World roundup: April 16 2024
Stories from Sudan, Russia, Ecuador, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
April 16, 1457 BCE: This is the date most commonly cited for the Battle of Megiddo, the earliest well-documented (reasonably, anyway) battle in human history. An Egyptian army under Pharaoh Thutmose III defeated a group of rebelling Canaanite kingdoms at Megiddo, a city that was the site of so many battles in the ancient world that it gave its name to the hypothetical apocalyptic “Battle of Armageddon.” They followed up by besieging the city, which fell seven months later. Thutmose’s victory restored Egyptian preeminence in the Levant and enabled the greatest territorial expansion in Ancient Egyptian history.
April 16, 73: This is the traditional date for the fall of Masada, a Jewish fortress whose capture by the Romans effectively ended the First Jewish-Roman War (66-74). According to the Jewish rebel leader-turned-Roman historian Flavius Josephus, the surviving defenders of Masada chose mass suicide over capture. Modern archeological work on the site, which also questions the dating of the siege, suggests the Romans massacred most of the survivors and that Josephus was either misinformed or deliberately formulated the suicide narrative to cover up the atrocity. The traditional narrative and its story of Jewish fighters choosing death over capture holds a prominent place in modern Israeli national consciousness.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The Israeli military (IDF) is reportedly surging forces back in to northern Gaza, over three months after it declared its mission accomplished in that part of the territory. The rationale is unclear but the return of IDF tanks is displacing people who had begun returning to their homes (or whatever remains of them) after the IDF withdrew most of its forces from Gaza earlier this month. Israeli forces are also continuing to bombard parts of central Gaza (one airstrike on Tuesday killed at least 11 people in al-Maghazi refugee camp, at least some of them children) as well as the southern Gazan city of Rafah, which is awaiting an IDF ground assault that may now have to wait until after the Israelis have extracted whatever revenge they seem to need for this weekend’s Iranian attack.
Speaking of that revenge, Israeli Knesset member Yuli Edelstein—who chairs its Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee—assured Reuters on Tuesday that the Israeli government is “not…in the business of revenge” (all evidence to the contrary) and said that the aim of its forthcoming retaliation will be to cap off this latest round of Israeli-Iranian escalation, not extend it. I don’t know that Edelstein has any idea what the Israeli government really wants, but his interview was somewhat instructive for its open hypocrisy. At one point he said that Israeli retaliation is necessary to “teach [the Iranians] a lesson that you can't attack a sovereign country just because you find it doable.” Israel attacks sovereign countries constantly, of course, so I guess Israeli leaders either haven’t learned that lesson or it doesn’t apply to them for some reason.
The United Nations is issuing an appeal for $2.8 billion to cover humanitarian operations in the occupied Palestinian territories this year, with most of that going to Gaza for obvious reasons. Although there have been some anecdotal improvements in humanitarian aid reaching Gaza, like the reopening of a World Food Program bakery in Gaza City on Tuesday, the UN Relief and Works Agency says it’s seen no “significant” increase in the amount of aid coming into the territory this month, despite multiple Israeli pledges to do so.
LEBANON
IDF airstrikes in southern Lebanon killed at least three people on Tuesday, one of them a senior Hezbollah figure named Ismail Baz allegedly involved in carrying out attacks against Israel. The other two fatalities were also Hezbollah personnel. A pair of Hezbollah drones wounded at least three people in northern Israel.
Lebanese Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi told a Lebanese TV station on Sunday that he believes Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency was behind the murder of alleged Hamas financier Mohammad Srour, whose body turned up near Beirut last week after he’d been missing for several days. The US government blacklisted Srour in 2019 over his alleged involvement with both Hamas and Hezbollah.
