the final engagements of the War of the Spanish Succession, which had begun back in 1701 following the death of Habsburg Spanish King Charles II. It pitted Charles’ chosen heir, the Bourbon royal Philip of Anjou, against the Habsburg claimant Archduke Charles of Austria (later Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI) for control of the decaying but still large and wealthy Spanish empire. Barcelona’s surrender brought an effective end to the war and also ended the Principality of Catalonia, a hitherto independent entity joined in dynastic union with the kingdom of Aragon, as new King Philip V reshaped Spain from a loose union of polities into a single, centralized political entity.

September 11, 1973: With the support of the US government and specifically the Central Intelligence Agency, a Chilean military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet overthrows President Salvador Allende, who died (the official story, at least, is that he committed suicide) as soldiers seized the presidential palace in Santiago. Pinochet ruled as a dictator until 1990, becoming Chile’s legal president in 1981 under a newly-promulgated constitution, then continued to exert significant authority as military commander in chief until 1998. His regime is noted for its extensive human rights violations and for overseeing the neoliberalization of the Chilean economy under the Milton Friedman-trained “Chicago Boys,” a process that generated high levels of growth but also high levels of inequality. His legacy is still being felt in Chilean politics to the present day.

September 11, 2001: Al-Qaeda operatives kill nearly 3000 people by flying airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. A fourth plane, probably intended for the US Capitol, was brought down over Pennsylvania. The attacks sparked the “Global War on Terror,” which included US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and during which the United States essentially ran roughshod over the rest of the world and any concept of international law. It’s difficult to assess that conflict in a historical context given that it’s still going over two decades later, but the human toll alone has been nearly unfathomable.

INTERNATIONAL

A new study suggests that climate “feedback loops” are already kicking in to potentially disastrous effect:

Rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels are transforming the world’s forests, wetlands and tundra to the point they are releasing emissions that could further worsen global heating by as much as 30%, a new study has found.

As the world heats up, permafrost in the high latitudes is thawing, fiercer wildfires are burning in drying forests and wetlands and lakes are warming. All of these changes are themselves causing the release of planet-heating methane and carbon dioxide locked in trees and soils, therefore worsening the climate crisis, the paper states.

While scientists have long known of these “feedback loops” that amplify the impact of direct pollution from burning coal, oil and gas, the emissions from natural sources are largely unaccounted for in climate projections.

This additional heating is, however, significant, researchers found, with emissions from natural sources set to amplify global heating by 20% to 30% by the end of this century. This would add an estimated 0.2C to 0.4C to the global average temperature by this time, depending on the overall action taken by countries to combat the climate crisis.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The Israeli military (IDF) claimed on Friday that it had killed “a top Hamas commander” along with “two other commanders” in an airstrike in Gaza the previous day. Hamas has acknowledged the death of Mohammed Abdel ​Salam al-Yazouri, identifying him as one of the planners of the October 7, 2023 attacks, but hasn’t commented on the other two deaths.

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TODAY IN HISTORY

September 10, 1813: In one of the largest naval engagements in the War of 1812, a US fleet defeats a smaller British fleet in the Battle of Lake Erie. This was a significant strategic victory, in that it gave the US control of the lake and enabled both the recapture of Detroit in late September and the US defeat of Tecumseh’s confederacy at the Battle of the Thames in early October. The victory also prompted US Commodore Oliver Perry’s famous message to General William Henry Harrison: “we have met the enemy and they are ours.”

September 10, 1942: In World War II, Allied forces undertake an amphibious landing at Mahajanga, in northern Madagascar, kicking off their final push to take that island from Vichy France. An initial Allied invasion of Madagascar in May had stalled, but over the ensuing months the British military was able to bring in reinforcements and to seize the nearby island of Mayotte for use as a base. The overwhelmed French forces resisted the renewed Allied push for several weeks but by early November Madagascar was in Allied hands. The victory was important for the Allied war effort as it prevented Madagascar from being used by the Japanese Navy to project power into the western Indian Ocean and threaten India as well as the “Persian corridor” used to funnel arms to the Soviet Union. The campaign also demonstrated the potential effectiveness of combined sea, land, and air operations.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited military (IDF) personnel in southern Syria on Thursday. This is the third time he’s done something like this but that doesn’t make it any less problematic, inasmuch as the IDF occupation in Syria is legally dubious and regarded (reasonably) as an affront by that country’s government. The Syrian Foreign Ministry condemned his visit, calling it “a provocative move and a blatant violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic and of international law.”

LEBANON

Netanyahu and his defense minister, Israel Katz, declared on Thursday that the IDF has “destroyed Hezbollah underground infrastructure at the Ali al-Taher ridge in southern Lebanon.” Lebanese media reported a “powerful” explosion in that area that was presumably said destruction.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The IDF killed at least four people, a married couple and their two children, in Gaza city on Thursday. Israeli officials claimed that they were targeting a Hamas operative but made “no mention of a ​wife or children.” Coincidentally, a new Israeli documentary titled NAZA reportedly sheds new light on the tools that the IDF has been using to find and kill low-level Hamas personnel and their families:

Interviews were filmed at night on rooftops in Tel Aviv, on the condition of anonymity because of the risks involved in speaking publicly about Israel’s war activities. The appearance and voices of participants in the film were digitally altered to disguise their identities.

The interviewees detail the secret methods used by the Israeli military in Gaza, including AI-based systems built to identify large numbers of potential low-ranking Hamas targets, who were then bombed in their homes at night, in the knowledge attacks would also kill their families.

The Israeli military hacked into phones to identify the location of such targets, and covertly listened into conversations with their wives and children moments before they were all killed.

The film also features first-person accounts about the destruction of neighbourhoods where the Israeli military estimated that up to 25% of residents were still sheltering in their homes, the systematic burning of civilian homes, and the killing of civilians at a food distribution site.

YEMEN

In what may be the most significant battlefield developing in Yemen in several years, Ansarullah fighters seized control of Mokha on Thursday, about a week after they began a new offensive aimed at isolating and capturing that port city. Mokha lies just north of the Bab al-Mandab strait connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, a major maritime chokepoint. If Ansarullah is able to assert effective control over the strait it will give major heft to the group’s blockade of Saudi Arabia and allow it to potentially throttle other commercial traffic. Assuming it holds on to Mokha it’s now also positioned to push further south along Yemen’s Red Sea coast to the strait itself. Ansarullah fighters have also been sighted on the Hanish islands, which are some ways north of the strait but still well-positioned to allow the group to expand its maritime activities.

IRAN

Drop Site’s Fateme Karimkhan reported on Thursday that wages and food prices have become so disconnected in Iran that people are going into debt to buy groceries. This carries risks for both buyer and seller, inasmuch as shops are extending credit to people who may never be able to repay it at this rate. For the Trump administration, which seems to believe that it’s causing this hardship in service of overthrowing the Iranian government, the effect seems to be exactly the opposite. People who don’t know where their next meal is coming from tend to have more immediate concerns than revolution. And as Esfandyar Batmanghelidj writes, the Iranian government has had plenty of time to figure out how to bear US sanctions even as the country’s population is immiserated:

Yet for the better part of a decade, Iran has been able to resist U.S. economic coercion. Until the recent blockade, it used sanctions-evasion techniques to continue oil exports to its key customer, China. Its non-oil industries also adapted to the sanctions, as currency devaluation reduced competition from imports and made Iranian products more competitive in regional markets, boosting exports. Iran thereby avoided the kind of runaway economic collapse seen in other sanctioned countries, such as Syria and Venezuela.

Today, war is testing the resilience of the Iranian economy in ways that sanctions alone could not. Numerous U.S. and Israeli airstrikes have targeted critical industrial facilities, including some of Iran’s most important steel and petrochemical plants. The damage sustained during these attacks has led to major production outages for key industrial goods. The general decline in maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz and the specific disruptions caused by the U.S. naval blockade have not only reduced Iran’s exports; they have also throttled imports of much-needed capital and consumer goods. According to a July estimate by the International Monetary Fund, Iran’s GDP is set to contract 5.4 percent this year after shrinking by less than half that over the previous 12 months. Year-on-year inflation climbed from 52.6 percent in December 2025 to 88.6 percent by the start of the summer. The value of the country’s currency has hit a record low of over two million rials to the dollar.

But even as the country’s economic situation is getting worse, Iran’s leadership remains better able to resist the coercive effects of sanctions than it might appear. The state of the economy is not yet impinging on Iran’s ability to wage war. Stockpiles of various goods remain deep, thanks to years of sanctions experience. And the Iranian state, with its powerful repressive tools, has figured out how to offload much of the economic pain onto ordinary Iranians while making sure its own needs are met. Trump’s approach, in other words, can certainly immiserate most of the country’s people. But it cannot successfully strangle the Islamic Republic itself.

To wit, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Iran is manufacturing ballistic missiles again, “using stockpiled components and working in underground facilities.” They’re not able to produce them at scale but the fact that they’re able to produce them at all suggests that the economic warfare isn’t working. Reuters reported that Iran has been evading US sanctions for several years in part via “a barter-like arrangement” with China whereby Iranian oil exports purchased “credits” that could be put toward Chinese products. They’ve been able to avoid using financial networks to facilitate transactions, which significantly reduces their exposure to sanctions. The US blockade is probably interfering with this system but the extent of that interference is unknown.

Speaking of sanctions, on Thursday the Trump administration blacklisted several individuals and entities that are allegedly supporting “Iran’s proxies,” in particular Hezbollah in Lebanon and Kataʾib Hezbollah in Iraq.

ASIA

INDIA

Jacobin’s Sajad Hameed and Rehan Qayoom Mir report on the cooking fuel crisis that is impacting low income Indians due to subsidy cuts and the Iran war:

Across India’s cities and industrial belts, the basic act of cooking a meal is becoming increasingly precarious for low-income households. Part of that shock reflects spillovers from the conflict in the Middle East, particularly due to disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz, a key transit route for crude oil and [liquefied petroleum gas].

India depends heavily on LPG imports, making domestic prices highly sensitive to global energy markets and external supply conditions. Fluctuations in international fuel prices and supply disruptions are increasingly passed on directly to households.

Provision of India’s LPG subsidy, which exceeded 400 billion rupees annually in the mid-2010s, fell sharply by 2020–21 before being partially restored in recent years. Government budget data shows LPG subsidy expenditure has fluctuated sharply over the past decade, reflecting a broader shift toward market-linked pricing.

Today LPG subsidies have become increasingly targeted rather than universal. In 2025–26, the government allocated around 120 billion rupees to support Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), a program that subsidizes cooking gas for low-income households, reflecting a narrower approach to welfare support.

For consumers, this translated into a steep rise in refill costs. The price of a standard 14.2-kilogram domestic LPG cylinder, which hovered around 400 to 500 rupees a decade ago, crossed 1,000 rupees in many cities in 2022, before easing slightly to around 850 to 950 rupees. For low-income households, this remains prohibitively expensive.

CHINA

The Chinese Commerce Ministry expressed optimism about a potential agreement to lower tariffs with the US on Thursday. This seems noteworthy inasmuch as Chinese President Xi Jinping will visit the US in two weeks for a summit with Donald Trump, and the ministry’s statement suggests that the two governments are on track to announce a deal, which according to Chinese media would cover $30 billion worth of products on each side, at that time.

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AFRICA

SUDAN

Falling debris from what appear to have been Rapid Support Forces drones rained down on the city of Omdurman on Thursday, killing at least one person and wounding nine more. Military air defense systems intercepted the devices, which may have been targeting military facilities north of the city.

ALGERIA

The Algerian government announced on Thursday that it is cutting off relations with the United Arab Emirates in response to what it called “provocative or hostile” Emirati actions. The severing of ties includes closing Algerian airspace to UAE commercial and military aircraft, save for flights to and from Algiers that will apparently continue through the end of the year. Disagreements over the UAE’s normalization of relations with Israel, its support for Morocco’s claim on the Western Sahara region, and its relationships with the Sahelian junta states (Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger) appear to be fueling this decision.

SOMALIA

The leader of Somalia’s breakaway Somaliland region, Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, told a conference audience in Washington on Wednesday that he’s prepared to commit 2000 military personnel to the planned International Stabilization Force in Gaza. If the US were to take him up on this offer one assumes it would come at the cost of recognizing Somaliland’s independence. The Ugandan government has already committed personnel to the ISF but that’s apparently caused some public discontent in Uganda.

ETHIOPIA

The Tigray People’s Liberation Front accused the Ethiopian military of carrying out a drone strike in the Tigray region on Tuesday, killing an unspecified number of civilians. There’s no confirmation of this but AFP reported that local medical sources are saying that at least three people were wounded, which doesn’t preclude the possibility of deaths. The Ethiopian military hasn’t commented but this certainly wouldn’t be the first time it’s carried out a strike in Tigray in recent months, as tensions with the TPLF have risen.

EUROPE

NATO

According to POLITICO, the Trump administration is now pushing other NATO members to help it “dismantle” the International Criminal Court:

The U.S. attempted to enlist its NATO allies in a campaign to “systematically dismantle” the International Criminal Court, straining already fraught transatlantic relations.

During a closed-door meeting of NATO’s 32 ambassadors in Brussels in mid-July, U.S. envoy Matthew Whitaker asked NATO countries for help in disassembling the international body, and urged them to leave the ICC’s founding document, the Rome Statute, according to three NATO diplomats who were granted anonymity to speak freely.

Whitaker ended his intervention by saying: “We will be watching closely who stands with America,” the three diplomats said.

The pressure on allies to quit the court — driven by U.S. concern that its own officials could face war crimes prosecutions — is part of a broader Trump administration campaign against international institutions and rules seen as limiting U.S. freedom of action. The White House has moved to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, withdrawn from the World Health Organization, ended U.S. participation in the U.N. Human Rights Council and pressured companies to boycott this week’s space summit in Paris, while also launching a series of trade wars.

Two of the anonymous diplomats told POLITICO that they did not believe that the administration was trying to “compel” NATO members to join its anti-ICC crusade, but that doesn’t mean it won’t go that route eventually.

UKRAINE

Russian attacks killed at least 15 people across Ukraine overnight into Thursday. On a related note, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was in Canada, where Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged another $260 million for bolstering Ukraine’s air defenses and its energy infrastructure. Ukrainian strikes killed at least two people in Russia’s Belgorod oblast and at least one person in Voronezh oblast.

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AMERICAS

UNITED STATES

Finally, Spencer Ackerman offers his 25th anniversary thoughts on the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath:

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, it is important to remember that the 9/11 catastrophe itself changed nothing. Regardless of the pabulum that politicians and journalists will intone for this sorrowful anniversary, what changed everything was not the attacks but the U.S. response to them.

What became known as the “Global War on Terror” was a choice, not an inevitability. As politically arduous as it would have been, there was a possible response in which the U.S. recognized that its decades-long extractive, exploitative approach to the Middle East, one that imported the region’s resource wealth and exported the means to subjugate its people, had been proven unviable and began unraveling it. Instead, the U.S. intensified its violent status quo. The War on Terror took the lives of what the Costs of War Project at Brown University tallies as between 4.5 and 4.7 million people.

But while the War on Terror was a choice – a choice made by American elites in both parties, after exploiting the post-9/11 fear and bloodlust to manufacture consent – and for the peoples of the Middle East and Southwest Asia a death sentence, it was also, for many rising powers around the world, an opportunity.

America loves to think of itself as a beacon of freedom to humanity. Its historical record of infamy will never disturb this self-conception. But after 9/11, ambitious architects of repression from Moscow to Beijing to Tel Aviv were inspired by the infamy. Never would there be a better opportunity than the War on Terror to unleash their visions for power unconstrained by justice. After all, they were doing what Washington said it wanted: following the example of the United States.

September 9 (or thereabouts), 9: A large Roman army under general Publius Quinctillus Varus is thoroughly defeated by a Germanic alliance under one of Varus’s former auxiliaries, Arminius (“Hermann” in German), at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest somewhere in what today is northwestern Germany. Also known as the “Varian disaster,” which gives you some idea of the extent of the Roman defeat, the battle saw the effective destruction of three legions and brought an end to Roman efforts to expand further into Germania. The Roman historian Suetonius writes that, upon hearing of the defeat, Emperor Augustus began beating his head against a wall and shouting “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!” (I’m sure it sounded nicer in Latin). Recent historiography has argued that this battle was less decisive than the German national mythos presents it and that Roman expansion probably would have reached its natural limit at the Rhine River with or without this setback.

September 9 (or thereabouts), 1141: A Qara Khitai army led by that dynasty’s founder, Yelü Dashi, defeats a Seljuk-Karakhanid army at the Battle of Qatwan, north of the city of Samarkand. Yelü Dashi was a relatively minor royal during the last days of China’s Liao dynasty who fled during the accession of the Jin dynasty and founded the Qara Khitai empire (sometimes also called the Western Liao) in Central Asia. Doing so meant displacing the Karakhanids, which his victory at Qatwan helped accomplish. The defeat of its Karakhanid vassal and the loss of a substantial chunk of eastern territory also triggered, or at least contributed to, the collapse of the Great Seljuk Empire in the Near East. Sketchy tales of this battle may have provided the basis for the Christian legend of “Prester John,” a mythical Nestorian Christian ruler who was supposed to make war against Islam from the east.

September 9, 1855: The nearly year-long Siege of Sevastopol ends with a Russian withdrawal from the city. The siege is among the most famous in history and the centerpiece of the Crimean War—it’s pretty much the reason we call it the “Crimean War” even though most of the other fighting in that conflict took place somewhere other than Crimea. The Allied capture of the city contributed heavily to Russia’s eventual defeat.

INTERNATIONAL

This probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to anybody who lived through it, but the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service reported on Wednesday that August was the hottest month ever recorded. Global average temperatures reached 16.96 degrees Celsius, topping the previous record set in July 2023 by 0.01 C (effectively a tie).

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s board of governors voted unanimously on Wednesday to end the agency’s investigation into past nuclear activity in Syria. The IAEA has repeatedly praised the current Syrian government for cooperating with its inspectors and has made a number of recent declarations regarding the scope of the previous government’s nuclear program. Wednesday’s vote indicates that the agency is satisfied that the Syrian government isn’t hiding anything regarding that program. Damascus is still obliged, like any other party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, to support IAEA work in Syria.

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TODAY IN HISTORY

September 7, 1191: A Crusader army under English King Richard I (“the Lionheart”) defeats Saladin’s Ayyubid forces at the Battle of Arsuf, one of the major military engagements of the Third Crusade. Richard’s disciplined infantry withstood several waves of attacks by Saladin’s cavalry before a late and somewhat unplanned Crusader cavalry charge routed the Muslim army. Afterward the Crusaders were able to capture the port city of Jaffa (part of modern Tel Aviv) but Richard would eventually determine that he lacked the military strength to fulfill his main goal, retaking Jerusalem.

September 7, 1822: Brazilian Independence Day—Portuguese prince and Brazilian regent Dom Pedro (the future Pedro I of Brazil) declares Brazil’s independence from Portugal. The ensuing war, which had already begun at a low level in early 1822, ended in 1825 with a Brazilian victory.

September 7, 1901: The Boxer Rebellion ends with the defeat of the rebels and the signing of the Boxer Protocol. Under the treaty the Chinese government, which had joined the rebels in their anti-colonialist uprising, was obliged to pay an indemnity to the Allies—Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—as well as Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden, and to take steps to diminish its military capabilities.

