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TODAY IN HISTORY
July 28, 1821: Having entered Lima a few weeks prior and having been named “Protector of Peru” by local officials, South American revolutionary leader José de San Martín proclaims Peru’s independence from Spain. Annually commemorated as Peruvian Independence Day.
July 28, 1915: The US military occupies Haiti following a revolt that culminated in the assassination of pro-US Haitian President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. Woodrow Wilson ordered the occupation out of concern that Germany could use the uprising to establish a foothold in the Western Hemisphere (and to make sure Haiti repaid the sizable loans it had received from several US financial institutions, but we don’t like to talk about that part). The US didn’t return control of Haiti to Haitians until 1934.
INTERNATIONAL
The El Niño system that is currently developing in the south Pacific is forecast to be one of the strongest on record, and Foreign Policy’s Christina Lu reports on what that could mean:
This year’s event is still strengthening and is poised to peak in the winter. But it has already made waves because it is forecasted to be “very strong”—the highest of four levels at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The strength of an El Niño matters because it influences the probability of what will happen. Strong El Niños in particular are a big deal because they increase the odds that precipitation shifts mirror historic impacts. “A stronger El Niño increases your likelihood of having a certain outcome—it doesn’t make it a certainty,” said Andrew Hoell, a research meteorologist at the NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory.
There have only been four other El Niños at this level, most recently between 2015 and 2016, according to [University of Maryland faculty member Brian] Barker. That event fueled a brutal drought in South Africa and India—which should have been seeing a rainy season—at the same time that it contributed to harrowing flooding across South America, wreaking havoc on some farmers’ livelihoods and straining other communities.
Estimates of the average economic toll of the phenomenon have ranged from tens of billions of dollars to a few trillion dollars. [Peterson Institute for International Economics fellow Cullen] Hendrix warned in a recent report for the think tank that this event could inflict a massive economic cost that disproportionately hits lower- and middle-income countries.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Reuters reports on life along the Israeli military’s (IDF) ever-advancing “yellow line” in Gaza:
On a road in Gaza City’s Zeitoun district, Palestinian resident Assem Dawla loaded mattresses and bags onto a truck as concrete yellow blocks marking the edge of Israel’s expanding military zone stood amid the rubble nearby.
He said it was the seventh or eighth time since the war began that he and his family had been forced to leave a shelter because of Israeli evacuation orders and the advance of what residents call the yellow line.
Zeitoun is one of at least five locations across Gaza where residents and Hamas officials say Israel has expanded areas under its control in recent days by moving forward the yellow line, a military demarcation established under a U.S.-brokered ceasefire reached in October.
As men hoisted belongings onto a waiting truck, elderly relatives picked their way through debris. Continued Israeli military activity made it too dangerous to remain, Dawla said.
“We are taking our belongings out and going to leave the place because the occupation (Israel) has moved the yellow line all the way to Salah al-Din Street,” he said.
YEMEN
Oil prices are on the decline thanks to recent developments in the US-Iran conflict (see below), though there’s some mixed news on that front given the resumption of the Saudi-Ansarullah conflict. Saudi Aramco reportedly suspended operations at its oil refinery in the city of Jazan on Monday following a Houthi attack on that facility over the weekend, which on the one hand does reduce demand for crude oil but also takes about 400,000 barrels per day of refining capacity offline for an indeterminate period of time.
The renewed Yemen conflict has also disrupted traffic through the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandab Strait, at least when that traffic has anything to do with Saudi Arabia and the Houthi “blockade” of the kingdom. However, there may be some relaxation there as Reuters reported on Tuesday that the Chinese government has asked Ansarullah to allow its tankers safe passage through the waterway even if they are carrying Saudi oil. So far at least four Chinese vessels have passed through the strait despite the blockade, but those have been negotiated on a case-by-case basis and Beijing seems to be after a blanket waiver for its ships. The Houthis say they fired on a Saudi tanker in the Red Sea and forced it to change course on Tuesday, so the blockade is clearly still operative for non-Chinese ships.
SAUDI ARABIA
The Saudi military said that its air defenses intercepted another drone attack targeting oil facilities in the eastern part of the kingdom on Tuesday, the second time that’s happened in as many days. Saudi officials claim the drones originated in Iraq, which points toward Iraqi militias rather than the Houthis, but that doesn’t rule out some degree of coordination between the Iraqi and Yemeni actors.
BREAKING: The US and Saudi militaries carried out “strikes” against Iraqi militia targets on Tuesday night (eastern US time). There was no more information available beyond that at time of publication.