IRAN
The US and European Union are likely to impose new sanctions against Iran in the coming days, both in response to the Iranian attack on Israel over the weekend and in an attempt to reduce the intensity of Israel’s forthcoming retaliation. Israeli officials are demanding sanctions as part of a broader “diplomatic offensive” in response to the attack, and if they feel those sanctions are particularly severe there is some possibility that it could influence them to be gentler in their military response. This might actually be an affirmative use case for sanctions, which as a rule don’t work and punitively punish ordinary Iranians rather than Iranian decision makers. Anything is better than a regional war, I suppose, and Iranian leaders are already threatening to retaliate for any Israeli retaliation so the risk of such a war is still very much alive.
ASIA
ARMENIA
Eurasianet’s Ani Avetisyan reports on budding military ties between Armenia and the United States:
Only a few years ago, the idea seemed unimaginable: the United States is planning to give considerable military assistance to Armenia, Russia’s not-so-long-ago strategic partner. But times have changed, and Washington is treading cautiously as it works to erase a geopolitical red line in the Caucasus.
The Armenian government started distancing itself politically and economically from Russia after experiencing a crushing defeat at the hands of the Azerbaijani military in Nagorno-Karabakh. The widespread feeling in Yerevan was that the Kremlin failed to fulfill its security commitments to Armenia. The European Union and the United States have been quick to respond to Armenian feelers for closer security and economic ties. In early April, the EU and US came up with a combined assistance offering of over $350 million for Yerevan.
Following up on that meeting, US Ambassador to Armenia Kristina Kvien provided an overview of rapidly expanding US-Armenian relations in an April 10 interview with the Armenian Service of RFE/RL, saying that Washington’s contacts with Yerevan “in just about every sector have expanded and deepened” over the past year.
That includes military cooperation. “We’ve had significant expansion on this theme in the last year,” Kvien noted, pointing to the joint US-Armenian military exercises in early September in Armenia. The envoy also said an American military “advisor” would soon work with the Armenian Defense Ministry to implement capacity-building reforms promoting “modern standards” in planning and operations.
AZERBAIJAN
The French government recalled its ambassador from Baku on Tuesday in response to “months” of “unilateral actions” by the Azerbaijani government that Paris says have been “damaging to the relationship between our two countries.” In addition to its burgeoning relationship with the US, Armenia has also been intensifying its ties with France since the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War. Azerbaijani officials have been heavily critical of France and particularly of French arms sales to Armenia.
INDIA
Police reportedly killed at least 29 Naxalite (Maoist) militants during a raid in India’s Chhattisgarh state on Tuesday. At least three police officers were wounded.
SINGAPORE
Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on Monday announced that he will be stepping down on May 15 after nearly 20 years in power. He’ll be succeeded, as planned, by Finance Minister and deputy PM Lawrence Wong, who’s been the heir apparent for about two years now. Lee has for some time been treating next year’s general election as the time for a generational transfer of power within Singapore’s ruling elite and giving way to Wong now will allow time for him to settle into office ahead of the vote. Wong says he intends to appoint Lee as a “senior minister” following the transfer of power.
AFRICA
SUDAN
Days of fighting between the Rapid Support Forces group and the Sudanese military have reportedly left at least 25 civilians dead in El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state. The RSF controls most of the Darfur region but has not previously moved against El-Fasher, whose population has as a result ballooned because of people displaced from other parts of the region. Hundreds of thousands of displaced persons will be at grave risk if the fighting continues in that area, and relief agencies that have been operating from El-Fasher may be forced to pull up stakes and withdraw.
LIBYA
UN Libya envoy Abdoulaye Bathily took to a UN Security Council meeting on Tuesday to express his apparently (and understandably) deep frustration with Libya’s political elites and their near absolute refusal to set aside their own interests in order to form a unified government. After the meeting he told reporters that he was tendering his resignation from the envoy post. In his remarks to the council, Bathily said that his efforts to bridge the gaps between Libya’s rival leaders “were met with stubborn resistance, unreasonable expectations and indifference to the interests of the Libyan people.”
Libyan leaders blew through their last deadline for new elections, in December 2021, and have made no apparent progress toward unification since then. The country is effectively divided among factions in its eastern and western halves and neither of those halves shows much internal cohesion either. The leaders of the various stakeholder groups seem content to leave things divided and chaotic rather than risk diminishing their own power in a unification process.