September 8, 617: Rebels led by the Duke of Tang, Li Yuan, defeat an imperial Sui Dynasty army by luring it out of the city of Huoyi in northern China. The victory left Li Yuan preeminent among the many nobles who were in rebellion against the Sui, and the following June he had himself crowned Emperor Gaozu of the new Tang Dynasty. The Tang ruled China for almost 300 years, from 618 to 907, with a brief 690-705 interregnum. Nowadays the Tang period is generally regarded as a “golden age” in terms of the flourishing of Chinese civilization and the expansion of China’s political and cultural hegemony.

September 8, 1566: An Ottoman siege of the Hungarian city of Szigetvár ends with the Habsburg garrison, under the command of Croatian Ban Nikola IV Zrinski, defeated (and almost completely wiped out) and the Ottomans in control. Szigetvár is remembered today as a tactical victory for the Ottomans but a significant strategic setback, and is commemorated in both Hungarian and Croatian national histories (Zrinski’s death while leading a final charge out of the castle is particularly well-regarded). The Ottomans suffered significant losses during an unexpectedly lengthy siege, including Sultan Sulayman himself, who died in his tent at the age of 71 just two days before the siege ended. This forced them to abandon plans to march on Vienna, so there is a case to be made that the garrison’s robust defense—while ultimately unsuccessful—prevented further Ottoman expansion into central Europe.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria submitted a new report to the UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday in which it argued that Israeli military actions in Syria could rise to the level of war crimes. The commission assessed that the Israeli military (IDF) has “increasingly sustained and entrenched” itself in southern Syria and particularly flagged its detention of Syrian civilians. Israeli diplomats criticized the report as “Israel-bashing” and insisted that the country has no “territorial aspirations” in Syria.

On Monday, International Atomic Energy Agency director Rafael Grossi claimed that the eastern Syrian nuclear reactor that the IDF bombed in 2007 could have been used “in the production of ‌fissile ⁠material” for nuclear weapons. This doesn’t mean that it necessarily would have been used for that purpose but it is at the very least suggestive. Recent IAEA inspections of the reactor site, in Deir Ezzor province, have uncovered nuclear material as well as several other nuclear-related facilities.

LEBANON

The IDF killed at least 13 people across southern Lebanon on Monday, including at least 11 people (two children) in one strike on the town of Kfar Rumman. IDF attacks continued through Tuesday, and after a relative lull in Lebanese casualties Israeli forces have now killed at least 27 people since Sunday.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

In Israel-Palestine news:

• The IDF killed three more Palestinians in Gaza, including one child, over a 24 hour period from Sunday into Monday, in addition to the father and daughter it killed on Sunday.

• In what mainly appears to be an act of political theater, a group of 12 countries including Canada, France, and the UK imposed a ban on goods produced on Israeli settlements in the West Bank on Tuesday. The ban comes in response not to the illegality of the settlements themselves but to the wave of settler terrorism that has been drawing international attention of late. This “coalition of the willing” appears to be a stand-in for a proposed European Union ban on such products, which has been stymied by German opposition. While I don’t want to dismiss the importance of this entirely, it is the lowest possible hanging fruit for these governments to pick and Bloomberg reported on Monday that UK officials “have privately told the US that the sanctions are largely symbolic and will have no material impact on the UK's wider relationship with Israel on trade or security.” So, yeah, mostly theater. The Israeli government has already responded by closing the UK’s East Jerusalem consulate, which could also be viewed as an act of theater in that it doesn’t really do much to inconvenience the UK government, though it does punish any Palestinians who might be seeking British consular services.

• Of potentially greater significance is a Haaretz report on Tuesday claiming that United Arab Emirates President Mohamed bin Zayed personally warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the possibility of a “major” forthcoming Hamas attack in late September 2023. MBZ’s information could be traced back to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar himself, who apparently told an unnamed Fatah official to convey a warning to the Israeli government amid stalled negotiations on lifting its Gaza blockade. The Fatah official did that, and also passed the information along to a friend of his in Abu Dhabi. MBZ’s interaction with Netanyahu was meant to reinforce the seriousness of the threat. Netanyahu mostly blew it off, arguing that if an operation was coming it would happen in the West Bank, and never conveyed MBZ’s message to his senior security officials.

• The same report also claims that on the evening of October 7, 2023, Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani informed Mossad head David Barnea that Hamas (under threat of expulsion from Qatar) had agreed to release, without conditions, all of the Israeli civilians whom it and other armed factions had taken captive in their attacks. He offered to mediate negotiations between Hamas and the Israeli government to arrange their release, and Barnea refused. The Qataris kept pushing on this for a few more days but the Israeli government refused to engage.

• These revelations are not exactly new but having them reported in such detail about seven weeks before Israel’s next parliamentary election feels significant, certainly as pertains to Netanyahu’s standing.

• UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese warned on Monday that the Israeli government, or any other entity, that clears rubble in Gaza is likely helping to destroy evidence of war crimes and may be found liable for that. While certainly accurate, the prospect of holding anybody responsible for such an act presumes a functioning and enforceable system of international law and I think we’ve established pretty conclusively at this point that such a thing does not exist.

YEMEN

Building on its apparent gains in recent days, the Yemeni military launched a new counteroffensive against Ansarullah on Monday with officials talking about going all the way to Sanaa. As far as I can tell there’s no indication that they’ve made any additional progress as yet but casualties are mounting, with at least 728 people killed and wounded since August 26 and some 21,000 displaced just within Yemen’s Taiz province. Among the casualties were at least seven people killed in an airstrike that hit a prison in northern Yemen’s Jawf province on Monday. Ansarullah blamed Saudi Arabia for that attack.

UPDATE: As of Wednesday the death toll in that prison airstrike had risen to 23 and may rise still further.

On Tuesday morning the spokesperson for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, Turki al-Maliki, accused Ansarullah of wounding at least 73 civilians in attacks against “civilian and economic sites in the kingdom.” He apparently didn’t say when these attacks took place, but the Saudi Ministry of Energy did report several strikes targeting energy facilities in the kingdom on Tuesday morning so presumably Maliki was referring specifically to them. At time of writing Ansarullah was reporting that a Saudi retaliation was underway but the scope was still unclear. AFP added more casualty data, saying that it has tallied more than 500 people killed to date including 278 Ansarullah fighters, 216 government personnel, and 29 civilians.

IRAN

The US military claimed the destruction of five more Iranian oil tankers on Tuesday, in addition to the three it struck over the weekend. The precursor again seems to have been another round of attempted Iranian strikes on US warships. Iranian forces retaliated for the tanker attacks by firing on US military targets in Jordan. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is reportedly claiming to have successfully struck two US destroyers, though I’m not sure if these strikes are supposed to have happened before the tanker attacks or after. I would take any assertion like this with a grain of salt unless/until it’s confirmed by some other source.

Iranian Supreme National Security Council secretary Mohsen Rezaee claimed on Sunday that the Iranian government will soon be unveiling a new “exclusion zone” on either end of the Strait of Hormuz, potentially expanding its target package from vessels that are transiting the waterway to include vessels that appear like they might be planning to transit it or that have already transited it. As far as I know Tehran hasn’t yet made any official announcement about implementing this zone and it’s possible that ambiguity on the subject might suit Iranian aims better than specificity. Rezaee did say that the zone will begin where the US naval blockade sits, though it’s unclear exactly where the Iranians define that to be.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration blacklisted every Iranian airline (the 27 that weren’t already under US sanctions) as well as nine other aviation-related entities. The aim is to effectively blockade Iran by air as well as by sea under “Maximum Pressure 2.0,” at least to the extent that other governments are willing to abide by these airline designations. Speaking of economic pressure, the Iranian government announced on Tuesday that it is raising gasoline prices for those who purchase more than their 110 liter per month quota, doubling the cost above that threshold to 100,000 rials per liter. Despite its oil resources Iran runs a fuel deficit, and so the US pressure campaign is pinching the Iranian economy even in this sector.

ASIA

NEPAL

The Diplomat’s Biswas Baral argues that Nepal’s recent disastrous floods may have major repercussions for the country’s foreign policy:

Nepal’s recent floods, which have killed at least 1,280 people while over 5,600 are still missing as of this writing, rank among the country’s worst natural disasters. Preliminary estimates put economic losses at $2.56 billion. But the disaster’s consequences will extend far beyond the immediate human and economic toll.

It has also undermined the efforts of successive post-2015 governments to achieve more geopolitical balance, largely through the development of new transport, trade and transit facilities with China.

As a landlocked country wedged between India and China, Nepal has long sought to preserve its strategic autonomy by balancing the influence of its two neighbors.

Much of the infrastructure that the Nepali government has built at its Kerung border checkpoint was washed out in the flooding and will take considerable time and money to rebuild. Further complicating the situation, the Chinese government has closed a second checkpoint for fear of landslides. Coupled with the damage that Nepal suffered to its power grid the result is likely greater dependence on India.

NORTH KOREA

The Russian and North Korean governments opened the first road bridge connecting their countries across the Tumen River on Monday. According to Russian officials it will be able to handle “up to 300 vehicles” per day and will be immediately open to cargo traffic. Passenger traffic may come later. Those details aside, the bridge is probably more significant as a symbol of the developing relationship between the two countries amid the Ukraine war.

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AFRICA

SUDAN

AFP is reporting that an apparent Rapid Support Forces drone strike killed at least 13 people and wounded another 22 in the city of Umm Ruwaba in Sudan’s North Kordofan state on Tuesday. Elsewhere, Sudan Tribune is reporting that “up to 20 people are dying each day from severe hunger and disease” in the Jebel Marra area in Sudan’s Darfur region. Officials in the Sudan Liberation Movement (al-Nur) faction, which controls that area (and which consequently has become a haven for displaced persons fleeing the RSF) are claiming that the area is in a state of famine and that millions of people could be at risk. Any official famine designation would require international assessment, but there’s no reason to doubt that conditions are dire.

NIGERIA

The New Humanitarian’s Obi Anyadike reported on Monday that the Nigerian government and Boko Haram have been in a ceasefire since June and are likely to extend it for at least another 40 days. The two sides came to this agreement during negotiations over the release of some 360 civilians whom the jihadist group kidnapped from a village near the Cameroonian border back in March. It also included a $3.7 million ransom payment to Boko Haram, though the Nigerian government has denied that—indeed it’s denied or refused to comment on the whole arrangement because it doesn’t want to be seen Negotiating With Terrorists. But apparently there is some feeling that this ceasefire could lead to more comprehensive negotiations on some sort of settlement, perhaps including joint operations against the Islamic State West Africa Province group. That very much remains to be seen.

EUROPE

UKRAINE

The Russian military killed at least five people and wounded another 30 in bombarding Kyiv overnight, coinciding with the expiration of its three day pause in attacks on the Ukrainian capital (and the departure of US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff). Ukrainian strikes, meanwhile, killed at least two people in Russian-occupied Crimea and two more people in Russia proper.

SERBIA

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić announced on Tuesday that he’s setting October 25 as the date for the country’s snap parliamentary election. He triggered this election when he announced his resignation earlier this year, possibly with an eye toward circumventing term limits by making himself prime minister (assuming that his Serbian Progressive Party wins the election).

Also on Tuesday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa criticized the attendance of several Serbian officials at the funeral of convicted génocidaire Ratko Mladić on Monday. Mladić, who led ethnic Serb forces during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War and was convicted for his conduct by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2017, died last month in The Hague. The Serbian government initially planned to give him a state funeral before backing down under international criticism. There may be repercussions for Serbia’s European Union membership bid though it’s unclear what those might be.

HUNGARY

The Hungarian government expelled ten Russian diplomatic staffers on Tuesday, claiming that they had “engaged in activities in Hungary that are unacceptable for diplomats under the Vienna ​Convention.” Presumably that means some form of espionage or interference in domestic affairs but it’s unclear exactly what they were doing. The election of Prime Minister Péter Magyar and his Tisza party earlier this year brought a more Europe-friendly government to power in Budapest and that seems to be causing a recalibration of the country’s relationship with Moscow. The Russian government will presumably retaliate for this act.

GERMANY

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party won Sunday’s legislative election in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt state with roughly 44 percent of the vote. That translates to 39 seats in the 83 seat state parliament, shy of a sole majority but close enough that the party may be able to bring in a handful of defectors or independents to cobble together a working coalition. I don’t normally devote time to state-level elections in this newsletter and I’m not going to spend much time on this one, but given the potential ramifications of AfD running Saxony-Anhalt both on German federal politics and on the European far-right in general it seemed worth noting.

ICELAND

The Icelandic Foreign Ministry summoned US ambassador Billy Long on Tuesday to express displeasure over one of Donald Trump’s recent social media posts. Said post included a map that showed the US flag emblazoned over all of North America—including Iceland, whose western portion technically does sit on the North American continental plate though I doubt that the map’s illustrator gave it that much thought. Needless to say the post was poorly received in other places as well.

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AMERICAS

ECUADOR

The US military’s Southern Command sunk another Ecuadorian vessel in the eastern Pacific on Monday, the fifth such incident in the past two weeks. The Pentagon insists, without offering any evidence, that these vessels serve as refueling/logistical waystations for drug traffickers. It has been boarding them and detaining their crews before sinking them.

VENEZUELA

The Trump administration is apparently not done looting Venezuela, as Reuters reported on Tuesday that it is pursuing the country’s mineral resources as well as its oil according to “three sources familiar with the discussions.” The arrangement would presumably parallel the administration’s oil deal and could include gold as well as critical industrial minerals. Logistically there could be additional complications as unlike Venezuela’s oil resources, its mineral resources have been under-assessed.

GREENLAND

The EU inked a new agreement on Monday to invest €200 million in Greenland “aimed at improving local quality of life over the next two years,” as Al Jazeera put it. NATO and the EU have both demonstrated increased interest in Greenland in hopes of fending off Donald Trump’s desire to annex the island or at least to undermine his complaints that the blocs are ignoring Greenland’s economic and security needs. The EU is also planning to substantially increase aid to Greenland when it considers its next six year (2028-2034) budget.

CANADA

Finally, Canadian tariffs went into effect on Tuesday, imposing new duties on $20 billion (US) of US products in a dollar-for-dollar retaliation for the tariffs that the Trump administration imposed on Canada last month. Unable to let Canada have the last word (for now) in this exchange, Donald Trump announced in response that the US will ban several categories of Canadian goods from the US altogether. The new restrictions include Canadian alcohol and dairy products as well as “large motorcycles.” He’s also apparently planning to expand the tariffs to additional Canadian products next week. There is no war but the trade war, I guess.

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PROGRAMMING NOTE: Since tomorrow is Labor Day in the US I’m going to play it by ear in terms of writing a roundup. Basically if it seems like a relatively slow news day I will hold off and double up on Tuesday.

TODAY IN HISTORY

September 5, 1905: The Russo-Japanese War ends with the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth, negotiated with the mediation of Teddy Roosevelt (who won the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize as a result). The Russians were obliged to evacuate Manchuria, acknowledge Korea as within Japan’s sphere of influence, and turn over a couple of Pacific islands to Tokyo. The war marked Japan as a rising power and contributed to growing political discontent in Russia that wasn’t resolved until 1917.

September 5, 1972: Members of the Palestinian terror group “Black September” kill two members of the Israeli delegation and take nine more hostage during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. A poorly handled rescue attempt at the Munich airport by West German police the following day ended with the nine hostages killed as well as five of the attackers and one police officer.

September 6, 1522: The Victoria arrives at the Spanish port of Sanlúcar, becoming the first ship to successfully circumnavigate the earth. It had set out as one of five vessels in Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition in 1519 and was the only ship to survive the journey. In that sense it fared better than its commodore, Magellan, who was killed after picking an ill-advised fight with a group of indigenous people in the Philippines. And its haul of spices in particular was worth more than the other four ships combined, so investors still came out ahead. The Victoria would fully complete its trip around the world two days later by returning to the port whence it departed, Seville.

September 6, 1955: The two-day Istanbul Pogrom begins amid news reports that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki (located in the former home where Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was born) had been bombed by Greek agents. A mob began attacking Greeks in Istanbul and then expanded its scope to include Armenians and Jews. Between 13 and 30 people are said to have been killed in the violence and the incident began a process of Greek emigration that played out over the next several years. In reality, the consulate was fine and the whole thing was a planned operation by Turkey’s two “Operation Gladio” organizations, the Tactical Mobilization Group and Counter-Guerrilla. They were responding to the rise of Greek unionist sentiment (Enosis) in Cyprus and were likely also working on a longer-term project to “encourage” minority emigration and thereby “Turkify” Turkey.

MIDDLE EAST

LEBANON

The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least seven people across southern Lebanon on Sunday, prompting Lebanese President Joseph Aoun to appeal for US assistance in reducing Israeli violence. Israeli officials insisted that they were responding to a Saturday drone strike by Hezbollah against IDF personnel positioned near the Ali al-Taher ridge.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The IDF killed at least two people, a man and his daughter, in Gaza on Sunday. Israeli officials claimed that they were targeting a Hamas member and said that they were investigating the airstrike.

In the West Bank, Israeli settlers killed at least one Palestinian and wounded three others in a shooting incident near the city of Qalqilya early Monday morning. Settler terrorism has been on the rise of late across the territory, shining an international spotlight on the issue. In response, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly ordered the removal of dozens of unapproved settler outposts. The order applies to upwards of 100 such facilities, which is less than a third of the total number of illegal (under Israeli law) outposts that dot the territory. Netanyahu is hoping that this fairly empty gesture will ease the pressure he’s now under from the US to rein in settler violence, without completely upsetting his base ahead of next month’s election.

YEMEN

Weekend fighting between Ansarullah and the Yemeni government’s security forces left over 140 people dead according to AFP, which reported at least 57 of the former’s fighters and 84 of the latter’s being among the dead. I haven’t seen any specifics regarding civilian casualties though at least four were killed and nine more wounded in an Ansarullah missile strike in Yemen’s Taiz province on Saturday. More than 300 people have been killed in total since Ansarullah launched a new offensive on Thursday. Government forces claimed the capture of part of Hudaydah province over the weekend, continuing a string of potentially significant advances on their part.

IRAN

The potatoes in Donald Trump’s “small potatoes” war with Iran seemed to get a little bigger on Saturday, when Iranian forces fired on at least two US naval vessels. Since the June “memorandum of understanding” that put the brakes on the much bigger potatoes phase of the war, the Iranians have tended to focus their attacks on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz. The US military’s Central Command described Saturday’s attacks, on an aircraft carrier and a destroyer, as “unprovoked” and I mention this mostly because it belongs in the obvious gaslighting hall of fame if such a thing exists. The Iranians also claimed attacks on three oil tankers while US forces attacked three Iranian oil tankers, including one near the country’s Kharg island oil facility. Iranian assertions that the US military ships took some damage in the attacks cannot be confirmed and Central Command denied it.

On Sunday, Iranian officials claimed to have struck an “unmanned” US naval vessel in the strait, which Central Command also rejected. And US Energy Secretary Chris Wright told ABC News that the US and Iran “may not” negotiate a nuclear deal after all. Who could have predicted? I guess it doesn’t matter, because it’s not like Wright’s boss justified a whole war on the basis of reaching a nuclear deal. And the alternative to a deal is, according to Wright, simply to stay at war with Iran in perpetuity, attacking the country any time it appears to be reconstituting a nuclear program. That seems perfectly reasonable.