IRAN
DEVELOPING: After I had most of tonight’s roundup written, the US military’s Central Command reported an Iranian ballistic missile attack “on US forces based in the Middle East.” The target was apparently a US facility in Jordan. In CENTCOM’s telling US air defenses intercepted all of the missiles. Assuming this is accurate it is unclear why the Iranians would have upended the tenuous pause in fighting that’s been in place for the past few days. This story broke just about two hours before I sent out the newsletter and there’s no indication yet of a US response, unless those Iraqi strikes (see above) were the response (but that doesn’t appear to be the case). There may be much more to say tomorrow.
Prior to the above, the Omani government had reportedly presented its Iranian counterpart with a proposal for managing future traffic through the Strait of Hormuz that includes the collection of “voluntary fees” for ships that transit the waterway. It has previously been reported that the Omanis were proposing something akin to the system in place in the Strait of Malacca, where a coalition of littoral states asks shippers to pay into a fund to support maritime services including navigation assistance, environmental remediation, and search and rescue if necessary. This is not the framework that the Iranian government wants, particularly not if it’s expecting to make billions of dollars per year by managing the strait, but it may be the best it can hope to get. The Omani concept apparently has the support of the other Gulf Cooperation Council member states, whose participation Tehran has been seeking and whose influence may be enough to get the United States to go along with it.
In other items:
As far as short-term management of the strait is concerned the Iranians have apparently rejected an Omani proposal to restore the “traffic separation scheme” under which ships could pass through one of two open transit routes—one through Iranian waters and the other through Omani waters. Tehran wants both routes to run at least partway through the Iranian side of the strait, ostensibly over “security concerns.”
Nick Turse at The Intercept reports that the depletion of US air defense interceptor stockpiles has enabled Iranian forces to “overwhelm” those defenses with a combination of drone and missile fire. This is consistent with the NBC News story a few days ago that said US air defense units were letting some Iranian projectiles through to preserve their interceptor supplies. The US military insists that this only applies to projectiles that are deemed to be harmless (heading off target, for example), but we’re just supposed to take its word for that and recent evidence, in the form of US casualties, suggests otherwise.
ASIA
AFGHANISTAN
Two gunmen assassinated the director of information and culture in the Badakhshan provincial government on Tuesday in one of the most significant attacks on a Taliban grandee since the group retook control of Afghanistan in 2021. Police killed one of the assassins and captured the other but as yet there doesn’t seem to be any indication as to who they were or their motive. Islamic State carries out attacks in Afghanistan with some regularity but it’s unclear why it would target a provincial information and culture director, so there may be something else going on here.
PAKISTAN
The Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) activist group is alleging that Pakistani security forces have gunned down at least 30 people over the past two days amid protests in Pakistani (Azad) Kashmir. JAAC has been organizing protests for several weeks to demand changes in the allocation of seats in the regional legislature ahead of the election that began on Monday and will continue through early August. Security forces have frequently responded to those demonstrations with violence and the Pakistani government has outlawed the JAAC. State authorities have now imposed a communications lockdown featuring an internet blackout, which makes it impossible to verify the JAAC’s claims but also speaks to an attempted coverup.
AFRICA
SUDAN
Sudan’s Emergency Lawyers activist group said on Tuesday that drone strikes have killed “dozens” of people in North Kordofan state over the past several days. That period coincides with the Sudanese military’s seizure of the main highway connecting the Khartoum region to the state capital, El-Obeid, from the Rapid Support Forces militant group. There does not seem to be any indication as to responsibility and both combatants may share it. Neither has exhibited much concern for civilian casualties in general. Inside El-Obeid the military’s gains have not yet translated into an influx of badly needed humanitarian aid. The city’s population has been swollen by displaced persons from other parts of Kordofan and has been struggling to accommodate them while under effective siege by the RSF.
LIBYA
Protesters broke into the Libyan General Electricity Company’s Mellitah Oil and Gas facility outside of Tripoli overnight, forcing a shutdown to natural gas lines supplying fuel to several power plants. This is the most serious incident in a days-long string of demonstrations that have been taking place in major western Libyan cities. They are demanding better electrical service and an end to the “hourslong” blackouts that have apparently become a regular feature of life in the region.
NIGERIA
Gunmen attacked a village in central Nigeria’s Benue state on Tuesday morning, killing at least 14 people. Benue is located in a part of Nigeria where herder-farmer violence is a fairly frequent occurrence and this appears to have been the work of Fulani herders, who have reportedly been active in the state in recent days.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
Ukrainian drone strikes killed at least three people and wounded another 19 in Russia’s Belgorod oblast on Tuesday. One of those strikes apparently hit a bus in the border town of Shebekino. The Russian Foreign Ministry accused the Ukrainian military of targeting public transit “with a maniacal persistence, taking revenge on ordinary people for growing failures at the front.”
