Here We Go Again (also Today in History, November 25-27)
The "Winter War" begins, the First Crusade is called, and more (including a news update)
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Foreign Exchanges is on Thanksgiving break, but I didn’t want things to be completely quiet this week so here are a few anniversaries of note. And there is a little news to cover (see below). Thanks for reading, and we’ll be back to regular programming on Tuesday.
November 25, 1120: The White Ship sinks after striking a rock off the coast of Normandy en route to England. What made this particular shipwreck notable is that the vessel was carrying William Ætheling, the only legitimate son of King Henry I of England, as well as Henry’s illegitimate son Richard of Lincoln. This meant that when Henry died in 1135 his only heir was his daughter Matilda, which was problematic because she was married to the Count of Anjou, Geoffrey Plantagenet. Oh, and also because she was a lady. English nobles didn’t like Geoffrey—they didn’t like Angevins in general, to be honest—but they really didn’t like the idea of being ruled by a woman. They decided instead to make Henry’s nephew, Stephen of Blois, their new king, kicking off an 1135-1153 civil war known as “The Anarchy,” which essentially pitted Norman England against Norman Normandy. That war ended in a compromise, the Treaty of Wallingford, which left Stephen as king but ensured the succession of Matilda’s son, the future Henry II.
November 25, 1177: The Battle of Montgisard
November 25, 1491: The Treaty of Granada
November 26, 1939: The Russian village of Mainila is struck multiple times by artillery shells, which Russian authorities blamed on the Finnish military. In reality the Red Army had staged an attack on the village as a justification for tearing up Russia’s non-aggression treaty with Finland, after which they invaded Finland and kicked off the “Winter War.” The conflict ended in March 1940 with Finland agreeing to make some territorial concessions to the Russians—either more than Moscow wanted or much less than it was hoping to gain, there’s some academic debate about this. The Soviet military was, however, thoroughly embarrassed by the difficulty it had handling the far weaker (on paper, anyway) Finnish military. Among other outcomes, the Red Army’s faceplant helped convince Adolf Hitler that Russia was vulnerable to invasion, which needless to say didn’t quite turn out the way he’d assumed it would.
November 27, 602: A very disaffected Byzantine army under Phocas executes Emperor Maurice, but only after forcing him to watch the execution of six of his sons. They seem nice. This mutiny set in motion the events that led to the 602-628 Byzantine war against the Sasanian (Persian) Empire, as almost immediately after Phocas became emperor the Byzantine governor of Mesopotamia, Narses, declared a rebellion. He appealed to the Persians—whose emperor, Khosrow II, had been crowned in part due to Maurice’s aid—for assistance, and there’s your war. The extended conflict saw the Persians conquer the Levant and Egypt before they overextended themselves with an ill-conceived siege of Constantinople. When that failed, the man who’d supplanted Phocas in 610, Heraclius, led an invasion of the Persian Empire, and in 628 Khosrow’s nobles availed themselves of the opportunity to oust their emperor and sue for peace. The conflict battered the two great empires, which worked to the benefit of a new regional power that was just beginning to emerge in western Arabia.
November 27, 1095: During the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II issues his call for what we know as the First Crusade.
November 27, 2020: Somebody murders Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in an attack on a road east of Tehran.
So, about that.
Fakhrizadeh, a professor at Tehran’s Imam Hussein University and a one star general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was probably Iran’s premier nuclear scientist. He was certainly its most prominent nuclear scientist, and to the extent Iran has ever had anything that could be characterized as a nuclear weapons program, Fakhrizadeh is the person Western intelligence agencies believe was in charge of it. I’ve seen his murder compared to the assassination of former Quds force commander Qasem Soleimani back in January, and while I don’t think Fakhrizadeh will be as difficult for the Iranian government to replace as Soleimani has been and he certainly wasn’t as widely known as Soleimani was, his murder is a big deal. It does partner with the Soleimani killing to create a pair of macabre bookends on 2020, although I suppose that optimistically assumes there won’t be any more incidents like this over the next five weeks.