ASIA

MYANMAR

Myanmar junta leader Min Aung Hlaing made his first official visit to Vietnam as a nominally civilian head of state on Friday, and on Saturday he and Vietnamese President Tô Lâm announced that they had agreed to strengthen their defense and security relationship. The deal itself is less notable for what it entails than for what it says about Myanmar’s reintegration into Southeast Asian politics, now that its junta has gone through the motions of holding an election. Min Aung Hlaing’s visit in itself was a sign of normalization, and the defense agreement goes beyond that.

CHINA

The Washington Post reports on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recently busy travel calendar, which indicates that he’s hoping to capitalize on the present geopolitical moment:

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has hit the road this September for an unusual series of diplomatic trips spanning four countries, three state visits, two multilateral summits and one widely anticipated meeting with President Donald Trump.

A key part of his agenda: A pitch for China as a stable partner, especially for developing countries, during a period of what Beijing has portrayed as U.S.-driven geopolitical uncertainty.

The visits — to Kyrgyzstan, Egypt, India and the United States — are a collective rarity for the Chinese leader, who has sharply limited his international travel since the coronavirus pandemic. Between 2021 and 2025, U.S. presidents logged 51 visits to other countries, compared to just 25 for Xi.

Other world leaders have been more than willing to visit Xi in China, allowing him the luxury of holding court at home. But experts say he now sees openings abroad.

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AFRICA

SUDAN

There are several items of note:

• The Sudanese military (SAF) captured the town of Hamrat al-Wiz in Sudan’s North Kordofan state on Sunday. Given its location, this could further strengthen the SAF’s control of the main road linking the Khartoum region to North Kordofan’s state capital, El Obeid.

• In South Kordofan, the Sudan Doctors Network is reporting that the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North killed at least five civilians on Friday in an artillery attack on the town of Dilling.

• The United Nations Panel of Experts on the Sudan has submitted a new report to the UN Security Council claiming that “commanders” within the Rapid Support Forces militant group “ordered fighters to rape women and encouraged the killing of civilians during their takeover of El Fasher,” the capital of North Darfur state, last October. The atrocities reach all the way to RSF Deputy Commander Abdel Rahim Hamdan Dagalo, brother of RSF leader Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo.

• The New York Times reported on Saturday that “a dossier of evidence shared with [the NYT] by a Middle Eastern intelligence agency bolsters” US allegations that the SAF has been using chemical weapons, specifically chlorine gas. We can assume that said intelligence agency hails from either the UAE, which supports the RSF, or Israel on the UAE’s behalf. In either case that would argue for taking these claims with a heap of salt. That said, the SAF hasn’t exactly wreathed itself in glory over the past three and a half years and just because the purview of this dossier may be suspect that doesn’t make its claims false.

NIGER

Niger’s ruling junta is accusing the French government of fomenting last weekend’s mutiny/attempted coup. While this isn’t out of the question, I wouldn’t make too much of it. Nigerien officials (like their other Sahelian junta counterparts) tend to blame their misfortunes on France as a means of deflecting from their own failures by dredging up nationalist/anti-colonialist sentiment.

ETHIOPIA

Al Jazeera discusses the Tigray People’s Liberation Front’s efforts to preserve and reconstitute itself under the Pretoria Agreement that ended its 2020-2022 war against the Ethiopian government:

Nearly four years later, the large-scale war has ended, but many of the disputes that fuelled it remain unresolved.

More significantly, the period since 2024 has seen the TPLF reposition itself politically and organisationally while retaining military leverage and developing new relationships.

The sequence is striking: TPLF contacts with Eritrean officials, including reported meetings in Dubai and Zalambessa; a renewed struggle over political control in Tigray; reports of recruitment and mobilisation; new clashes involving Tigrayan forces; and the emergence of Tsimdo, a loose convergence of groups opposed to the federal government.

Taken together, the developments raise a question over whether Pretoria became less a completed transition to peace than a period in which the TPLF could regroup and reposition itself while the underlying conflict remained unresolved.

There is no evidence that the TPLF entered the agreement with a predetermined plan to use it as a tactical pause. But the events since 2024 suggest that the movement has retained an organisational and security role that Pretoria was supposed to diminish.

Tsimdo puts the TPLF in alliance with multiple groups including Fano militias from the Amhara region and the Oromo Liberation Army. The TPLF and the Fano in particular have a history of tense relations and are still at odds over which region should control the territory that is currently classified as the western portion of the Tigray region. If they can collaborate with each other and with the Eritreans, that could pose a serious threat to the Ethiopian government.

NAMIBIA

The Trump administration is “phasing out” support for Namibia’s anti-AIDS programs, allocating just $45 million for them in 2027 and nothing beyond that apart from “technical cooperation.” Namibia is one of several African countries that have balked at the administration’s demands for things like sensitive health data and favorable resource deals as prerequisites for continuing US health aid. Namibia has “surpassed UNAIDS targets,” so the effect of this funding cut will hopefully be small.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff on Saturday, while Russian airstrikes were killing at least ten people across Ukraine and Ukrainian attacks killed at least two people in Russia’s Belrogod oblast. The meeting doesn’t seem to have resulted in any major breakthroughs, though as a courtesy to the envoys both countries agreed to hold off on attacking one another’s capital cities through Monday. Kushner and Witkoff headed to Kyiv on Sunday, which was their first visit to the Ukrainian capital. Again there don’t seem to have been any major developments, though even touching base at this point seems useful.

UKRAINE

The New York Times reports on the extent to which rank corruption has been undermining the Ukrainian war effort:

Confidential reviews by the State Audit Service and an internal Ministry of Defense auditing department reveal a military procurement system riddled with mismanagement. Warning signs go unheeded, the records show, and there are seldom consequences for overcharging or failing to deliver.

Companies won contracts without demonstrating that they could supply the weapons, or without licenses to deliver them. Auditors identified 18 companies that signed deals despite defaulting on previous agreements. Six of those companies failed to fulfill a single contract.

Military contractors around the globe, including the world’s richest arms dealer as well as Ukrainian and American companies, have gotten wealthy through this system.

The internal government audits showed that in 2024 alone, Ukraine lost about $1.2 billion to fraud, waste and mismanagement.

Those losses, which have not been made public, piled up even as President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to allies for more weaponry and financial aid.

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AMERICAS

COLOMBIA

Somebody carried out an attack on a Colombian military outpost in the city of Ocaña, in Colombia’s Norte de Santander department, on Friday night that killed at least three soldiers and wounded four others. Colombian authorities have pointed to National Liberation Army (ELN) rebels and the group is active in that part of the country, though as far as I know it hasn’t claimed responsibility as yet.

UNITED STATES

Finally, Responsible Statecraft’s Andrew Leonard discusses the potential parameters of US military operations in Latin America:

On Thursday, U.S. SOUTHCOM Commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan met with the Colombian and Ecuadorian defense ministers in San Lorenzo, Ecuador. The trio agreed on a plan to significantly expand their military cooperation along the Ecuador-Colombia border, moving past episodic U.S.-partnered missions and toward sustained combined operations against groups Washington has designated as terrorist organizations.

This development is significant because it occurs at the time U.S. military forces are already operating on the ground with Ecuadorian forces in Esmeraldas, with the precise manner of cooperation publicly unknown. Additionally, on Aug. 23, Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella announced all illegal armed and criminal groups will be classified and treated strictly as “terrorists” under a new “Comprehensive Security and Public Order Strategy,” further laying the groundwork for expanded military cooperation with the U.S. and Ecuador. The new U.S.-Colombian-Ecuadorian tripartite framework and broader commitments made at the recent Americas Counter Cartel Coalition (A3C) in Panama raise an even larger question: what types of U.S. military cooperation will occur across the Americas, and under what authorities?

The framework, in deepening the integration of U.S. military forces on land, may see those forces advising foreign military forces, participating in combined operational planning, and supporting or even participating in future combined patrols and lethal strikes inside Ecuadorian and Colombian territory, and potentially elsewhere in the region.

The distinction is important because ‘security cooperation and security assistance’ can describe varying levels of activity, each governed by different authorities and with different levels of risk and consequences. U.S. military engagement with foreign security forces is best understood as four increasingly consequential forms of involvement, each with their own unique legal and political requirements and associated costs: training and equipping; advising and assisting; partner-enabled U.S. operations; and direct employment of U.S. forces.

September 4, 476: Odoacer and his army depose the very young western Roman Emperor Romulus Augustus (“Augustulus”) at Ravenna. This is the conventional date given for the final end of the Roman Empire in the west, though there were other claimants to the throne still kicking around. Modern historians tend to discount the notion that there was one specific end date for the western empire, with this date instead serving as one of several markers in a lengthy transition from the Roman world to something we would recognize as “medieval.”

September 4, 1839: Four British boats open fire on a group of Chinese junks enforcing a blockade on the English community in Hong Kong, killing two in what’s known as the Battle of Kowloon. This minor engagement sparked the First Opium War, which ended with Britain in control of Hong Kong and China forced to agree to major trade concessions.

September 4, 1912: The Albanian Revolt of 1912 ends with Ottoman authorities agreeing to a list of rebel demands that gave the empire’s predominantly Albanian provinces a significant degree of autonomy. The Ottoman Empire was at war with Italy when the revolt broke out and simply lacked the capacity to deal with both struggles at once, so it more or less acceded to Albanian demands (the Ottomans lost the war with Italy anyway). The First Balkan War, which broke out on October 8, short circuited the autonomy plan but ended in mid-1913 with, among other things, the creation of a fully independent Albanian nation.

INTERNATIONAL

• The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reported on Friday that global food prices rose last month to their highest level since November 2022. A combination of extreme El Niño- and climate change-driven weather and disruptions caused by the Ukraine and Iran wars are fueling price increases for staples including “cereals, vegetable oils, sugar, meat and dairy.”

• The UN General Assembly voted on Friday to adopt the “Equal Earth” map, which aims to replace the Mercator projection as the main world map in general use. Unlike Mercator, which overstates the size of land masses near the Earth’s northern and southern poles (making Europe, in particular, look a lot bigger than it actually is), the Equal Earth projection offers a more accurate picture. In particular Africa and South America appear much larger. The vote doesn’t force anyone to change maps, but the US nevertheless voted against the resolution because it’s Woke, or whatever. It was the only country to vote no.

MIDDLE EAST

LEBANON

The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least two people in an airstrike in southern Lebanon’s Nabatieh province on Friday and at least one more in an airstrike near the city of Tyre. The Nabatieh incident took place near the Ali al-Taher ridge, which the IDF claimed to have seized the previous day. Also on Friday, the Israelis released four more Lebanese civilians as part of a deal under which the Lebanese government is assisting in the search for the remains of several Lebanese Jewish community leaders who were killed in the 1980s.

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TODAY IN HISTORY

September 3, 301: According to tradition, this is the date upon which a stonemason-turned-deacon named Marinus founds a new monastery on Monte Titano, some distance outside the Italian city of Rimini. He may have fled Rimini after a woman there accused him of being her estranged husband. The monastery grew quickly, possibly fueled by Christians looking for sanctuary amid the Diocletianic persecutions (though historians continue to debate the actual extent of those persecutions), and, taking the name of its founder, became the historical basis for the tiny nation of San Marino (“St. Marinus”). San Marino commemorates September 3 as “Republic Day.”

September 3, 863: A Byzantine army manages to defeat an Arab raiding party at the Battle of Lalakaon, in the process killing the emir of Melitene, Umar al-Aqta. They may also have killed the leader of the Paulician movement, Karbeas, though he may have died later in 863. The Byzantines then raided into the Caucasus, where at some point they killed the emir of Tarsus, Ali ibn Yahya. In basically one fell swoop the empire had eliminated arguably its three biggest threats in the east. Constantinople was able to shift its focus west and ensure that it, not Rome, would manage the Christianization of the Bulgarians. That in turn pacified the Byzantines’ western border for the time being, which allowed them to shift focus again to the east and make significant gains at Arab expense in the decades to come.

September 3, 1260: A Mamluk army stops the seemingly unstoppable Mongols at the Battle of Ayn Jalut at what is known today as Ma’ayan Harod in Israel. The Mongol commander, Hulagu, had returned east with a sizable portion of his army in order to defend his interests following the death of the great khan, Möngke, in August 1259, leaving behind an undermanned remnant. The Mongols also faced an army of slave soldiers recruited from Central Asia, who fought like the Mongols and seem to have used many of the Mongols’ favorite tactics against them. The battle is a genuine turning point in world history, as a Mongol victory probably would have seen them continue into Egypt and thus there is an argument to be made that the Mamluk victory preserved Islam’s status as a major world religion.

September 3, 1650: The English New Model Army invades Scotland and wins a decisive victory over Scottish/Royalist forces at the Battle of Dunbar. English commander Oliver Cromwell moved quickly to capture Edinburgh and the key Scottish port of Leith. The invasion, prompted when the Scottish Parliament voted to recognize Charles II as the successor to Charles I after the English “Rump” Parliament had the latter executed in 1649, ended coincidentally exactly one year later, on September 3 1651, when Cromwell’s army again crushed a Royalist army at the Battle of Worcester.

September 3, 1783: Representatives of Great Britain and the United States of America sign the Treaty of Paris, ending the American Revolution and establishing the United States as a newly independent nation. US negotiators went around the French government, which saw itself as the leader of an anti-British alliance, to negotiate a bilateral treaty with London. As a result they reached an agreement that, among other things, gave the new nation control of all North American territory east of the Mississippi River. The French delegation, by contrast, had favored a settlement that confined the US to the territory east of the Appalachian Mountains.

September 3, 1939: France and the United Kingdom, along with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, declare war on Germany in response to the German invasion of Poland, officially kicking off the Second World War.

INTERNATIONAL

The United Nations World Meteorological Organization issued a new El Niño forecast on Thursday that projects the current system to persist through at least February and “to be the strongest in at least 70 years.” Weather and agricultural disruptions are already apparent and the system is expected to strengthen further over the next few months.

MIDDLE EAST

LEBANON

The Israeli government released one of its Lebanese prisoners on Thursday and is preparing to free four more, all civilians. According to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu these prisoner releases are part of a deal whereby the Lebanese government has promised to facilitate a search for the bodies of several Lebanese Jewish community leaders who were abducted and killed by Hezbollah and groups aligned with it back in the 1980s. The Israelis are believed to be holding more than 30 Lebanese civilians taken captive since the Israeli military (IDF) invaded southern Lebanon in 2024.

Elsewhere, the IDF claimed on Thursday that it has secured “operational control” over the Ali al-Taher ridge in southern Lebanon after clearing two underground Hezbollah tunnels in that area. That ridge has been an IDF focus for some time now, both because of the tunnels beneath and because it is a strategic high point in the region. The IDF is now apparently planning to destroy the tunnels. Reuters reported earlier on Thursday that the Iranian government had issued a warning a couple of weeks ago regarding IDF operations on the ridge, in part because there were Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps personnel stationed there, and that the Israelis had delayed their plans as a result. Israeli officials are denying the details of that report.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The IDF killed at least three people in Gaza on Thursday, one in a drone strike and two others (including a 13 year old) in a shooting incident in the Beit Lahia area. Elsewhere, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir announced a plan for ethnically cleansing Gaza on Thursday that involves the creation of a new cabinet ministry devoted to the task. Defense Minister Israel Katz made it clear the previous day that ethnic cleansing — er, I mean “voluntary migration” — is still the Israeli government’s ultimate goal for the territory.

On the diplomatic front, DRC President Félix Tshisekedi announced on Thursday that he will move his country’s Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Tshisekedi made the announcement as he was wrapping up a visit to Israel. Aside from Israeli investment one assumes that he’s looking to curry additional favor with the Trump administration.

YEMEN

Ansarullah launched a new offensive on Thursday aiming to cut a road between the port city of Mokha and the southern city of Taiz, sparking clashes that left at least 18 Ansarullah personnel and 13 Yemeni military personnel dead. The main thrust appears to have been an operation to seize Mokha from the Yemen government, which would be a significant gain for Ansarullah though there’s no indication as to whether or not the group made any meaningful gains.

IRAN

The latest US-Iran flareup continued on Thursday, with Iranian forces striking targets in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (allegedly, as UAE authorities denied that any attack took place there). Iranian officials say they’re retaliating for a US missile strike earlier this week that reportedly struck a civilian home during a wedding ceremony and killed at least five people. The US military is “probing” that claim for the possibility that the damage was caused by missile debris or an errant Iranian air defense interceptor, though video and still photos of the damage apparently point toward a direct hit on the home by a US weapon. Additionally at latest count at least 13 Iranian military personnel have been killed this week.

The good news is that this isn’t a war, according to noted expert JD Vance. He might want to explain that to his boss, though, because Donald Trump keeps referring to it as a war even though it would benefit him and his Republican Party if he stopped doing that.

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright told CNBC on Wednesday that 17 million barrels of oil made it out through the Strait of Hormuz the previous day. The Trump administration has been claiming for some time now that it’s secretly moving all the oil that there is, was, or ever will be out through the strait. I guess the ultra secrecy is supposed to explain why maritime traffic monitors can’t track any of the related tanker movements and why global oil prices are still rising, to $97 per barrel on Thursday with diesel prices hitting their “highest level since 2022.” Clearly the monitors and the market don’t have access to the information that JD Vance has.

Reuters claims that the combination of the US blockade and “Maximum Pressure 2.0” has the Iranian economy struggling even more than it was struggling previously. The blockade has substantially reduced Iranian oil exports and the intensified sanctions (or at least intensified rhetoric about sanctions) campaign has reportedly closed down avenues that the Iranians were using to evade the blockade (or made them much more expensive to maintain). There’s no reason to doubt that the Iranian economy is being squeezed and we already knew that the US was capable of inflicting pain on Iranians. The question is whether it can inflict enough pain to force the Iranian government to make any concessions and/or to provoke a revolution. Otherwise it’s just pain for pain’s sake.

ASIA

INDIA

The Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague ruled earlier this week that the Indian government is still bound by the terms of the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, which is supposed to ensure an adequate water supply for Pakistan by limiting Indian activity on the upstream portions of the Indus River system. The Indian government suspended the treaty last year after a terrorist attack in Kashmir and the Pakistani government has been growing increasingly agitated about that. It’s begun a major dam project on the Chenab River that the Pakistanis insist will violate the treaty and that the court ordered mostly suspended pending a ruling from an “expert” appointed by the World Bank. The Indian government rejected the PCA ruling, which may leave the Pakistanis a step closer to taking drastic action.

SOUTH KOREA

The South Korean government is reportedly planning to send military assets to the Persian Gulf later this year to support “freedom of navigation” through the Strait of Hormuz. This is likely to be a token gesture that has much less to do with the strait than it does with South Korea’s relationship with Donald Trump. You may recall that when Trump scaled down last month’s joint US-South Korean military exercises he said that he was doing so in part because Seoul had not supported the Iran war. Presumably South Korean officials are hoping to pacify him.

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AFRICA

SUDAN

The United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan issued a new report on Thursday highlighting the role of foreign interference in expanding and extending Sudan’s civil war:

Foreign recruitment and external support networks are fuelling the war in Sudan, strengthening the military capabilities of the country’s warring parties and enabling increasingly sophisticated military operations with devastating consequences for civilians, the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan said in a new report today.