UKRAINE
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha took to social media on Tuesday to warn Iran against retaliating for the Ukrainian attack that killed an Iranian sailor in the Caspian Sea over the weekend. The post came after Sybiha held a phone call with his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, who told Iranian media that the Ukrainian FM had insisted that the strike was “unintentional and that Ukraine had no desire to escalate tensions.” Araghchi later posted that “Iran does not seek escalation either,” so maybe this situation will remain confined to the single incident, at least for now.
SPAIN
Al Jazeera reports on the climate-fueled wildfires that are currently raging through parts of Spain and France:
Since early July, wildfires have been burning across southern and western Europe, with France and Spain being the worst hit.
About 220,000 people have been evacuated from their homes in France, about 100,000 people in Spain, and around 30,000 others there ordered to shelter in place, according to authorities.
In Spain, a fast-moving wildfire in the Andalusia region killed at least 12 people on July 10. By July 20, the fires had spread hundreds of kilometres to the capital, Madrid. At least 10,000 people were evacuated following fires in the central Madrid region. On July 24, Spanish authorities declared a national emergency, saying two major blazes were “out of control”.
Over the weekend, a separate blaze in Spain’s eastern Castellon province ravaged more than 4,300 hectares (10,600 acres), regional authorities said.
“The fire is out of control; it’s very difficult to extinguish from a technical standpoint, especially because of the adverse weather conditions that will continue throughout the day,” the regional leader of Valencia, Juanfran Perez, told reporters near the site.
An extremely wet winter fed the growth of large amounts of vegetation that an extremely dry and hot summer has turned into a tinderbox. Both are manifestations of climate change. The fires are burning so intensely that the region is now seeing the formation of pyrocumulonimbus clouds, basically thunderclouds created by the fires themselves that can generate lighting strikes causing more fires. That makes fighting the blazes considerably more challenging. Europe is the fastest-warming continent on Earth and that’s undoubtedly supercharging seasonal wildfires. With more heatwaves expected the likelihood is not just that these fires will keep burning but that the crisis will spread to other countries across the continent.
AMERICAS
PERU
Keiko Fujimori officially took office on Tuesday as Peru’s ninth president in the past decade. She narrowly won last month’s runoff, proving that the fourth time really can be the charm when it comes to presidential runs, and in terms of staying power she may benefit from the fact that her Fuerza Popular party is currently the largest bloc in the Peruvian Congress (though it does not hold a majority). Unsurprisingly, in her inaugural remarks Fujimori declared her intention to get Tough on Crime, promising to declare states of emergency across the country to enable the Peruvian military to assume responsibility for law enforcement. Given her family’s legacy, Peruvians will be lucky if that’s all she has military do.
UNITED STATES
The US Senate voted on Tuesday to confirm Jay Clayton, currently the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, as Donald Trump’s new Director of National Intelligence. He replaces Tulsi Gabbard, who resigned last month. Every Democrat voted against Clayton’s appointment but most nevertheless seem to regard him as an improvement over Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte, who had been serving as DNI in an interim capacity following Gabbard’s departure.
Finally, The Wall Street Journal reports on the emergence of a new boom (pun unfortunately intended) industry in the US and Europe—explosives:
At least 24 new projects are under way for propellants or explosives across NATO countries, according to information assembled by The Wall Street Journal. Three new factories are set for just Arkansas, a center of U.S. weapons production.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago exposed the West’s struggle to churn out ammunition. Although artillery-shell output has increased, producers still rely on constricted supplies of dangerous chemicals manufactured in a globe-spanning supply chain with lots of chokepoints.
Before the war in Ukraine, Washington and its allies believed they had ample stockpiles and reliable manufacturing sources. Pentagon dogma for decades centered on surgical strikes using a limited number of expensive and ultraprecise munitions packed with computer chips and digital sensors.
Now, war in “Ukraine and elsewhere is bringing back munitions that have a very different supply chain,” like artillery shells, said Will Somerindyke, the chairman of Regulus Global, a defense manufacturing and logistics company. The U.S. and Europe don’t have that supply chain, meaning they don’t have sovereignty over their own ammunition—and reversing that won’t be easy, he said.
Conflicts and tensions are now prompting countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to restart production and reshore supply chains, though slowly and with gaps.
Re: the “boom” in explosives mfg
(Citizen Kane clapping.gif)