Because of his significance to Iran’s nuclear program, Fakhrizadeh had been the target of previous assassination attempts. To save a lot of time we could spent parsing potential killers, this was almost certainly a Mossad operation conducted with the knowledge of the US government and probably the Saudi government as well. The actual attackers may have been Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) members—the Israeli government has (allegedly) used MEK in its four previous (alleged) murders of Iranian nuclear scientists, all carried out between 2010 and 2012. Fakhrizadeh has been at the top of their target list for a while now. The reason I mention the Saudis is because of that meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that we’re all supposed to pretend didn’t take place in NEOM this past weekend. If the Israeli government was preparing to take out Iran’s leading nuclear scientist I would assume that was a topic of conversation. But we can’t say for certain.
Assuming this murder was Israel’s doing the obvious question is “why now?” And while I’m sure there were some operational details that made Fakhrizadeh vulnerable in a way he hasn’t been in the past, the main reason “why now” is that Donald Trump is going to be out of office in a couple of months and the Israelis wanted to carry out such a provocative operation under the friendliest possible administration in Washington. The Israelis wouldn’t have done this without assent in DC and they were more likely to get that from Trump than from Joe Biden.
Trump’s electoral defeat also helps answer the question “why do this at all?” The reason is not to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program, which is under tight surveillance by the International Atomic Energy Agency and which will undoubtedly survive Fakhrizadeh’s death. This murder was intended to embarrass the Iranian government, in part, but its main purpose is to disrupt future US-Iranian diplomacy. Biden has expressed his intent to rejoin the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and to try to use that as a springboard from which to reengage with Tehran diplomatically. An attack like this is meant to make the idea of diplomacy with the US poisonous in Iranian politics ahead of next year’s presidential election. Ideally, it’s meant to provoke Iran into retaliating in a way that could justify a US response and thereby foreclose on the possibility of any diplomacy at all.
I hesitate to speculate as to what’s likely to happen now both because it’s very uncertain and because I really am trying to take some time off. Obviously the closest analogue we have to this assassination is the Soleimani killing. Iran’s response to that strike was so measured that it didn’t give Trump any reason to respond and actually deescalated the situation.
The calculations now are a bit different than they were in January, though. Back then Trump was looking ahead to a presidential campaign and didn’t want a brand new Middle Eastern war on his hands. Now he’s on his way out the door and probably wouldn’t mind handing such a war off to Biden. So his threshold for responding may be lower now. The Iranians may also decide that enough is enough, or they may believe they have more options to retaliate during Trump’s lame duck period. Another difference is the involvement of Israel in this incident. If the Iranians do retaliate it will probably be against a target identified more clearly with Israel than the US, which leaves the door open for an Israeli escalation that tries to force Trump’s (or Biden’s) hand.
It’s foolhardy to try to guess what the Iranian government might do now, but the likeliest scenario is probably another calibrated retaliation like their missile attack in January, but against an Israeli rather than US interest. The Israelis may then retaliate for the retaliation, but at that point the ball, so to speak, will be in Trump’s court. Unless, that is, the Iranians hold off on their retaliation until after Trump leaves office. That’s not how things played out in January, but given the current political situation in the US the Iranians could opt to wait Trump out and then see how things look with Biden in office before they decide whether or how to respond to this assassination.
There’s one other aspect to this incident that’s worth mentioning, and it feeds into one of the themes we’ve been hitting here lately with respect to the presidential transition: impunity. At the end of the day the Israelis killed Fakhrizadeh because they could, because they knew their patron, The World’s Only Superpower™, would protect them from any serious repercussions. The United States can protect Israel because it, of course, operates with more impunity than any other nation on Earth. Call it “American Exceptionalism” or “America First” or “the rules-based liberal order,” the gist is the same: the “rules” we set—like the one that says countries shouldn’t go around murdering each other’s citizens—are for other people to follow. We, and our select special friends, are free to do as we like. The Biden administration will likely take a dim view of these kinds of operations over the next four years, but it’s not going to challenge the sense of impunity that makes such operations possible.
Great breakdown, Derek. Thank you for all you do!