The report, “Fuelling Sudan’s conflict: weapons, fighters and external support networks,” documents how transnational entities operating across several countries have recruited, trained and deployed foreign personnel to support the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), while also facilitating the transfer of weapons, ammunition, military technology and logistical support. The report also finds reasonable grounds to believe that the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) used foreign-supplied drones in its operations that harmed civilians and civilian objects.

States linked to these supply chains are under strict international legal obligations to exercise due diligence, investigate and halt illicit mercenary and supply networks operating from or through their territories, prevent violations, and enforce the UN arms embargo.

Directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects constitutes war crimes. “The consequences of this external support are being felt most acutely by civilians,” said Mohamed Chande Othman, Chair of the Fact-Finding Mission. “This external support has not brought greater protection for civilians. Instead, civilians are paying the price through attacks on homes, hospitals, schools, markets and places of refuge.”

NIGER

In the wake of last month’s mutiny/attempted coup in Niger, Sawahil’s Alex Thurston highlights the factors that put that country’s junta at greater risk of a being overthrown than the region’s other military (or basically military) governments:

Unlike in 2020 in Mali or 2022 (x2) in Burkina Faso, Niger’s General Abdourahamane Tiani was a senior officer and an insider who appears to have acted to protect his own position within the existing system; that image and posture contrast sharply with the Malian and Burkinabè coups that brought relatively young, combat-tested officers to power promising systemic change. The ideological foundations of Niger’s junta are weaker and less credible, in other words, than are those of the juntas in Mali and Burkina Faso. Meanwhile, although Tiani came out of a particular political dispensation and rearranged it, he does not have the kind of lynchpin position that Chad’s Mahamat Déby has - Déby may be resented and contested by numerous other factions in Chad, but the Déby family has been the center of gravity in Chadian politics since 1990, a kind of continuity Tiani does not embody. Tellingly, of all the successful Sahelian coups of the 2020s, the 2023 Niger coup appeared to be the least cohesive, the one that most relied upon various factions of the military reluctantly assenting to a takeover. So while all four of these Sahelian juntas are vulnerable, Niger’s may be the most politically vulnerable, meaning the one where front-line soldiers would have the least sympathy for their current rulers.

SOMALIA

Somali security forces apparently held off another attack on the city of Baidoa by forces loyal to former Southwest state governor Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen on Thursday. It’s been a bit over two weeks since Laftagareen’s forces last tried to take the city, and as they did then Somali officials are accusing Laftagareen and his militia forces of collaborating with al-Shabab jihadists. It’s unclear whether al-Shabab was a participant in Thursday’s attack but if it was then it’s unclear whether it was working with Laftagareen or just exploiting the chaos. Laftagareen was forced from office earlier this year after he declared that he no longer recognized the authority of the federal government in Mogadishu.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

Ukrainian strikes killed at least four people in Russia’s Belgorod oblast on Thursday. Additionally, authorities in the Russian-occupied portion of Ukraine’s Donetsk oblast reported that drone strikes killed at least three people.

UKRAINE

Foreign Policy’s Adrian Karatnycky says that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is losing public support over a series of corruption scandals:

Recent polling from Ukrainian political research company SOCIS shows that Ukrainians now regard corruption as a greater problem than the war itself, in part because they link Ukraine’s fate on the battlefield to corruption at the highest levels of the state. Fully 90 percent of Ukrainians believe that corruption stands at a high or extremely high level. Most significantly and most emblematic of the shift, nearly 57 percent of Ukrainians blame Zelensky for the prevalence of corruption, nearly double the number in a similar poll by SOCIS in April 2025. The SOCIS polling also projects that three different rivals would beat him in a second-round election, each by a landslide margin of around 2-to-1.

Zelensky’s loss of support is largely a self-inflicted wound, the product of a philosophy of governance based on rule through a small group of functionaries prized for their personal loyalty. For years, Zelensky has touted and defended this highly centralized system of governance, in which nearly all decision-making emanates from the presidential office. In December 2023, he famously declared that he relies on a team of five to six key managers to run the country’s affairs. Such centralization, while in violation of the constitution, was long accepted by the public as necessary amid the wartime emergency.

In the past year, however, numerous scandals inside the heart of Zelensky’s office have shaken public confidence, and his system of rule through close confidants and managers is a shambles. Four of Zelensky’s top managers are implicated in allegations of illicit activities.

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AMERICAS

CUBA

The Trump administration blacklisted five Cuban entities plus Fidel Ernesto Castro, grandson of Cuban grandee Raúl Castro, on Thursday. The entities involved included one bank, two mining firms, and two energy companies.

UNITED STATES

Finally, The Conversation’s Wendy Whitman Cobb considers Donald Trump’s plans to create a “US Space Academy” and the militarization of outer space:

Establishing the U.S. Space Academy could be a wise decision, as space is becoming more important in everyday life. The pace of space activities – civilian, commercial and military – has increased significantly in the past decade and is poised to continue. For example, satellite constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink provide internet access globally, and the Global Positioning System, GPS, is a vital part of the economy worldwide. A space academy could help educate the next generation of engineers, scientists and spacecraft operators.

But the biggest implication of this space academy proposal is that it would almost certainly lead to a reconsideration of the relationship between military and civilian space. The distinction between these two areas has been a cornerstone of U.S. space policy for over 65 years. While the lines have been blurred at times, a U.S. Space Academy that serves as both a military and civilian institution confuses them even further.

As tensions in space between the United States and its potential adversaries continue to rise, balance will be necessary to avoid any potential escalation. Space activities that are civilian in nature, like scientific exploration, should not be confused with those that are distinctly military related, such as missile warning or defense, that might be seen as more aggressive. Keeping this distinction clear will help to clear up any confusion about U.S. intentions in space.

September 2, 31 BCE (or thereabouts): Octavian’s forces decisively defeat the navy of Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium. Actium effectively marked the end of the war between Octavian and Antony, as both Antony and Cleopatra subsequently retreated to Alexandria and eventually committed suicide after Octavian besieged the city. His rival gone, Octavian became the first emperor of Rome, taking the title Augustus to mark his new status.

September 2, 1192: The Third Crusade effectively ends with the Treaty of Jaffa, under the terms of which Richard the Lionheart and Saladin agreed to a three year cessation in hostilities, during which time Saladin would allow Christian pilgrims to visit any holy sites in his territory, including Jerusalem. Richard agreed to surrender the city of Ascalon (modern Ashkelon) to Saladin, but only after destroying its fortifications. The treaty was the product of Richard’s realization that he lacked the manpower to besiege Jerusalem and that he needed to return home to defend his French territories.

September 2, 1870: The Prussian Third and Fourth armies thoroughly defeat the French Army of Châlons in the Franco-Prussian War’s Battle of Sedan, in northeastern France. In military terms the Prussian victory was of significant importance. The entire Army of Châlons, which had been trying to come to the Army of the Rhine’s aid during the Siege of Metz, was eradicated, suffering some 18,000 casualties and a whopping 104,000 soldiers captured. In political terms the impact was massive. It just so happens that French Emperor Napoleon III had accompanied the Army of Châlons to Metz, and he was among those taken prisoner. Two days later, an uprising in Paris saw whatever was left of the empire give way to the “Government of National Defense,” which attempted to salvage the war but ultimately surrendered in January 1871 and transitioned into the French Third Republic.

INTERNATIONAL

A United Nations report declared on Wednesday that humanity “has failed in its goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial times.” That was the stretch goal of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, which mainly called for keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius. Needless to say the prospects for that goal aren’t looking terribly good either. The UN is now suggesting that, in addition to limiting carbon emissions, it is also necessary to remove carbon from the atmosphere on what The New York Times characterized as “a colossal scale.” That would require either massive reforestation or a technological breakthrough to achieve and even at that the timeframe would be too long to avert serious near-term climate impacts.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

The Washington Post’s Gerry Shih reports on the Syrian government’s attempt to present its country as an alternative to the now-volatile Strait of Hormuz:

Day and night, 5,000 hulking trucks carrying oil from the Persian Gulf rumble across this stretch of barren desert as if in a caravan snaking its way toward the Mediterranean Sea.

The trucks began shuttling between the refineries of southern Iraq and the Syrian port of Baniyas in April, initially as an experiment by Iraqi oil exporters seeking to circumvent the Strait of Hormuz after cargo traffic in the waterway was stopped by the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.

Today, the daily bumper-to-bumper procession of tanker trucks is a showcase of how Syria and its new government aim to benefit as global energy flows are reshaped.

More than 18 months after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, who fled after 24 years in power, Syria is poised to capitalize on the lifting of international sanctions and the continuing war in the Persian Gulf.

Boasting access to Europe through its Mediterranean port at Baniyas, Syria — under its new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa — is pitching itself as a relatively stable, overland corridor for energy and goods, and an alternative to the Strait of Hormuz.

It is daft to imagine supplanting the strait’s prewar traffic with truck convoys, but there is a plan in the works to build a pipeline from southern Iraq to the Syrian coast that would be more effective though still not a full replacement. Construction is expected to take about two and a half years, though, so it’s not an immediate solution, and it will of course be vulnerable to attack. Even if all goes perfectly, rerouting Persian Gulf oil that is bound for Asia through the Mediterranean would add considerably to the logistical burden of getting it to market.

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TODAY IN HISTORY

September 1, 1880: A decisive British victory at the Battle of Kandahar ends the Second Anglo-Afghan War. British authorities deposed Afghan Emir Ayub Khan Barakzai and replaced him with his more pliable cousin, Abdur Rahman Khan.

September 1, 1939: Nazi Germany invades Poland. The German offensive began a week after the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the USSR and a day after the pact’s ratification by the Supreme Soviet. The initial German invasion overwhelmed the outgunned Polish military, and a subsequent invasion by the Red Army on September 17 sealed Poland’s fate and resulted in a partition of the country. The invasion is regarded as the start of World War II, as it triggered French and British declarations of war against Germany.

September 1, 1969: The Libyan Free Officers Movement, led by a young colonel named Muammar Gaddafi, overthrows King Idris of Libya in a coup d’état. Idris had been broadly unpopular, seen as siphoning off a disproportionate share of Libya’s newfound oil wealth and viewed as tyrannical by tribes that were accustomed to a great deal of autonomy. He was also in poor health, and when it became known that he planned to abdicate in favor of his nephew on September 2 the officers moved to preempt that. Gaddafi declared the founding of the “Libyan Arab Republic” and then set about implementing a political and economic program aligned with that of his idol, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, including its tenets of Arab socialism and pan-Arabism as well as its more authoritarian elements.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Clashes between the Druze “National Guard” militia and Syrian security forces left at least one of the former’s fighters dead and ten of the latter’s personnel wounded in southern Syria’s Suwayda province on Tuesday. This outbreak of violence apparently began on Thursday and left at least two civilians dead over the weekend. I haven’t seen any indication as to what caused the fighting.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has concluded that one of two sites its inspectors visited last month in eastern Syria’s Deir Ezzor province contained “cooling infrastructure … consistent with that of a nuclear reactor.” The site is the same one that the Israeli military (IDF) bombed in 2007 in “Operation Outside the Box.” The IAEA had previously assessed that it was “likely” a nuclear reactor but had not been able to confirm that assessment.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The IDF killed at least four people in Gaza on Tuesday during an operation in which it captured Moeen al-Arabeed, identified by Israeli officials as “the head of Hamas’s internal security force.” Arabeed’s wife was among the dead along with two children. The casualties apparently resulted from airstrikes that the IDF conducted after the “covert” team it sent into Gaza to effect the capture was discovered. This is yet another Israeli violation of the October “ceasefire,” which did not include a “but we really wanted to capture that guy” exception.

In the West Bank, the United Nations World Food Program said on Tuesday that it will halve its aid operations due to lack of funding (the product of aid cuts by the US and several European countries). In practical terms that means the number of people it’s supporting will decrease from 400,000 to 200,000, at a time when terrorist activity by Israeli settlers and security forces is, if anything, increasing the need for aid.

IRAN

The US and Iran exchanged fire again on Tuesday, with the former killing at least five people and wounding 68 others when one of its strikes hit a home in southern Iran during a wedding ceremony. There were presumably other casualties as well but that’s not clear as yet. The Iranians retaliated with a round of missile and drone strikes targeting military sites in Jordan as well as Gulf Arab states including Bahrain and Kuwait. This latest round of fighting came after apparent Iranian attacks on two oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz overnight.

ASIA

CHINA

“Two senior Trump administration officials” have claimed to Reuters that cargo vessels belonging to China’s state-owned COSCO Shipping firm are using “concealed equipment on board … to ‌spy on military communications near the coastlines of target nations.” The Chinese embassy in Washington rejected the claim. Last year the US Defense Department added COSCO to its list of Chinese companies accused of collaborating with the People’s Liberation Army. It is unclear whether the administration intends to take any action related to this allegation, but it seems unlikely given that any move to sanction the firm or ban its ships from US ports could risk reopening a trade war that Donald Trump seems intent on avoiding.

NORTH KOREA

South Korean MP Youn Kun-young told reporters on Tuesday that South Korea’s National Intelligence Service had made “an assessment that talks” between the US and North Korean governments “could be possible at ​anytime.” It’s unclear on what basis it made that assessment. The NIS has also assessed a “very ​low possibility” that North Korea will send additional military forces to support the Russian war in Ukraine, which seems to contradict Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s warnings that upwards of 50,000 North Korean troops may be on the way.

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AFRICA

SUDAN

An investigative report by The Sudan Tribune tracks the ways in which gold produced in the Darfur region is smuggled into the Central African Republic and Chad, and on from there:

Sudan Tribune interviewed drivers and logistics workers who transported gold shipments into the CAR and Chad in guarded convoys to mobile transit camps operated by unidentified Sudanese and foreign traders.

The investigation could not determine the exact coordinates of these sites, but drivers described them as highly mobile transit bases.

Equipped with modular shelters, water tankers, generators, solar panels, and Starlink satellite internet terminals, the encampments are designed to relocate swiftly along transit routes.

Flight tracking and source accounts indicate that once in the CAR, consignments of gold are flown to the United Arab Emirates, the primary trading and refining destination. Other parcels are routed directly through informal channels to Russia, generating hard-currency liquidity outside international sanctions regimes.

GUINEA-BISSAU

As expected, voters in Guinea-Bissau approved a new national constitution in Sunday’s referendum. Official results have the affirmative getting 70 percent of the vote with just under 60 percent turnout. Between the very clean 70-30 vote split and a turnout figure that contradicts observations of minimal participation at polling sites on election day I think it’s safe to say that these figures are very simple and, above all, believable. The new constitution significantly increases the powers of the presidency, which should be good news for junta leader/“transitional president” Horta Inta-A Na Man whenever he decides to make himself president for real.

SOMALIA

The New Arab reported on Tuesday that Somaliland President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi is about to travel to the United States, where he’s hoping that Israel’s recognition of Somaliland’s independence, and the region’s strategic Red Sea location, will help him make a case for US recognition. US officials regularly interact with Abdullahi’s government but the Trump administration still insists that it supports Somalia’s territorial integrity.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

The Financial Times is reporting that “Russia has been secretly helping Iran develop advanced supersonic cruise missiles” under a “multiyear covert programme.” The project aims “to help Iran to develop a ramjet propulsion system,” and while the FT investigation found that the Iranians have built and tested such a system there’s no evidence that they’ve yet deployed it in combat. What is mainly of interest here is that the Russian government didn’t just supply Iran with ramjet-powered missiles, it has instead supported Iran’s own development of that technology. Arms transfers can be interrupted or halted if one party’s priorities change, but the effects of this sort of project can’t be undone. It shows a Russian intent to arm and support countries that are hostile toward the US/West on a long term basis, predating the current Iran war.

UKRAINE

Another major overnight Russian bombardment (for the sixth night in a row) left at least 12 people dead in and around Kyiv on Tuesday. At least 12 more people were wounded across the country. Elsewhere, Russian President Vladimir Putin is claiming that his country’s forces seized some 270 square kilometers of territory in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk oblast last month and that they’ve surrounded “a large ​group of Ukrainian ​troops.” Neither claim can be verified.

GERMANY

The German government is accusing its Russian counterpart of attempting a drone attack on Leipzig/Halle Airport last month. On August 4 a drone carrying explosives was discovered at that facility, apparently in the vicinity of a Ukrainian aircraft, and security personnel disarmed it without further incident. German authorities are taking a number of retaliatory steps, most significantly the closure of the Russian consulate in Bonn later this month. The Russian embassy in Berlin rejected this accusation as “unsubstantiated, absurd and contrary to common sense” while promising retaliation for any diplomatic measures that Germany takes.

UNITED KINGDOM

Donald Trump told reporters on Tuesday that he may “review” US policy toward the Falkland islands. At present the US is neutral on the question of whether the islands should be part of the UK or Argentina but it recognizes UK administrative authority over them. The Trump administration has been threatening to recognize Argentine sovereignty over the islands in an effort to coerce the UK government into raising defense spending. That’s because the current UK government under Prime Minister Andy Burnham is reportedly preparing to walk back the previous government’s commitment to spend at least 3 percent of GDP on defense by 2030. Switching the Falklands policy could also be viewed as punishment for the UK’s failure to join in Trump’s glorious war on Iran.

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AMERICAS

VENEZUELA

The New York Times gets into the mechanism by which the Trump administration is looting tens of billions of barrels of oil from Venezuela, which boils down to the Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Capital taking “up to a 35 percent” ownership stake in Venezuelan oil magnate Alejandro Betancourt’s North American Blue Energy Partners firm (though the legality of that is unclear). The deal would also entitle the US to “preferential” prices on oil sales. Betancourt, as Axios explains, seems like a very upstanding citizen who’s been sued in US court and investigated by US and Swiss prosecutors on corruption charges—though as a “US official” explained, the administration is “not nominating anyone for sainthood here.”

One thing that probably doesn’t bode terribly well for the success of this arrangement is that the US and Venezuelan interpretations of what it means seem to diverge quite a bit, as Responsible Statecraft’s Orlando Pérez writes:

[Venezuelan President Delcy] Rodriguez described her interpretation of the deal on Telegram and expanded on it Saturday night on state television. Hers is a 25-year, bilateral project across 17 strategic fields and eight greenfield blocks, targeting more than 1.5 million barrels a day, drawing $100 billion in investment and returning roughly $209 billion to the Venezuelan state at a benchmark price of $65 per barrel, which would give the government about $19 of revenue per barrel. She insisted it preserves Venezuelan sovereignty over natural resources.

Trump, for his part, claimed there will be majority American ownership of the reserves, which would be illegal under Article 12 of Venezuela’s constitution. A U.S. official told the Associated Press that Washington would control 55% of the output of a new private company called North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), the second largest oil producer in Venezuela, with an ownership stake and the right to buy crude at cost for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and the military.

The White House fact sheet later broke that figure down: a 35% equity stake for the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, plus the State Department gets the right to buy 20% of output at cost.

This framing appears at odds with that of Rodriguez; it’s hard to imagine, after all, that Caracas will get $19 per barrel if the U.S. is buying large amounts of it at cost.

COLOMBIA

A car bomb killed at least one person and wounded another ten outside a police station in the Colombian city of Cúcuta on Tuesday. There’s no indication as to responsibility but authorities blamed a similar incident in the same city last month on National Liberation Army (ELN) rebels. Elsewhere, Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella claimed on Monday that military forces had killed at least 20 members of the Central General Staff (Estado Mayor Central or EMC) militant group in airstrikes that morning in Guaviare province.