ETHIOPIA
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says that it raised almost $629 million in pledges to support humanitarian relief projects in Ethiopia during a donor conference in Geneva on Tuesday. Assuming that money actually materializes it represents a sizable chunk of the $1 billion the UN says it needs to provide aid to Ethiopians affected by violence and extreme weather activity.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
Writing for The Nation, the Arctic Institute’s Pavel Devyatkin wonders if the US and Russia can find a way to get past their enmity and get back to working together on the Arctic’s climate crisis:
The Arctic faces a climate emergency. The United States and Russia should be working together to understand the deepening crisis—a global security threat. Instead, essential cooperation is fractured.
Warming at a rate four times faster than the rest of the world, the Arctic is disproportionately affected by global warming: sea ice is diminishing, coastlines are eroding, ecosystems are collapsing, and there are existential risks to local communities and Indigenous livelihoods. The Arctic climate crisis is the “canary in the coal mine” for what awaits other regions. The transforming Arctic has direct consequences on warming and rising sea levels around the world.
Meanwhile, scientific cooperation to understand these processes has been blunted since Vladimir Putin’s decision to send troops into Ukraine in 2022. Following the escalation of violence, joint projects, information sharing and expert working groups between Russian and Western researchers and institutes were severed.
Arctic cooperation has a nearly century-long history of successful initiatives based on mutual interest despite political differences between states. The sharing of data, international polar expeditions, and collaborative research are critical for constructing climate models and prognoses as well as informing effective adaptation and mitigation policies.
UKRAINE
Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday signed into law the conscription measure that the Ukrainian parliament passed last week. The new law doesn’t immediately expand the pool of conscripts, but it introduces measures that are intended to allow Ukrainian authorities to identify every military aged man in the country in order to enable more effective conscription efforts. It also includes financial incentives for service that the Ukrainian government probably can’t afford to provide. An initial draft of the bill included a 36 month maximum rotation but that was stripped out of the final legislation so conscription remains an open ended proposition.
AMERICAS
ECUADOR
The fallout from the Ecuadorian government’s raid on the Mexican embassy in Quito earlier this month continued to intensify on Tuesday, as both the Honduran and Venezuelan governments announced new diplomatic measures in response. Honduran Foreign Minister Enrique Reina took to X to say that he’d recalled his country’s chargé d’affaires from Quito for consultation over the Mexico incident in order to deliver “a clear message to promote respect for international law.” The Venezuelan government went further, announcing the closure of its Ecuadorian embassy and consulates until “international law is expressly restored in Ecuador.” The Mexican government has suspended relations with Ecuador altogether and has filed a complaint at the International Court of Justice seeking Quito’s expulsion from the UN. That’s presumably a long shot.
UNITED STATES
Finally, at Responsible Statecraft Janet Abou-Elias, Lillian Mauldin, and William Hartung assess the troubling merger of artificial intelligence and the US military:
The Pentagon is beginning to back its rhetoric on emerging technology with resources. The department’s Office of Strategic Capital now has the authority to grant executive loans and loan guarantees to invest in firms researching and developing 14 “critical technologies,” including hypersonics, quantum computing, microelectronics, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, the Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act authorizes the Advanced Defense Capabilities Pilot, which contains a mandate to establish public-private partnerships with the goal of “leverag[ing] private equity capital to accelerate domestic defense scaling, production, and manufacturing.”
Proponents argue that the rapid development and deployment of autonomous systems, pilotless vehicles, and hypersonic weapons will shorten the time between recognizing a potential threat and destroying it — a process analysts and military leaders often refer to as shortening the "kill chain." This shift is portrayed as a positive development, when in fact it could easily enable deadly escalations by accident or design.
First "today in history" is particularly cool.
Classic Foreign Exchanges, from the Today in History events at the start to the horrifying speculation at the end, this is why we love you Derek.