MEXICO

Mexican authorities say that a “spate of bomb attacks” has impacted multiple states across the country in recent weeks. One incident, a car bombing, left at least 11 people wounded in Zacatecas state on Monday. Cartels and other criminal networks increasingly appear to be turning to drones as well, mainly in attacks on police or military personnel.

UNITED STATES

Finally, The American Prospect’s Gillian Brockell describes the experience aboard one of the Trump administration’s human trafficking flights:

For the first few hours of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement flight over the Atlantic Ocean, Mohamed Barry continued to act like himself, which is to say, he expected to be visible to the people around him.

So as GEO Group flight security guards stood over him and the other shackled passengers, chatting casually with each other, he asked them what country he was going to be deported to. They didn’t answer.

When the guards started drinking from red and blue plastic cups and the smell of alcohol wafted over to his seat, he asked one of them point-blank, “Are you guys allowed to drink on the job?” No response.

Then a man from Eritrea or Somalia, Barry isn’t sure which, began to beg the guards to let him use the lavatory. Barry chimed in with an appeal to decency, telling the guards, “Please consider us as human beings.” But the guards were boisterous by that point, he said, and they didn’t appreciate the man’s increasingly loud and desperate pleas crashing their party.

Barry watched as a guard turned and looked at the man dead in the face and said, “You. Can pee on. You.” Another guard laughed.

“After seeing that, I just kept my head down,” Barry, 52, told me over the phone last week.

Among the things Barry witnessed was at least one outright crime. According to Brockell, he saw “an ICE agent tell a foreign official to return them to their countries of origin, despite all having protection orders barring this—a practice called chain refoulement that is illegal under U.S. and international law.”

August 31, 1907: Britain and Russia sign the Anglo-Russian Convention, which closes arguably the last chapter in their “Great Game” rivalry in Asia, at least until the 1917 Russian Revolution. The two empires, having already agreed to mark Afghanistan as the frontier between their domains, further agreed to divide Iran into spheres of influence (Russian in the north, British in the south), to recognize Afghanistan as part of Britain’s sphere of influence, and not to interfere in Tibetan affairs. There’s a case to be made that the Cold War brought the “Great Game” back, but historians generally mark that as something different and consider the true Great Game to have ended with this convention.

August 31, 1957: The Malayan Declaration of Independence is proclaimed by Tunku Abdul Rahman, then-Chief Minister of the Federation of Malaya. The declaration acknowledged the end of the British protectorate over the nine Malay states that made up the federation. This date is annually commemorated as Malaysian Independence Day, but there is a bit of controversy about that because Malaysia didn’t come into existence until 1963, when the former British colonies of North Borneo, Sarawak, and Singapore joined the federation (Singapore left a couple of years later). Some folks in North Borneo and Sarawak take issue with their “independence day” commemorating an event that took place before they were part of the country.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least five people in multiple incidents in Gaza on Monday. One airstrike hit a Gaza city “public park” that’s become a makeshift displacement encampment. The IDF has now killed at least 1313 Palestinians in Gaza under the current “ceasefire.”

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TODAY IN HISTORY

August 29, 1526: The first of two battles involving the Ottoman Empire near the town of Mohács, in what is now southern Hungary, ends in a decisive Ottoman victory. The Ottomans were concerned about potential Habsburg expansion into the Balkans (prompted by King Louis II of Hungary’s 1515 marriage to Mary of Habsburg) and were being encouraged by their French allies to attack their common Habsburg foe from the east. Louis died during a panicked retreat and his Jagiellonian dynasty died with him. Hungary effectively ceased to exist as a kingdom, with its northern and western portions coming under Habsburg rule and the rest held as an Ottoman vassal. The battle opened central Europe up to the Ottomans, a state of affairs that would reach a high water mark of sorts in their failed 1529 siege of Vienna.

August 29, 1842: Britain and Qing China sign the Treaty of Nanjing, ending the 1839-1842 First Opium War. China was obliged to pay reparations to Britain and Hong Kong became a British colony, which it remained until 1997. The treaty also ended China’s “Canton System,” which had forced all foreign trade to run through the port city of Guangzhou (Canton) and was the means by which the Chinese government controlled those foreign commercial interactions, and forced the Qing to accept unequal conditions on Chinese-British trade.

August 30, 1363: The navies of two competing factions of the Red Turban rebels vying to replace the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty—one led by Zhu Yuanzhang and the other by Chen Youliang—begin a five week battle on China’s Lake Poyang. When it was over, Chen Youliang was dead and Zhu Yuanzhang’s faction was ascendant. Zhu and his forces eventually overthrew the Yuan and he took the throne as the Hongwu Emperor, the first ruler of China’s Ming Dynasty.

August 30, 1922: The Republican Turkish army defeats an occupying Greek force at the Battle of Dumlupınar in western Anatolia. In their victory the Turks destroyed the better part of an entire Greek army corps and began driving the rest of the Greek army toward the western Anatolian coast. The Greek position was untenable and they withdrew completely from Anatolia in mid-September.

MIDDLE EAST

LEBANON

The Israeli military (IDF) carried out air and artillery strikes on multiple towns across southern Lebanon on Saturday. There’s no indication of casualties but there are indications of potentially substantial damage.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The IDF killed at least four people in Gaza on Saturday and at least two people, including a child, on Sunday. Saturday’s attacks also included a drone strike on a medical supply “warehouse” (which in Gaza these days means a tent) that drew condemnation from the Doctors Without Borders NGO.

In the West Bank, Israeli settler-militants carried out another attack on Palestinian homes around the village of Qusra on Saturday. IDF personnel deployed to the village and unsurprisingly appear to have joined in the attack rather than stopping it, firing tear gas into one of the homes and reportedly detaining and beating some of the residents. In the nearby village of Jalud, settler-militants interrupted an NBC News interview with a local Palestinian woman by attacking both the woman and the news crew. These incidents received so much attention that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “condemned” the violence on Saturday, though he attempted to blame it on a handful of individual bad actors rather than acknowledging it as the obvious outcome of his entire career-long political project.

IRAN

The US military attacked Iran’s Larak island on Sunday, striking “launchers that were set to fire rockets carrying mines towards the Strait of Hormuz” as Al Jazeera put it. This was the first US attack on Iran in several weeks, as the Trump administration has been trying to shift its kinetic war to an economic war. Iranian officials have reported “several” soldiers killed and wounded in the attack. They retaliated by attacking military facilities in Jordan that are used by the US.

The resumption of hostilities, even if it’s brief, is an interesting counterpoint to Sunday’s Washington Post report that senior US military officers are pushing for an end to the war:

Several U.S. military leaders have advised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere, including the U.S. homeland, according to people familiar with a recent assessment prepared for the Pentagon chief.

The warnings — detailed for Hegseth by the heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force and the four-star commanders overseeing U.S. operations throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America — appear in the Aug. 14 edition of the Secretary of Defense Orders Book (SDOB), these people said. They described the assessment to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity because the document is classified.

The SDOB, typically produced twice monthly, outlines the worldwide availability of U.S. warships, aircraft, personnel and weapons systems. It reflects the president’s priorities for the force, which are carried out by the defense secretary, and includes insights from the military’s top generals and admirals that inform the directives the Pentagon issues.

The “dimmest picture” apparently comes from Chief of Naval Operations Daryl Caudle, whose service can’t even make payroll and who warned that the maintenance burden of extended ship deployments “jeopardizes the fleet’s availability should other conflicts arise.”

ASIA

MYANMAR

Al Jazeera reports that Myanmar’s military has been making steady gains at the expense of rebel groups but likely doesn’t have the capacity to strike a truly “decisive” blow against them:

The military has opened new operations this year in Chin, Kachin, Kayin and Rakhine States, and according to ISP-Myanmar, an independent think tank, it has now retaken 22 of the 101 towns it lost after the [2021] coup. That amounts to 9 percent of the lost territory, but the areas are strategically located and include key trade corridors linking border areas to central Myanmar, where the military’s main bases are located.

Their capture has disrupted the “economic and logistical capacity of many resistance groups,” Su Mon, an analyst at [the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project], wrote in a recent briefing note. While the military has yet to fully restore its own administration in these areas, she said, “the victories have effectively hindered resistance coordination,” pushing opposition groups “away from large-scale coordinated offensives to defensive guerrilla warfare”.

Still, the military is unlikely to score “existential or politically decisive wins” against the opposition, she added, warning that the country “faces a protracted war of attrition” in the coming months.

The military’s run of success seems mainly attributable to its massive air power advantage, which it employs indiscriminately against civilians and combatants alike, coupled with the manpower boost provided by its conscription program. The Chinese government has also contributed, pushing some rebel groups into accepting ceasefires and helping to choke off the supply of arms to others.

CAMBODIA

Chhay Sinarith, the Cambodian government’s “senior minister in charge of combating online scams,” claimed on Thursday that “large-scale scam activities have been brought fully under ​control, and there are currently no online scam compounds remaining in the country.” He was not asserting the total eradication of those scam operations, which have apparently adopted smaller and more decentralized structures to evade authorities. But if this is true, and in fairness there’s a good deal of skepticism about the claim, the elimination of those compounds could be a very positive development considering the extent to which they’d been “staffed” by people whom the scam operators trafficked into effective slavery.

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AFRICA

SUDAN

The Sudan Doctors Network is accusing the Rapid Support Forces militant group of attacking two villages near the town of Barah in Sudan’s North Kordofan state, killing at least five people and displacing over 3000. The Sudanese military (SAF) took Barah from the RSF last month and the group’s retreating/rampaging fighters have been attacking and looting communities in the area since then.

LIBYA

Libya’s eastern and western governments agreed on Sunday to hold elections for president and parliament within a “period not exceeding 24 months.” This was the finalization of a United Nations-brokered deal that the two governments’ negotiators reached earlier this month at a meeting in Tunisia. There is good reason to be skeptical here, as Libya’s ruling elites have thwarted previous attempts at organizing elections since the outcome could threaten their positions.

GUINEA-BISSAU

Guinea-Bissau’s ruling junta held a referendum on Sunday on the adoption of a new constitution ahead of elections in December. The main thrust of the draft constitution is the empowerment of the country’s presidency at the expense of its legislature and particularly its premiership. It will shrink parliament from 102 to 65 seats and give the president the ultimate authority over naming and sacking prime ministers as well as dissolving the legislature. Turnout was expected to be low due in part to an opposition boycott, and anecdotal accounts seemed to bear that out.

NIGER

Niger’s ruling junta fended off an attempted coup on Saturday, when mutinying soldiers seized a base near Niamey’s airport and attempted to attack state broadcasting facilities and the presidential palace. Russian “Africa Corps” personnel reportedly played a major role in putting down the uprising and helping the junta to restore a semblance of order in the capital. There were casualties, at least among the mutineers, but I have not seen any figures.

EUROPE

UKRAINE

In Ukraine news:

• A Russian drone strike hit an munitions depot in a village near Kyiv late Friday night, killing at least 38 people and wounding at least 20 more at last count. On Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky partially blamed the incident on those who “stored explosives right next to people” and said that a criminal investigation had already been opened, while calling on the Defense Ministry to “audit” the locations of its other arms depots. This was the second depot to be hit near Kyiv in the past two months.

• A Ukrainian missile strike killed at least two people in the Russian city of Belgorod on Sunday evening.

• The International Atomic Energy Agency reported on Saturday that Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is running on diesel generators after its connection to the Ukrainian power grid was apparently severed over a week ago. The plant is offline and requires outside electricity to maintain its safety/coolant operations. Diesel generators can substitute, unless the war prevents new supplies of fuel from getting to the facility. The agency is trying to negotiate a temporary localized ceasefire to allow for repairs to reconnect the plant to the power grid.

• Axios is reporting that US Central Intelligence Agency director John Ratcliffe proposed a Russia-Ukraine-US summit when he visited Moscow on Tuesday. Zelensky has previously expressed support for such a meeting but the Russians have rejected it. It’s unclear whether Ratcliffe was able to convince his interlocutors to raise the issue with Russian President Vladimir Putin, though even if he was it seems unlikely that Putin will agree to it.

• The Turkish government summoned Ukraine’s ambassador in Ankara on Saturday after two “Turkish-operated” commercial ships came under attack in the Black Sea in recent days. Several other Turkish vessels have been attacked in recent weeks, in most or all cases likely by Ukrainian drones.

ICELAND

Icelandic voters rejected the reopening of accession talks with the European Union in Saturday’s referendum. The margin was not large—52.8 percent to 47.2 percent—but the outcome confounded polling that mostly suggested a “yes” victory with a smaller possibility of a narrower “no” victory. The Icelandic government had put EU membership back on the national agenda mainly in reaction to Donald Trump’s designs on Greenland and concern that Iceland could be next on his acquisition list. This outcome probably puts the issue to rest for at least another decade if not longer.

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AMERICAS

VENEZUELA

Donald Trump’s new deal to loot Venezuela of billions of barrels of oil has surprisingly not gone over terribly well in Venezuela. Many who supported former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro regard signing over a large portion of the country’s oil wealth as affirmation that Venezuela is now a mercantile colony of the United States. Many who opposed Maduro are worried that the deal will further cement whatever remains of his government, now under the control of reliable US lackey Delcy Rodríguez. In all cases the concern revolves around sovereignty, and whether Venezuela still has any.

Rodríguez delivered a televised address on Saturday in which she insisted that the deal does in fact maintain Venezuelan sovereignty, which feels like the kind of thing that would go without saying if it were actually true. She emphasized that the arrangement should bring significant foreign investment into the Venezuelan oil sector (perhaps upwards of $100 billion) and that a whopping $19 of every barrel of oil Venezuela provides to the US “will flow to Caracas.” Again this seems exploitative but to be fair it doesn’t apply to all of Venezuela’s oil reserves—just a large portion of them from some of the country’s most productive oilfields.

Trump, of course, is portraying this as the greatest Business Deal in human history, which in and of itself should be a warning to Venezuelans that they’re getting screwed. On Sunday Trump said that he intends to use his Venezuelan booty to refill the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is currently at or near its lowest point in more than four decades. Trump blamed that state of affairs on Joe Biden, even though he’s been releasing oil from the reserve for the past six months to try to tamp down oil prices amid his Iran war.

UNITED STATES

Finally, Current Affairs’ Nathan Sledjeski considers Guam’s position in the US empire:

“Is this really America?”

As I marched through Agaña’s humid suburbs in 2013—a dense, unfamiliar jungle pressing in on one side, cul-de-sacs with stilted houses and long roadways on the other—this question played over and over in my head. In the sky, American military helicopters passed. On the road, sun-bleached American cars. Every so often, a McDonald’s. Yet none of it could shake the question until, over time, it curdled into something deeper: Should Guam be a part of America? Better yet, does America deserve to keep it?

Around the world, conversations around neo-colonialism are evolving—in Palestine, in the DRC, in dozens of places once written off as settled history. Welcome as that shift is, it far too often leaves out Guam’s ongoing fight for self-determination, along with the rest of the Western Pacific Islands. I don’t raise this as a criticism so much as an opening: this moment of decolonial reckoning is precisely the moment to bring Guam into the fold, and to ask what is hiding behind the opaque label of “territory.”

I was once told that there is no difference between a colony and a territory. A colony, according to Merriam-Webster, is “an area over which a foreign nation or state extends or maintains control.” One could argue that Guam does not fit that definition—after all, the U.S. is not technically foreign to Guam, and vice versa.

But empires have always been fluent in the art of renaming what they claim as theirs. “Territory” is modern-day colonialism. It just has better PR.

August 28, 1189: In an effort to find himself a new capital city (having lost his previous one), titular King of Jerusalem Guy of Lusignan begins a siege of Acre. It took the armies of the Third Crusade, under Richard the Lionheart of England and Philip II of France, to finally conclude the siege and capture the city in July 1191.

August 28, 1521: Ottoman forces under Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent capture the then-Hungarian city of Belgrade (Nándorfehérvár to the Hungarians) and destroy most of it. The Ottomans rebuilt the city and made it the capital of the Sanjak of Smederevo, and within a short time it became the largest Ottoman city in Europe other than Constantinople.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa has named former Syrian Democratic Forces boss Mazloum Abdi as a “presidential ‌adviser.” Abdi announced the SDF’s dissolution earlier this week. It’s unclear whether he will actually have a meaningful job in this new role or if the appointment is just symbolic.

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TODAY IN HISTORY

August 27, 1883: The Krakatoa volcano erupts violently, virtually destroying the island (located in what is now Indonesia) and causing substantial loss of life. Days of volcanic activity culminated on August 27 with four explosions, each of which generated massive tsunamis and the third of which is regarded as perhaps the loudest sound in recorded history. The immediate effects of the eruption killed 36,417 people according to Dutch records. The eruption caused a volcanic winter and ejected so much sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere that it cooled (and darkened) the planet for the next five years.

August 27, 1896: Shortly after 9 AM local time, British forces invade the Zanzibar Sultanate over a succession dispute. Around 40 minutes later the Anglo-Zanzibar War was over and Britain’s man was on the throne. This conflict, the shortest war in recorded history, marks the point at which Britain’s protectorate over Zanzibar really took hold and the sultanate—founded when Zanzibar and Oman split into separate kingdoms in 1856—ceased to be an independent political entity in any meaningful sense.

MIDDLE EAST

LEBANON

The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least one person (a newlywed woman) and wounded six others in southern Lebanon’s Nabatieh province on Thursday, according to Lebanese state media. The IDF said later that it was retaliating for Hezbollah drone strikes on its personnel. It was a busy day for Israeli occupation forces, which also carried out a number of operations in southern Syria. Anecdotal reports suggest that some of those operations have been quite intense, but there’s very little detail available as yet and there may be more to say tomorrow.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

IDF airstrikes killed at least three people in Gaza on Thursday. Israeli forces have now killed more than 1300 people under the “ceasefire” that ostensibly went into effect in October. While the IDF serially violates the ceasefire, the Israeli government is getting rid of the people who are supposed to be monitoring it. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar expelled a group of Dutch monitors from the International Gaza Support Center earlier this week (after expelling a Spanish team earlier this year), and The Financial Times reported on Thursday that he may also get rid of “British and potentially other European officials” as well. Ostensibly they’re all biased against Israel, but maybe Sa’ar is also operating under the principle that you can’t violate a ceasefire if there’s nobody around to see you do it.

IRAN

Séamus Malekafzali is skeptical about Maximum Pressure 2.0’s chances of bringing down the Iranian government:

Despite the conjured images of American gloves finally being taken off, there is little indication of what, in substance, is significantly different from other sanctions packages the Treasury has deployed against the Islamic Republic. Those with memories extending beyond the past few months may remember when the Treasury Department under Bessent announced Operation Economic Fury at the height of the war, which also targeted foreign buyers of Iranian oil, banks dealing in Iranian money, and clandestine monetary exchange networks. Those who were conscious during the first Trump administration may also remember “Maximum Pressure”, spearheaded by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo which also attempted to strangle the country and bring about the government’s eventual collapse.

None of these initiatives worked to the full extent they intended, even when they were built upon by the Biden administration in the interregnum, that White House not only deploying multiple sanctions packages of its own but also utilizing the Department of Justice’s powers to begin seizing tankers carrying hundreds of thousands of barrels of Iranian oil. Crippling economic sanctions drove the Iranian economy into disarray, robbing Iranians of their life savings as the rial crumbled and collapsed, reaching its all-time low against the dollar just this month as Bessent has proudly touted. The shattered economy has, however, not led to the collapse of the government, nor substantially changed its behavior abroad.

Elsewhere:

• Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin ⁠Abdulrahman Al Thani (who also serves as foreign minister) traveled to Iran on Thursday. He’s the second senior official from a would-be mediating country to make that trip this week, after Pakistani military boss Asim Munir. It’s hard to know whether this flurry of diplomacy reflects actual progress or just a strong desire on the part of those countries to try to manufacture some progress. My guess is the latter. Iranian Supreme National Security Council Secretary Mohsen Rezaee told a Lebanese outlet on Thursday that the mediators have asked Tehran to prepare a list of “conditions” for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which suggests that any negotiations are still at a very preliminary stage.

• Rezaee also denied reports that the Iranian government has put a $10 million bounty on the head of Donald Trump’s son, Barron. Those reports are based on a video that reportedly ran on Iranian state television, which is a detail that I don’t think Rezaee attempted to explain.

ASIA

INDIA

At Foreign Affairs, C. Raja Mohan believes that the Indian government has decided to put up with Donald Trump for the time being, but that may not last forever:

President Donald Trump, in his second term, has severely tested the U.S.-Indian relationship. He has slapped tariffs on India, threatened to impose secondary sanctions, gotten considerably closer to Pakistan, and enthusiastically engaged with China—the country India considers its biggest long-term military threat. Yet these strains have not led to the rupture that some observers had predicted. Nor have they forced a fundamental reorientation of Indian foreign policy. Instead, New Delhi has adopted what might be called an “America plus” strategy, in which it seeks to sustain partnership with the United States while widening its engagement with other powers, namely U.S. allies.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has responded with unusual restraint to Trump’s provocations and has resisted demands to pull away from Washington. With the United States, India has continued trade negotiations, increased defense cooperation, and expanded technological and commercial ties. In addition, he has sustained the Quad, a regional security organization that also includes Australia, Japan, and the United States; drawn closer to U.S. allies; preserved relations with Russia; and sought to lower tensions with China. These efforts do not represent a retreat from the United States or a strategy of multialignment. India is trying to reduce its exposure to American volatility, but it still recognizes that Washington is its most important partner.

After all, when it comes to cultivating a great-power patron, India doesn’t have better options. China and Russia will never buy Indian goods and services on the scale that the United States does, nor can Russia help India balance China. These realities have protected the U.S.-Indian relationship so far. But if Trump continues to bully India, public opinion could force Modi to abandon his restrained approach.

MYANMAR

At Foreign Policy, Kristina Kironska and Jan-Sha write that the rare earth industry in Myanmar has survived and even thrived despite the chaos of that country’s ongoing civil war. The costs, in the form of little to no environmental, labor, or human rights protections, are borne mainly by ordinary people:

Communities living near mining areas bear the brunt. They face exposure to contaminated water, polluted soil, and unsafe working conditions. Workers frequently perform hazardous tasks involving toxic chemicals for low wages and with little or no protective equipment, and cases of sexual exploitation involving women workers have also been widely reported. Accountability mechanisms are weak or entirely absent. Local communities bear the long-term environmental costs while Chinese investors capture most of the profits.

These consequences are not unique to rare earths. The Letpadaung copper mine, for example, became associated with violent crackdowns on protesters, forced evictions, and allegations that local communities bore the environmental and social costs while military-linked and foreign actors captured most of the economic gains. However, conflict and fragmented authority can deepen these risks by dispersing the responsibility among multiple actors, making it unclear who is responsible for enforcing standards and compensating affected local communities.

Myanmar exposes one of the central contradictions of the global energy transition. The technologies meant to power a greener and more sustainable future are frequently built on extraction systems embedded within civil war, fragmented governance, environmental destruction, and coercive political economies.

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AFRICA

SUDAN

According to The Sudan Tribune, the Sudanese military (SAF) “repelled an attack” by the Rapid Support Forces militant group on a town in southeastern Sudan’s Blue Nile state on Thursday, killing “dozens” of the group’s fighters. The town, Al-Keli, is located along the Ethiopian border near Kurmuk, which the SAF retook from the RSF last month.

SOUTH SUDAN

Rustlers killed at least 49 people and wounded 33 more when they attacked a cattle camp and village in South Sudan’s Warrap state on Thursday. I note this incident partly for the high casualty figure but also because it’s only the second-deadliest such incident in Warrap state this month—a coordinated assault on a camp and nearby village left at least 60 people dead and 50 more wounded back on August 9. Both of these attacks have taken place in Warrap’s Tonj North County region and the rustlers appear to have come from neighboring Unity State.

SOMALIA

Data from the International Maritime Organization, analyzed by AFP, shows that piracy in the waters off the coast of Somalia has reached 2013 levels, with at least 15 cases reported so far this year. Eight of those have taken place just since May. For reference there were five instances of piracy in these waters throughout all of last year. The Iran war and the resumption of conflict in Yemen appear to be driving this resurgence in piracy.

UGANDA

The good news is that the World Health Organization has declared Uganda’s Ebola outbreak over, with no new cases detected there for the past 42 days. There is still some risk of new cases entering Uganda from the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo but that doesn’t diminish the significance of this announcement.

The bad news is that, as AFP reports, Uganda is approaching what could be a serious struggle to determine who will succeed 81 year old President Yoweri Museveni, who’s ruled the country since 1986. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, who is the commander of the Ugandan military and Museveni’s son, is clearly intent on taking over and has already declared his candidacy in Uganda’s 2031 presidential election (though if Museveni is still around and interested in keeping his job at that time then Kainerugaba will presumably stand down). But there is growing support for Odrek Rwabwogo, who is married to Museveni’s daughter, has a business background, and in marked contrast to Kainerugaba is not (as far as anybody knows) a sadist. He’s trying to present himself as a less volatile alternative. Kainerugaba has begun threatening to arrest Rwabwogo and his associates so this situation is already becoming dangerous and Museveni hasn’t even gone anywhere yet.

EUROPE

NATO

Reuters reported on Thursday that the US Defense Department is aiming to complete its review of the US military posture in Europe by November 6, about a month ahead of schedule. It’s aiming to offer Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “at least four sets of options” for reducing that posture, which aligns with Donald Trump’s desire to put a greater share of the burden of supporting NATO on its European members and with his anger that those European members didn’t join the Iran war to whatever degree Trump demanded. The Trump administration has reportedly circulated a questionnaire among NATO’s European members as part of this review that includes items related to “any restrictions” that they’ve placed on the US military’s “access, basing, and overflight” rights and “regulations or other measures designed to ​inhibit or reduce transatlantic defense industrial cooperation.”

Speaking of NATO and the Iran war, the US military is now facing a “beyond critical” shortage in the number of available Patriot air defense interceptors it has stationed in Europe. The Pentagon has been shifting interceptors to the Middle East from around the world because of the war. This could be a critical situation if Russia, or some other actor, decided to start firing missiles at parts of Europe in the near future, but that doesn’t seem terribly likely.

RUSSIA

An apparent car bomb killed a lieutenant colonel in the Russian military and wounded his wife in St. Petersburg on Thursday. There’s no indication as to culpability but Russian authorities have unsurprisingly accused the Ukrainian government of similar previous attacks on senior military personnel.

UKRAINE

The Russian military carried out what it called a “massive” overnight bombardment across Ukraine, targeting no fewer than nine cities including Kyiv and killing at least one person while wounding another 15. While Russian officials insisted that all of their targets were military-related it would appear that a number of residential buildings and other civilian facilities were hit.

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AMERICAS

VENEZUELA

Axios reported on Thursday that “the Trump administration is in talks with Venezuela's interim government about taking an ownership stake in the South American country's enormous oil resources.” It would apparently involve “more than a dozen productive oil fields” but would not cover all of Venezuela’s oil reserves. In return for submitting itself to this colony-esque arrangement, the Venezuelan government (such as it is) “would benefit from private companies, including American firms, developing the fields and returning more oil revenue to that country.”

UNITED STATES

Finally, The Guardian reports on the financial impact that the Iran war has had on the US Navy:

Donald Trump’s war on Iran has driven the US military into a severe financial crisis, with the US navy forced to transfer money from its payroll and other sources to cover the costs of combat, according to documents obtained by the Guardian, and interviews with navy officials, contractors and defense analysts.

The US-Israeli operation, which has depleted US munitions stockpiles and prompted retaliatory Iranian strikes that have wrecked strategic bases across the Middle East, is piling pressure on budgets across the military.

One Pentagon memo about navy funding seen by the Guardian warns that there are “shortfalls in payroll” accounts due to the department “raiding” them to fund combat operations.

Experts and former officials say the accounts are running dry. “The piggy bank is broken,” said Harlan Ullman, a retired naval officer. Ullman is a member of the National Commission for the Future of the Navy but he said he is not speaking on the commission’s behalf.

One official and one navy contractor said non-emergency maintenance on shore-based facilities has been deferred because of the cash crunch.

TODAY IN HISTORY

August 26, 1071: A Seljuk army inflicts a crushing defeat on Byzantine Emperor Romanos IV near the city of Manzikert. Arguably one of the most decisive battles in history, Manzikert and the imperial political chaos that followed allowed the Seljuks to pierce the Byzantine Empire’s Anatolian heartland. Although it survived (more or less) for nearly another 400 years, the empire never fully recovered. Manzikert is also important as the seminal event leading to the formation of the Crusading movement.

August 26, 1922: The Turkish army begins what’s known as its “Great Offensive,” the final push to oust an occupying Greek army from Anatolia. The offensive was successful and brought the 1919-1922 Greco-Turkish War, itself a theater of the larger Turkish War of Independence, to a victorious (from Turkey’s perspective) conclusion.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Although the Syrian Democratic Forces organization is moving forward with its own dissolution, Al Jazeera reports that there is still a great deal of work to be done before it and Syria’s Kurdish population can be considered fully integrated into the state:

[The Arab Center for Contemporary Syrian Studies’ Navvar] Saban said that SDF military fighters are being incorporated into the Syrian army under the command of the Defence Ministry, while the Asayish – the SDF’s affiliated security forces – and other local security bodies are being integrated into the Ministry of Interior. Civilian institutions and employees are also being transferred to relevant ministries.

“The formal merge has been completed, but creating a unified military culture and chain of command will take much longer,” he said.

There is also likely to be some apprehension from Syrian Kurds, with a deadly war still recent in their memories, and some mistrust towards Syria’s government. The government is led by figures formerly associated with now-disbanded rebel groups, including Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, whose predecessor, al-Nusra Front, was once affiliated with al-Qaeda. Many of the former rebel groups had also fought the SDF, which was accused of cooperating with the al-Assad regime at times.

“Many Arab communities may welcome the return of the central institution [government], while Kurdish communities are likely to be more cautious,” Saban said. “They want peace. But they also need guarantees concerning the Kurdish language, education, political representation, and local security.”

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TODAY IN HISTORY

August 25, 1580: An army under the Duke of Alba, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, fighting on behalf of King Philip II of Spain, defeats an army under António, Prior of Crato, at the Battle of Alcântara, part of the War of Portuguese Succession. Both António and Philip were claimants to the then-vacant throne of Portugal, and this victory allowed Philip’s army to capture Lisbon and eventually led to Philip’s crowning as King of Portugal in March 1581. The crowns of Portugal and Spain were held in personal union (known as the “Iberian Union”) until the 1640-1668 Portuguese Restoration War.

August 25, 1920: The two-week Battle of Warsaw ends with a surprising, arguably even miraculous (hence the moniker “Miracle on the Vistula”) Polish victory over the invading Russian Red Army. The costly defeat seems to have ended any Russian ambitions of a decisive victory in what is known as the Polish-Soviet War, and with Polish leaders having been similarly disabused of their chances for victory the two sides began peace talks in earnest in autumn 1920. An armistice was reached in October followed by the Peace of Riga in March 1921, in which Poland recognized Soviet governments in Belarus and Ukraine while those states ceded some 135,000 square kilometers of territory to Poland. That land reverted back to Belarus and Ukraine during and after World War II.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) leader Mazloum Abdi announced the organization’s “dissolution as an independent military force” on Tuesday in a speech delivered in Damascus. This is the culmination of efforts to integrate the SDF into the Syrian government’s security forces under a deal the two sides reached earlier this year. The SDF was at one time the US government’s chief proxy in Syria, instrumental in efforts to combat Islamic State as well as to deny eastern Syria’s oil revenue to the Assad government. But as the US embraced the post-Assad Syrian administration its support for the SDF and its goal of Kurdish autonomy withered. In addition to integrating the SDF’s fighters, the Syrian government also agreed to protections for the Kurdish language and culture that are still manifesting.

LEBANON

Responsible Statecraft’s Janet Abou-Elias discusses the environmental toll that the Israeli military (IDF), with US support, is taking on southern Lebanon:

For two years, Israel’s war in Lebanon has been measured largely in a human toll: the dead, the wounded, the displaced. What has drawn far less attention is the destruction of the land itself.

Across southern Lebanon, a combination of incendiary munitions, systematic demolitions, and now aerial herbicide spraying has degraded large stretches of Lebanese territory to the point where it is difficult to farm, unsafe to inhabit, and in many places, unrecognizable.

American money and American weapons are behind nearly all of it.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The IDF killed at least four people in multiple attacks across Gaza on Tuesday, while three other individuals died of wounds suffered in previous incidents. One IDF strike reportedly “destroyed a warehouse storing nutrition supplies intended for children, pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers.” Meanwhile, local committees in the territory have begun warning parents not to let their children fly kites after the IDF declared such activity to be a capital offense.

Israeli security forces raided a training center in East Jerusalem operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) on Tuesday. There doesn’t appear to be any rationale for this operation apart from expelling the agency from East Jerusalem altogether. Israeli officials insist that they’re converting the site into “a new educational and community complex” that will include schools, health facilities, recreational areas, and a mosque for the Palestinian community. We can probably assume that’s all bullshit, but it makes for a nice cover story. As a UN facility the training center should have been protected under international law.

IRAN

The Iranian economy is already showing signs of additional strain and “Maximum Pressure 2.0” hasn’t even gotten off the ground yet. The AP reports that “lines have grown outside gas stations” in Tehran of late as residents prepare for what may be steep hikes in the price of fuel, while the rial’s decline into the 2 million per US dollar range is increasingly pricing basic goods out of the reach of ordinary Iranians. Just like Maximum Pressure 1.0 and all the US sanctions that preceded it, the foremost victims of this policy are those ordinary Iranians—the same people whose rights and well-being US officials keep pretending to champion.

Leaving aside, as the Trump administration has, the pain that this economic warfare is causing the Iranian people, the operative question is will it achieve anything politically? Foreign Policy’s Hadi Kahalzadeh seems skeptical, particularly inasmuch as the administration seems to have given up on the idea of exerting economic pressure to induce concessions at the negotiating table and is now aiming for full on regime change/collapse. The Iranian government has had years to build the country’s resilience to US sanctions, and while the sanctions are stronger (and Iran’s economy is weaker) now, underlying data does not suggest that collapse is imminent or even likely. Iran’s domestic economy is still resilient enough to meet basic needs and its security establishment is still able to suppress dissent.

If conditions really deteriorate, Tehran retains the capacity to retaliate and try to pressure the US to let up. It also remains to be seen whether the administration can or will enforce sanctions against Iran’s two biggest foreign supporters, Russia and especially China.

In other items:

• Donald Trump declared the Strait of Hormuz to be free of mines on Tuesday. If that sounds familiar, perhaps that’s because he also declared it free of mines last Tuesday. Presumably one of these weeks he’ll be right. Indeed, also on Tuesday the Omani Foreign Ministry announced that it had come up with a “proposed framework” with the Iranian government to manage traffic through the strait. Part of the proposal apparently includes a collaborative effort to de-mine the waterway. Should that deal fall through the Iranians have relied more on drones and missiles to control the strait than mines, so even if they are cleared the effect on ship traffic may not be huge.

• The US Secret Service says that it is “aware” of a video that was broadcast on Iranian media threatening the life of Barron Trump and suggesting that there is a “$10 million reward” waiting for anyone who takes it. That video apparently ran over the weekend on Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, which is state-run. CNN reports that it’s part of “a campaign of videos from Iran” that discuss killing Donald Trump and/or members of his family. It’s unclear how seriously to take this but it did run on state TV and Iranian threats to kill Donald Trump stretch as far back as the 2020 assassination of Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani.

• Pakistani officials are claiming that Monday’s visit to Iran by Pakistani military chief Asim Munir generated “significant progress” toward ending the war. I think it’s reasonable at this point to take a “believe it when you see it” approach to this sort of thing.

• The US State Department is starting to return staff to its diplomatic outposts in the Middle East, specifically in Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. Those facilities were partially or wholly evacuated amid the Iran war. Reversing that decision suggests that the Trump administration isn’t planning to resume military action against Iran anytime soon, though the Iranian government also has a say on that front.

• The Pentagon added 60 wounded service members to its Iran war casualty list last week in what an anonymous US “official” characterized as an “accounting trick” in comments to The Intercept’s Nick Turse. The official claimed that the Defense Department had been “slow-walking” the true casualty count for weeks to avoid public scrutiny. The department’s Defense Casualty Analysis System now lists 18 personnel killed and 758 wounded in the war, figures that Turse’s reporting strongly suggests are fictional and drastically undercount the real toll.

ASIA

MYANMAR

A new report from the UN human rights office concludes that the situation in Myanmar has reached a “new low,” painting “a picture of suffering, misery, and cruelty on multiple levels and across the country that is heartbreaking” according to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk. It cites “persistent” military violence against civilians and in particular the continued abuse of the Rohingya community by both the military and the Arakan Army rebel group, as well as the expansion of “illicit economies” like illegal mining operations and scam outfits that participate in human trafficking to source their workforces.

CHINA

According to Reuters, satellite imagery shows the appearance of “new installations” in the Chinese-claimed Paracel islands archipelago in the South China Sea. One of them apparently has the makings of a radar system that could be used “to support eventual installations on Antelope Reef” while another appears to be the early stages of an artificial island near the reef that could become an airstrip. Control of the Paracels is disputed by the governments of China, Taiwan, and Vietnam, but they are administered by China.

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AFRICA

SUDAN

The Sudan Doctors Network has accused the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North of killing at least 27 people, including four children, in its most recent attacks on the Otoro community in Sudan’s South Kordofan state. The SPLM-N and the Otoro have been battling on and off over control of the town of Kauda since May. The Rapid Support Forces militant group, which controls most of South Kordofan and to which the SPLM-N is allied, attempted to broker a ceasefire in Kauda last week but that seems to have broken down almost immediately.

ZAMBIA

World Politics Review’s Liam Taylor writes that the unrest over Zambia’s recent presidential election may be doing lasting damage to the country’s democracy:

There are two competing narratives about Zambia’s recent election. In one, President Hakainde Hichilema swept to a second term on Aug. 13, while his opponent, Brian Mundubile, refused to accept the results and planned a foreign-backed insurrection. In another, Hichilema, an autocrat-in-the-making, stole the election and tried to assassinate Mundubile, the real winner.

The two versions of what happened are wildly incompatible—and also a sign of the times. Across Africa, as elsewhere, it has become de rigueur for competing political groups to claim victory and accuse the other side of violent plots.

In Zambia’s case, we may never know precisely how many votes each candidate received. The likeliest scenario is that Hichilema got enough to win, though not the 60 percent that the electoral commission claimed. Meanwhile, a former Cabinet minister lies dead, gunned down by security forces during a raid on a property linked to Mundubile.

The whole episode has tarnished the reputation of both candidates, shredding Hichilema’s image as a liberal reformer. It is also a strange turn of events for Zambia, long considered one of Africa’s more consolidated democracies.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

In Russia-related news:

• Ukrainian drone strikes killed at least two people in the community of Afipsky in Russia’s Krasnodar Krai region on Tuesday while sparking a fire at a nearby oil refinery. Another strike wounded two people near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Russian-occupied Ukraine. As ever, any strike in the vicinity of Europe’s largest nuclear power facility is inadvisable.

• US Central Intelligence Agency director John Ratcliffe made an unannounced visit to Moscow on Tuesday. It’s unclear what he went there to discuss or with whom he discussed it, but Ratcliffe has been something of a diplomatic fixer for the Trump administration in recent months with visits to Venezuela to iron out a working relationship with Delcy Rodríguez and to Cuba to try to find some Delcy-esque figures in Havana. Presumably his reasons for traveling to Russia are not related to regime change. The Wall Street Journal suggests that he may have been there to “deliver a warning” regarding rumors that Russia may be preparing another mobilization for the Ukraine war and/or has “plans for testing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s resolve.” Maybe he went there to convince Russian officials to participate in Maximum Pressure 2.0 (see above) despite the country’s fairly close relationship with Iran.

• Vladimir Putin issued a decree on Tuesday that will permit the Russian government to seize, at least temporarily, any “critical infrastructure” whose owners are deemed not to have adequately protected it from Ukrainian attack. Which would presumably be all of them, unless there are some private businesses in Russia that are packing their own air defense systems or electronic jamming gear or the like. This would include sites related to energy, telecommunications, transportation, and basically anything that Putin decides is “critical.”

UKRAINE

Euronews is reporting that the French government wants to put extra guardrails on Ukraine’s use of the €90 billion loan that it’s getting from the European Union. Any military acquisitions that Ukraine makes with that money must be at least 65 percent sourced from within the European Economic Area (the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway), but Kyiv can request exemptions for items that just cannot be acquired from EEA sources. French President Emmanuel Macron is aiming to make those exemptions temporary, so that more of the money eventually comes back into the European (and especially French) defense industry.

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AMERICAS

CANADA

The Canadian government announced retaliatory tariffs on some $20 billion in US products on Tuesday, matching the duties that the US is imposing on Canadian goods. They will take effect on September 8, barring a beyond-last-minute accord between the two countries. On the US side, Donald Trump is already threatening a new round of tariffs in retaliation for the Canadian retaliation. He also wants to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America.” I would say that we’ve entered the stupid phase of this trade war but that would imply that there’s been a non-stupid phase.

UNITED STATES

In US news:

• The US military killed four people in another boat strike on Tuesday, this one in the Caribbean. It has now extrajudicially executed more than 210 people since beginning this killing spree almost a full year ago.

• Donald Trump has submitted his US-Saudi nuclear deal to the US Congress, triggering a 90 day review period. The legislature could vote in that time to block the agreement, but that block would be subject to a veto that would have to be overridden by two-thirds majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Nevertheless the arrangement remains in doubt because Trump is still holding to his post-facto insistence that Saudi Arabia normalize relations with Israel before the deal can proceed. There’s no indication that the Saudis are prepared to do that.

Finally, ProPublica reports that when he first took office Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth polled senior US military leadership on his plans to cut the Pentagon’s office for minimizing civilian casualties, thinking that he would find support for the idea. Apparently he found exactly the opposite:

Hegseth had bet senior officers would endorse his view that focusing on civilian security was “woke” and out of step with “maximum lethality,” current and former defense officials told ProPublica.

Instead, every commander rebuffed the idea.

The poll from early 2025, which has not been previously reported, cemented top-level military support for Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a relatively new program adopted after years of heavy civilian tolls in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. As part of its mission, CHMR (pronounced “chimmer”) stationed personnel within major regional commands. Officials tried to develop a picture of life on the ground in combat zones to aid decision-making on military strikes and avoid or minimize civilian harm.

In the poll, Hegseth gave commanders three options: cut 65% of staff but keep the effort operational, continue with only a small centralized office in Washington, or eliminate the program.

Nine commanders chose the first option to preserve the enterprise as much as possible, according to a memo reviewed by ProPublica. Leaders of two commands, one overseeing the nuclear arsenal and the other focused on cyber threats, declined all three options, asking to maintain the full program.

Hegseth of course “gutted” the office anyway.

If you weren’t able to join my livestream with earlier this evening please check it out. Thanks to those who were able to make it!

TODAY IN HISTORY

August 24, 410: A Visigothic army under Alaric sacks Rome. This was the first time the city had been sacked by a foreign army since the Gauls did so around 800 years earlier and is considered one of the milestones in the collapse of the Roman Empire in the western Mediterranean. Rome was no longer a political capital but its prestige (and wealth) as the mother city of the empire and the center of Christianity in the west was still immense. Alaric continued plundering south through Italy, but his plans to invade Sicily and North Africa were interrupted first by weather and then by his death. The Visigoths moved into what is now southern France, where they established a kingdom within what was ostensibly Roman territory.

August 24, 1516: The Ottomans decisively defeat the Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate’s army at the Battle of Marj Dabiq in what is today northern Syria’s Aleppo province. The Ottomans and Mamluks found themselves on opposite sides of a relatively lopsided rivalry as the former expanded into eastern Anatolia and began to absorb principalities that had been Mamluk vassals. After Ottoman Sultan Selim I defeated the Safavids in the 1514 Battle of Chaldiran and eliminated their threat to his empire, he turned his attention to the Mamluks and made short work of them. The virtual annihilation of the Mamluk army at Dabiq allowed Selim to take Egypt easily the following year. The Ottoman conquest of the former Mamluk domains was a massive boost to the empire both in size and wealth. It also brought Islam’s three holiest cities—Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem—under Ottoman control, which had significant benefits for the empire from a political and ideological point of view.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

The US government formally lifted Syria’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism on Monday. When the Trump administration notified Congress of its intention to lift that designation last month, it kicked off a 45 day review period and that’s now ended without incident. There are now three countries remaining on the state sponsors list: Cuba, Iran, and North Korea.

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LIVESTREAMING NOTE : Don’t forget to join Elizabeth Urban of Islamic History for the Curious and me next Tuesday (8/25) at 8 PM eastern for the second in our new monthly livestream series. This month I’ll be asking Elizabeth about pre-Islamic Arabia and we will take your questions. Find us in the Substack app or bookmark the link so you won’t miss it!

TODAY IN HISTORY

August 22, 1153: A Crusader army captures the city of Ascalon (modern Ashkelon) from the Fatimid Caliphate, ending a nearly seven month siege. Ascalon had been a priority for the Crusaders since the First Crusade, and its importance had only grown since then as it served as a Fatimid beachhead into Crusader territory and was the main point of origin for Fatimid raiding parties. With brief interruptions the city remained in Crusader hands until the Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate destroyed it in 1270 as part of its wider and ultimately successful campaign to eliminate the Crusader kingdoms altogether.

August 22, 1864: An international convention held in Geneva produces a treaty outlining humane “rules” of war, including provisions for the treatment of sick and wounded soldiers. That treaty would subsequently be amended and expanded four times and is the basis of the First Geneva Convention, which was adopted along with the other three Geneva Conventions in 1949.

August 23, 1514: The Ottoman Empire decisively defeats a would-be rival, the nascent Safavid kingdom in Iran, at the Battle of Chaldiran. The engagement’s lopsided outcome ended any notion of a Safavid threat to the Ottomans and reportedly sent Safavid ruler Ismail I into a personal crisis from which he never entirely recovered.

August 23, 1595: An outnumbered Wallachian army under Prince Michael “the Brave” defeats an Ottoman army under Grand Vizier Koca Sinan Pasha at the Battle of Călugăreni, today located in southern Romania. Michael had to retreat afterward due to the Ottomans’ decisive advantage in numbers, but the victory became an important symbolic event in Romanian national history. This battle was part of the 1593-1606 Long War between the Ottomans and Habsburgs, which ended inconclusively but did stabilize the Ottoman-Habsburg frontier for several decades.

August 23, 1939: The Nazi German and Soviet governments sign the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, a nonaggression treaty that included an agreement to divvy up parts of Eastern Europe. The accord grew out of negotiations on an economic cooperation agreement and Soviet concerns about a potential war with Germany (and the reliability of France and the UK as possible allies). The pact paved the way for the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, which sparked World War II, but relations between the two countries broke down over the next several months and the Nazis terminated it when they invaded the USSR in June 1941.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

The Israeli military (IDF) bombed a “civilian car” south of Damascus on Saturday, wounding at least one person. It later claimed to have been attacking a “terrorist” of unknown description who was somehow threatening Israeli soldiers. That incident notwithstanding, Axios reported on Sunday that Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani and Mossad director Roman Gofman “met Sunday in an effort to lower the temperature between the countries” in the wake of the IDF’s attack on Abu Duhur airbase on Tuesday. It’s unclear whether they made any headway.

You can probably put this in the “who cares” file, but US ambassador to Turkey/Syria envoy Tom Barrack put himself in a bit of hot water on Friday when he said in a podcast interview that the Israelis “still occupy the Golan against the UN resolutions, against all of the international order, which has said the Golan is Syria’s.” As far as the Israeli government is concerned it has annexed the Golan, and Donald Trump adopted that position as official US policy during his first term. So while Barrack was technically right he was also out of step with his boss (or bosses, depending on your perspective). He reversed himself on Sunday in comments to the AP but there is some chance that he may face additional consequences.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The IDF killed at least two people in Gaza from Friday to Saturday and three more on Sunday, one of them a four year old child. In the West Bank, soldiers and settler militants wounded at least 19 people in multiple attacks across the territory on Saturday. For those who are interested, Jasper Nathaniel has published an interview with Loui Ridi, one of the Palestinian homeowners currently being besieged by militants and IDF soldiers in the West Bank village of Qusra.

NOTUS’s Akbar Shahid Ahmed reports that there is little reason to expect the Trump administration to oppose the Israeli government’s E1 settlement and its broader effort to cleave off East Jerusalem from the West Bank:

A new Israeli government effort to build settlements near Jerusalem could lead to another uptick in Israeli-Palestinian tensions, and there’s little indication the Trump administration will use its influence to limit rising instability.

Israel’s housing ministry opened bidding this week for companies to build more than 1,200 housing units in the West Bank’s E1 zone, part of occupied Palestinian territory where Israeli settlements are illegal under international law. Constructing Israeli homes in the region would block a key route between the north and south sections of the territory and separate it from East Jerusalem, where more than 300,000 Palestinians live and where diplomats have long envisioned a capital for a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

U.S. allies quickly condemned the move and suggested action to stop the land grab. Insiders expect a far more muted American response.

When NOTUS asked a U.S. official who works on Middle East policy about the chances of the Trump administration blocking the E1 move, the official responded: “Zero.”

The U.S. embassy in Jerusalem is “in lockstep” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, said the official, who was not authorized to speak on the record.

The indifference likely extends to any Israeli attempt to change the status quo in Jerusalem, for example by seizing control of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount complex from the Jordanian-run waqf that administers it now.

IRAN

Pakistani military boss Asim Munir is reportedly heading to Iran on Monday to try to revive negotiations toward ending the ongoing Iran-US standoff. It’s unclear whether he’ll be bringing a new proposal with him though it’s hard to imagine Munir making an in-person visit to Tehran just to touch base with Iranian leaders. Still, I wouldn’t expect any breakthroughs.

At present we’re still waiting to see what (if anything) the Trump administration has planned as part of “Maximum Pressure 2.0” and how Iranian leaders intend to respond to it. Iranian Supreme National Security Council Secretary Mohsen Rezaee threatened “seismic” repercussions for any country that participates in MP2 on Saturday, including a promise to block all oil from leaving the Persian Gulf region via any route should Gulf Arab states join the effort. That would have to be done militarily. On a related note Tehran reportedly allowed a number of Iraqi oil tankers to transit the Strait of Hormuz recently at the request of the Iraqi government. The concession emerged from Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf’s multi-day visit to Iraq over the past week.

In news that would be fairly hilarious if true, Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen outlet (which is generally considered close to Hezbollah) is apparently reporting that the governments of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey have invited Iran to join their “Mecca Agreement” mutual defense alliance. I would assume that this is not true, or at least that if it is true the offer was made contingent on the Iranian government settling its conflict with the US and making a number of other adjustments to its foreign/security policy, like ending its support for Iraqi militias and Yemen’s Ansarullah group. It’s hard to imagine the Iranians trusting the other members of the alliance enough to take those kinds of steps. But even if the offer were made with major prerequisites attached it would still represent a massive upheaval in regional dynamics that would not bode terribly well for the US.

ASIA

THAILAND

No fewer than 51 “coordinated arson and incendiary attacks” across southern Thailand left at least three people wounded on Saturday evening, according to the Thai military. Most of the attacks and all three of the casualties took place in Narathiwat province but additional incidents were reported in Pattani and Yala provinces. Several of the attacks targeted local government offices. This was presumably the work of ethnic Malay rebels, though there’s been no claim of responsibility made as yet.

CHINA

The China Manned Space Agency announced on Sunday that it is postponing the Chang’e-7 mission, which was supposed to take off soon and, among other things, search for ice (specifically frozen water as opposed to, say, dry ice or methane ice) at the moon’s southern pole. It did not give a reason for the postponement except to say that the decision was taken after a “comprehensive assessment” determined that the mission did not meet launch conditions, whatever those might be.

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AFRICA

SUDAN

The Chadian military accused its Sudanese counterpart of carrying out a drone strike on a “convoy of vehicles” inside Chad on Saturday. I have not seen any indication of casualties. The Sudanese military (SAF) has carried out attacks along the Chadian-Sudanese border, sometimes straying into Chadian territory, in the past. It has accused Chad’s government of funneling supplies to the Rapid Support Forces militant group in Darfur.

Elsewhere, fighting between a faction of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North and the Otoro community has continued in Sudan’s South Kordofan state despite a RSF-brokered ceasefire that was declared on Friday. Otoro leaders accused the SPLM-N on Saturday of shelling the town of Kauda, which the two parties have been disputing violently going back to at least May.

SOMALIA

According to UNICEF, the number of Somali children admitted to medical facilities for malnutrition-related reasons rose by 32 percent in the first half of this year. It’s warning that aid cuts have taken a severe toll on health and nutrition programs and may force the closure of up to 618 Somali health facilities by the end of 2026. Doctors Without Borders claimed earlier this month that funding for alleviating malnutrition in Somalia has dropped by over 80 percent.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

The Congolese government and the M23 militant group issued a statement on Saturday announcing that they’ve “agreed on a roadmap for peace talks.” This apparently includes mechanisms for reporting ceasefire violations and for resolving any challenges in implementing the “framework” deal that they reached back in November. The parties hashed out this roadmap in Switzerland earlier this month along with representatives from the African Union Commission, Qatar, Switzerland, Togo, and the United States. The ceasefire still seems to be aspirational and there are reports of ongoing fighting in the eastern DRC, though a monitoring team is supposed to arrive in the region on Monday.

Meanwhile, the death toll from the eastern DRC’s ongoing Ebola outbreak has passed 2500 according to the United Nations, and health authorities are beginning a clinical trial of the Ervebo vaccine. Ervebo was developed to counter the Zaire strain of Ebolavirus and it’s unknown whether it will have any effect on the Bundibugyo strain that is responsible for this outbreak. World Politics Review’s Mohamed Keita and L.A. Mustafa attribute the scope of this outbreak to the DRC’s “governance crisis”:

Even before the outbreak Congo’s health system was contending with 14.9 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, a projected 9 million displaced, and drastic cuts in international aid from the U.S. and other donors. But the [Félix] Tshisekedi administration’s spending priorities must also be accounted for. Since he took office in 2019, public expenditures on health have steadily hovered between 3.5 percent and 4 percent of GDP, while military spending has more than doubled in the same period. This reflects Kinshasa’s unfortunate habit of prescribing a militarized response to what is at its core a multidimensional governance crisis.

Ituri is a live demonstration of this failed approach. Since 2017, the province has seen a surge in communal violence among militias aligned with rival ethnic communities, as a constellation of other armed groups prey on civilians and battle the Congolese military. In 2021, Tshisekedi declared an emergency “state of siege” that was supposed to last for 30 days, but the measure has been continually renewed since then, effectively placing the province under martial law. This state of affairs has continued despite a 2022 U.N. experts’ finding that security and humanitarian conditions had deteriorated under military rule, not to mention repeated calls by elected representatives from Ituri to lift the emergency measure.

In the weeks leading up to the official detection of the epidemic, concerns surfaced about Ituri authorities’ inability to stem escalating massacres of civilians by armed groups like the Islamic State-aligned Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) and the CODECO militia. After the outbreak’s declaration, the general who has governed Ituri since 2021, Johnny Luboya, called the epidemic a second war front and asserted that the principles of military operation “are almost the same as those applied in medicine.” However, neither he, nor anyone under his command, took responsibility for months of unexplained deaths, and nobody inside the reporting chain had to answer for it.

Luboya’s rule has been characterized by opacity surrounding the use of public funds, reports of extortion and abuses by soldiers, and the illegal deployment of troops and police to protect mining sites at the expense of civilian protection. In June, Tshisekedi replaced Luboya with another general, Gaby Kasongo Mulumba. The change appeared to respond not to local grievances but to pressure from neighboring Uganda, whose army chief Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba had been publicly demanding Luboya’s removal, accusing him of obstructing Ugandan troops operating in the area against the ADF.

As Keita and Mustafa go on to point out, the abuses of militarized governance may be part of the reason why residents in the affected area haven’t been terribly eager to collaborate with health authorities. They also compare the government’s mishandling of this outbreak with the far more efficient manner in which it has pursued extending Tshisekedi’s time in office, which is supposed to end in 2028. That doesn’t paint the Congolese government in a terribly good light.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

The Russian government may be quietly downgrading its diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom. It turns out that Moscow withdrew its ambassador, Andrey Kelin, from London last month and has not yet replaced him. The online list of staff in Russia’s UK embassy does not currently include anyone beyond the chargé d’affaires level. It could be that the Russian government just hasn’t gotten around to naming a new ambassador, but the lack of clarity is noteworthy inasmuch as UK-Russian relations are not in a terribly good place at the moment amid reports that the UK has been supplying long-range attack drones to Ukraine.

UKRAINE

Russian strikes killed at least seven people in Ukraine on Saturday, one day after the “double-tap” drone strike on a shopping center in Kryvyi Rih that killed at least 16 people. Ukrainian strikes killed at least ten people across Russia. On Sunday a Russian bombardment killed at least three people in Ukraine’s Kharkiv oblast.

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AMERICAS

BOLIVIA

Several days ago Bolivian authorities arrested a major figure in the resurgence of the far-right across Latin America:

The businessman and political consultant Fernando Cerimedo, 42, had been working as an adviser to the Bolivian president, Rodrigo Paz Pereira, and was one of the main strategists behind Javier Milei’s campaign in Argentina’s 2023 presidential election.

He has previously been described as Maga’s man in Latin America – a reference to Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement – and is credited with helping secure the US president’s endorsement of the rightwing Nasry “Tito” Asfura, who won Honduras’s presidential election in December.

On Tuesday morning, Cerimedo landed in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, in Bolivia, and was arrested before boarding another flight reportedly bound for Buenos Aires, Argentina. According to police, he was detained on suspicion of ordering a gun attack on Nadia Beller, a Bolivian lawyer who local media reported had been in a relationship with Cerimedo – who is married – since last year.

It’s safe to say that Paz would have preferred not having to arrest Cerimedo, which was part of a difficult week for him in which he also had to sack Economy Minister José Gabriel Espinoza after the Bolivian Congress voted to remove him amid a corruption scandal.

CANADA

US-Canadian trade talks collapsed without a deal on Friday night, leaving the US on the verge of imposing 50 percent tariffs on some $20 billion-plus in Canadian products and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney pledging to retaliate on a “dollar for dollar” basis starting on September 8. Carney attributed the collapse to “last-minute terms” demanded by the US side, as well as a sense that the US signature on any agreement would be “written in pencil” (i.e., unreliable), and suggested that the two countries are now “at war.”

The Trump administration has been insisting that it’s simply responding to years of discriminatory trade policies by the Canadian government, but if Carney’s description of US demands—including an effective veto over Canada’s trade deals with other countries and unspecified measures that would “restrict our protections of our language, our culture, and in effect, our sovereignty”—are accurate then they go well beyond simply redressing some basic commercial disagreements. There are no further negotiations planned so it sounds like the tariffs are inevitable at this point. Longer term the prospects for successfully renegotiating the US-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement seem pretty dismal.

UNITED STATES

Finally, The New York Times reports on the Trump administration’s latest human trafficking atrocity:

At least five people who were deported by the United States to Liberia but resisted getting off the plane were flown to Equatorial Guinea on Thursday, according to a U.S. official and lawyers familiar with their cases.

It is the first reported case in the administration’s so-called third-country deportation campaign of migrants refusing to get off a deportation flight in a country to which they had no ties and being flown to another such country.

The rapid switch shows how widely the U.S. government has cultivated countries to serve as destinations for deportation through a secretive deal-making campaign.

The deportees who resisted were part of a deal struck by the government of Liberia with the Trump administration to take up to 1,200 deportees from the United States in the next year.

Among the migrants sent to Equatorial Guinea, in Central Africa, from Liberia, in West Africa, were four Cuban men, a Brazilian person and a Cameroonian woman, said Alexandra Smolyar, a lawyer at Asian Americans Advancing Justice Atlanta, a legal group that represents migrants deported to Equatorial Guinea as part of a separate deportation deal.

Three of the Cuban men spoke to the NYT and described US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers roughing them up in Liberia before putting them back on the plane and telling them that they would return to the US. They were then flown to Equatorial Guinea instead, and they were then taken in handcuffs to a hotel in the city of Malabo where people trafficked from the US are apparently being held under armed guard.

August 21, 1415: Portuguese forces under King John I and his son Henrique, the future “Prince Henry the Navigator,” capture the city of Ceuta from the Moroccan Marinid dynasty. Ceuta was the first possession in what would become the Portuguese Empire and served as a staging ground for the Portuguese to capture several other cities around the northwest African coast. It’s a Spanish city today—Madrid kept it after the 16th-17th century Iberian Union broke apart.

August 21, 1791: Slaves in Saint-Domingue attend a Vodou ceremony in the evening and afterward begin a mass uprising. This insurrection marked the start of the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave revolt in the Americas. Haiti won its independence from France, effective on January 1, 1804. The impact of the revolution on slavery in the Americas continues to be a matter of scholarly debate, but at the time the uprising so terrified US slaveholders that the Jefferson administration imposed an embargo on Haiti that remained in place until 1862.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Israeli soldiers and settler militants killed at least two Palestinians in the West Bank on Friday. A settler mob gunned down a 17 year old in the village of Khirbet Hamroush, near Hebron, while soldiers killed one man during a raid in the city of Jenin. Elsewhere in the territory, the Israeli siege of the village of Qusra is about to conclude its second week and the Israeli soldiers who were ostensibly deployed there to protect its Palestinian residents have apparently joined the siege instead. Palestinian media reports that they are preventing the besieged families from leaving and also preventing supplies from coming in. Who could have predicted, really.

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LIVESTREAMING NOTE: I will be appearing on The Global Gambit with Pyotr Kurzin on Friday at 12 PM eastern. FX subscribers should get an email when the stream goes live but you can also watch it at this link.

PROGRAMMING NOTE: There is some possibility that I will be unable to write a newsletter again tomorrow, in which case we will catch up on Sunday again as last week.

TODAY IN HISTORY

August 20 (give or take), 636: In one of the two great military victories of the early expansion of Islam, a caliphal army wins a stunning victory over the Byzantines in a six-day battle near the Yarmuk River (around the convergence of the modern borders of Syria, Jordan, and the occupied Golan). Despite being heavily outnumbered, the “Arabs” (for lack of a better shorthand) won thanks largely to better intelligence on the disposition of the Byzantine forces and the tactical genius of their field commander, Khalid ibn al-Walid. The Byzantines suffered heavy losses and made the strategic decision to retreat into Anatolia, effectively ceding Syria, the Levant, and eventually even Egypt to the caliphate.

August 20, 1988: A ceasefire brings the nearly eight year long Iran-Iraq War to an end. The war cost hundreds of thousands of lives and included some of the most appalling war crimes of the 20th century, all to achieve essentially a restoration of the prewar status quo (except for all the casualties, of course).

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani insisted on Thursday that “there was no intention” to establish a Turkish military presence at Abu Duhur airbase in northwestern Syria’s Idlib province. The Israeli military (IDF) bombed that facility earlier this week and then claimed that it did so in the interests of “preventing a Turkish military buildup in the area.” Israeli officials have continued to make threatening statements about preventing any sort of Turkish footprint in Syria.

LEBANON

The US Treasury Department blacklisted ten people accused of raising funds and/or laundering money on behalf of Hezbollah on Thursday. It also re-designated Hezbollah as a “specially designated global terrorist” group “for service to the Iranian regime under the command of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force,” which seems like a procedural move intended to tie the organization to Iran as a matter of US policy.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The Israeli government has begun taking bids for the construction of housing tracts in the “E1” settlement in the West Bank. As regular readers may know, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich finally inaugurated the E1 project last year after decades of hesitation on the part of the Israeli government. The settlement, which will be situated just east of Jerusalem, is meant by design to the West Bank into northern and southern halves, isolate Jerusalem from the territory, and foreclose on any lingering possibility of forming a contiguous Palestinian state. The announcement of the tender has drawn a fair amount of international criticism but nothing beyond rhetoric so far.

Elsewhere, the IDF is finally acknowledging that its forces pumped hundreds of bullets into a car containing five year old Hind Rajab in Gaza in January 2024, killing the child along with several of her relatives. Rajab’s killing took on symbolic significance as a marker for the IDF’s killing of thousands of children in Gaza as part of the genocide, particularly after audio was released of a phone call she made to the Palestine Red Crescent Society from inside the vehicle. The IDF initially and absurdly insisted that it had nothing to do with her killing. It now says that it will open a “criminal investigation” into the incident, which based on precedent will likely determine that the killing was a tragic accident or something of that nature.

Also on Thursday, the Australian government summoned the Israeli ambassador in Canberra after the IDF decided not to pursue criminal charges in its April 2024 killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers and their Palestinian driver in Gaza. One of the aid workers was an Australian national. The ambassador, Hillel Newman, characterized that incident as a “mistake” on the IDF’s part.

YEMEN

Ansarullah claimed new drone strikes on Saudi Arabia’s Najran province on Thursday, one targeting Najran city’s airport and the other targeting an Aramco oil facility. There’s no word on any casualties or damage. The Yemeni government, meanwhile, claimed on Thursday that its forces had carried out 81 attacks on Ansarullah positions along the front line in Yemen over the course of the previous day, killing an unspecified number of the group’s fighters.

IRAN

Is the United States about to do things to the Iranian economy that have never been seen before in human history? That’s the general message that’s been coming out of the Trump administration for the past week, culminating in Donald Trump’s Wednesday social media missive about “ECONOMIC D-DAY.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent elaborated a bit in a CNBC interview on Thursday in which he previewed the imposition of the “toughest sanctions in history” on Iran. What those might entail or how much tougher they could possibly be than the sanctions that the US has already imposed on Iran remains to be seen and is arguably irrelevant, since the factor that will determine whether or not these measures actually compel the Iranian government to surrender or at least reduce its negotiating demands is whether or not the rest of the world goes along with them.

Trump threatened “TREMENDOUS Economic Consequences” for any country that does business with Iran in his Wednesday screed, without going into any detail, but basically this sounds like more secondary sanctions which is something the US has been doing for many years now. As such, countries that are aligned with the US and/or dependent on trade with the US will presumably go along with any new Iran sanctions as they’ve done with previous Iran sanctions. The UAE already seems to have signaled that it’s on board, though to be sure what the Emirati government says doesn’t always align with what it does (especially when it comes to sanctions on Iran). But is Russia going to cooperate? Is China? Why would they? And if they don’t, will the administration actually attempt to enforce sanctions against them? Does it even have the capacity to do so in a meaningful way? Notably, Bessent wouldn’t commit to even trying to enforce sanctions on China in his CNBC interview.

In other items:

• The aircraft carrier USS George Washington arrived in the Arabian Sea on Thursday. The Pentagon hurriedly redeployed it from the Pacific to replace the USS Abraham Lincoln after news broke last week about the squalid conditions aboard that vessel. The Lincoln is apparently already heading back to the US, according to NBC News. Coincidentally, or not, the publisher of Stars and Stripes, Max Lederer, announced his retirement on Thursday. Stars and Stripes was one of the outlets that broke the story about conditions on the Lincoln and Lederer alluded to conflicts with the Trump administration in his resignation letter. Those conflicts run deeper than the Lincoln story but that may have been the final straw from the administration’s perspective.

• Amid all the hostility in the US-Iran relationship, The Intercept’s Noah Hurowitz offered a heartwarming story earlier this week about cooperation between those two governments on the issue of deportation. A cache of emails shows that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, under orders from senior levels in the Trump administration, coordinated at least three deportation flights last year with Iranian authorities, even including specific individuals who were requested by Tehran. Among the deportees, according to Hurowitz, were “political activists and ethnic and religious minorities who had good reason to fear persecution upon arrival.” OK, maybe that’s not so heartwarming.

ASIA

AFGHANISTAN

The United Nations said on Thursday that the Afghan government has released the two UN staffers it detained earlier this month in Herat. The UN still apparently doesn’t know why they were detained but apparently they are not facing any further legal issues.

PAKISTAN

The Pakistani government summoned the US chargé d’affaires in Islamabad on Wednesday to protest a visit by US ambassador to India Sergio Gor to India’s Jammu and Kashmir territory earlier in the day. In addition to objecting to the visit itself, Pakistani officials also protested a comment by Gor, who referred to Kashmir as “an important part of India.” The Pakistani government doesn’t regard Kashmir as a part of India at all, let alone an important part, and Gor’s remark went against longstanding US policy regarding Kashmir’s final status as yet to be determined. The US has increasingly moved closer to India over the past several years but that trend has reversed itself in the second Trump term as it now seems to favor Pakistan, which makes Gor’s comment particularly sensitive from a diplomatic perspective.

BANGLADESH

The Bangladeshi parliament elected Mirza Fakhrul ‌Islam Alamgir as president of Bangladesh on Thursday. The 78 year old Alamgir is the leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which along with its coalition partners holds a supermajority in the legislature so the vote was not in much doubt. The Bangladeshi presidency is primarily a symbolic post though the holder does have some obligations/powers as head of state and commander in chief of the country’s armed forces.

CHINA

The Trump administration designated US citizen Min Zin, who was arrested in China back in June on spying allegations, as “wrongfully detained” on Thursday. Zin heads a think tank focused on Myanmar and according to NOTUS was detained while attending “an academic conference” in China’s Yunnan province. He is the second US national to be designated as wrongfully detained by Beijing after seismologist Youlin Chen, who was arrested in 2024.

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AFRICA

SUDAN

The Sudan Tribune, citing “security sources and a local official,” reported on Thursday that recent attacks by the Rapid Support Forces militant group had killed at least six people and displaced more than 1000 in Sudan’s North Kordofan state. The displaced began arriving in the state capital, El Obeid, on Thursday.

LIBERIA

Liberia has become the newest participant in the Trump administration’s “third country” human trafficking scheme, agreeing to take in up to 1200 people expelled from the US over the next year. The first trafficking flight arrived in Monrovia on Thursday containing 20 people, mostly from parts of Latin America. Liberian authorities claim that these individuals will not be detained and will be given the opportunity to apply for asylum or to leave the country. They’re also denying that they agreed to participate in this program for financial reasons, though the US did just happen to award Liberia $5 million this year for “migration management activities.” Just an interesting coincidence I guess.

MALI

Human Rights Watch is accusing Russian Africa Corps personnel of “summarily” killing nine civilians during an operation in central Mali’s Mopti region on July 10. According to HRW “more than 100 Africa Corps fighters rounded up at least 80 men and boys” in a Mopti village and then tortured and interrogated them on their alleged ties to militant groups. They shot six people who attempted to escape and executed three others. The village is under the control of the Jamaʿat Nusrat al-Islam wa’l-Muslimin (JNIM) jihadist group but residents told HRW that there were no jihadists present that day.

CAMEROON

Cameroonian President Paul Biya returned to that country on Thursday. While normally something like this would not warrant a mention, the 93 year old Biya had spent the previous 73 days in Switzerland on what the Cameroonian government has called “a short private stay.” While it is exceedingly likely that this private stay (which was not all that short) involved medical treatment of some kind, Cameroonian officials have kept mum on that subject. Cameroon currently does not have a vice president (the office was abolished in 1972 and only reinstated earlier this year), so there is no clear succession plan should something happen to Biya.

EUROPE

UKRAINE

Another massive Russian bombardment of Ukraine’s Kyiv region killed at least 18 people overnight and into Thursday. Meanwhile, former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov’s push for new elections may be fizzling out, as protesters who have been demanding his reinstatement as minister now seem to be turning on him. Recent polling does indicate that a majority of Ukrainians oppose new elections in wartime, so despite the public following he seemed to gain after his sacking Fedorov may have overplayed his hand.

SERBIA

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić said on Thursday that the country will hold its forthcoming snap parliamentary election on either October 18 or October 25. Vučić announced his resignation in late June, triggering early elections for both parliament and president (they’d been scheduled for next year), after months of anti-corruption/anti-government protests. He cannot run for president again due to term limits, but if his Serbian Progressive Party wins the parliamentary election he could make himself prime minister.

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AMERICAS

BOLIVIA

Foreign Policy’s Nick Aspinwall reports on the promise and peril of Bolivia’s lithium reserves:

The Salar de Uyuni salt flat is the pride of Bolivia, spanning nearly 7,000 square miles and drawing thousands of tourists to its surreal bright-white landscape. It also lies atop a stockpile of lithium, a mineral crucial to the clean energy transition that’s long given hope to the country’s faltering economy.

Bolivia is home to roughly 20 percent of the world’s lithium deposits, mostly beneath Salar de Uyuni, but it produces less than 1 percent of global lithium. President Rodrigo Paz, who took office last year pledging measures to revive the economy, will be judged in part based on whether that number increases.

At Paz’s inauguration, he reiterated his campaign slogan of “capitalism for all” as the country moves away from two decades of left-wing rule. While prices have fallen from their peak in 2022, the metal is crucial to clean energy technology such as electric vehicle batteries and solar panels.

But any efforts to expand production will face fierce opposition from environmental advocates and Indigenous groups worried that further extraction will damage their livelihoods. In the towns scattered around Salar de Uyuni, people raise llamas and alpacas and grow quinoa, and they fear the lithium rush could contaminate the region’s groundwater and deplete its aquifers. Many migrated to Uyuni, the area’s largest town, to work in tourism. They worry lithium extraction will hurt that industry, too.

“We are the ones who are going to feel the impact,” said Edson Muraña, a tour operator who comes from a family of farmers. “We want this culture to exist. We don’t want it to disappear.”

BRAZIL

Sticking with this theme, the AP reports that Brazil is seeing a mining boom that brings with it similar concerns:

Foreign capital is rushing in. Nearly half of the 2,727 overall rare earth exploration applications — or 42% — in Brazil were made by subsidiaries of foreign mining companies or firms with foreign ownership stakes. Eleven of the 20 companies with the largest number of applications are backed by foreign investment, mostly from Australia, the U.S. and Canada.

The analysis reviewed all National Mining Agency records through June. Rare earth exploration applications have surged, with more than 86% filed in the past three years, including 268 in the first half of 2026, according to the agency’s public data.

But the mining, which in some cases could happen near reserves in the Amazon rainforest, also comes with major environmental risks. Indigenous communities are beginning to sound the alarm. It also raises questions about relations between the U.S. and Brazil, long trading partners, and Brazil and China, which have become closer in recent years.

UNITED STATES

Finally, Foreign Affairs’ Marc Lynch argues that we’ve reached a turning point for the United States in the Middle East:

The American Middle East is finished. The regional order that has prevailed since 1991 has been one of the many casualties of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. The American and Israeli failure to dislodge the regime in Tehran has proved the bankruptcy of decades of sanctions and violence. The inability of the United States to protect its Gulf allies from Iranian attacks or to keep the Strait of Hormuz open has fatally undermined the core security bargain that justified its network of military bases in the region. And Israel’s increasingly threatening posture and abandonment of any pretense of interest in reaching an accommodation with the Palestinians have ended Washington’s decades-long mission of bringing its Arab allies and Israel together into an enduring security partnership.

The United States’ primary goal for three and a half decades has been to lock its disparate allies into an order built around protecting Israel while containing, at first, Iran and Iraq, and more recently Iran and its nonstate allies. Far from being a deviation from that strategy, President Donald Trump’s war took it to its logical end, seeking to remove the Iranian threat by force in one fell swoop. As American leaders did before the 2003 invasion of Iraq and Israel has done in its wars against Hezbollah and Hamas, the architects of this war vastly exaggerated what military power could achieve, underestimated the capacity of adversaries to adapt, took for granted that allies would fall in line, and callously disregarded the lives of ordinary people. Washington’s misadventure was not an aberration so much as the ultimate expression of the inherent vice of its Middle East strategy.

At first, it may not look as though the war has had much effect on the alliances that form the American order. Facing an inconclusive war and an empowered Iran, the Gulf states may ramp up their arms purchases and their demands for renewed security guarantees, creating the illusion of continuity. But the old order is in fact giving way to something new. The 1956 Suez crisis is remembered today as the last gasp of British and French imperial power in the Middle East, but it took years to reach that inevitable end. American primacy will not disappear immediately, either, but long-building doubts about American power and purpose have passed their tipping point. The revelations of the Iran war and of the Israeli war in Gaza before it have already changed the calculations of U.S. allies and adversaries. Another round of fighting or the election of a different American president will not repair the rupture.

Lynch argues that there is a opening for the US to adopt a different approach and writes that “discarding its policy of support for autocrats, impunity for allies, and militarized containment of enemies might enable the United States to engage with the region in a healthier way—one that eventually could yield the durable stability Washington has claimed to want all along.”