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TODAY IN HISTORY

April 30, 1803: US representatives Robert Livingston and James Monroe and French representative François Barbé-Marbois sign the Louisiana Purchase Treaty in Paris. The treaty ceded France’s vast Louisiana Territory in North America to the United States, roughly doubling the young nation’s size, in return for $15 million. Livingston and Monroe intended to negotiate the purchase of the port city of New Orleans and were prepared to pay up to $10 million just for the one city. But Napoleon decided to sell the entire territory because he needed the money and because the Haitian Revolution had thrown his colonial plans for the Americas into disarray. Most of the Louisiana Territory wasn’t really Napoleon’s to sell, as it still belonged to Indigenous tribes, but in purchasing it the US bought the “right” to acquire that land by whatever means it chose.

April 30, 1975: The North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong capture Saigon, bringing the Vietnam War to a close. The North Vietnamese had begun their assault on the city the day before, when the remaining US personnel in Saigon began an evacuation known as “Operation Frequent Wind” that cleared out the US embassy and moved some 7000 US and Vietnamese nationals out of the country in the largest helicopter evacuation in history. The North Vietnamese government, which wasn’t really the “North” Vietnamese government anymore, renamed Saigon Hồ Chí Minh City, and this date is commemorated annually in Vietnam as Reunification Day.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly declared in a meeting on Tuesday that the Israeli military (IDF) will invade the southern Gazan city of Rafah, with or without a ceasefire agreement. Pre-announcing one’s intention to violate a ceasefire seems like it might be detrimental to securing said ceasefire, but what do I know? There are a few ways to interpret Netanyahu’s comments. Maybe he meant the IDF would invade Rafah after the ceasefire, which in its initial stage is supposed to last for around 40 days but could be extended for as long as a year under the proposal that is presently on the table. Maybe he was signaling that he’ll reject that extension when the time comes. Maybe he was just trying to appease the even more maniacal members of his governing coalition and his comments don’t really mean anything.

Whatever Netanyahu did or didn’t mean, it’s hard to imagine a statement like this not having some effect on Hamas’s deliberations as it considers how to respond to the proposal. And that might also have been his aim. Western officials, and most prominently US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, are already arranging their case to blame Hamas if these negotiations collapse. If Netanyahu doesn’t want a ceasefire and knows he won’t be blamed for preventing one, what has he got to lose?

In other news:

Israeli police gunned down a man in East Jerusalem on Tuesday after he attacked and wounded one of them with a knife. He was later identified as a Turkish national.
The US State Department revealed on Monday that, prior to October 7, it had assessed no fewer than five IDF units to be in violation of the Leahy Law’s requirement that all military units receiving US support maintain basic standards regarding human rights. It has designated none of those units under Leahy because, we’re told, the Israeli government has put four of them through successful “remediation” and the department is reviewing the alleged “remediation” of the fifth (presumably the notorious Netzah Yehuda battalion). It’s all very simple and believable.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Tuesday cited “incremental” improvements in the humanitarian situation in northern Gaza. He called on Israeli authorities to follow through on promises to open additional checkpoints for aid to pass into that region and for the IDF to ensure that it doesn’t target aid convoys. To the former, Blinken’s visit to Jordan on Tuesday coincided with the first deployment of a Jordanian aid convoy through the Erez checkpoint in northern Gaza, another incremental step.

Blinken (right) arriving in Israel on Tuesday evening and being greeted by US ambassador Jacob Lew (EVELYN HOCKSTEIN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Representatives of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority’s ruling Fatah party met in China in recent days to discuss settling their many differences. The parties sent their teams to Beijing on Friday with the goal, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, of “achieving reconciliation and increasing solidarity through dialogue and consultation.” It’s unclear whether they made any progress along those lines, although even a basic airing of grievances would probably have been useful. Unless you believe Netanyahu’s insistence that Hamas can be wiped out militarily, which seems even less likely now than it did on October 7, the only way to remove it as a militant threat would seem to be the Northern Ireland path: normalizing it as a political party. That’s easier said than done and would also require Palestinian statehood, but all else aside it cannot happen unless Hamas and Fatah can find some way to coexist.

YEMEN

Yemen’s Houthi movement is claiming that it conducted a drone strike on a Portuguese-flagged cargo ship, the MSC Orion, on Friday, and the Joint Maritime Information Center has apparently corroborated that an attack took place. The Orion reportedly suffered only minor damage, but what makes this particular incident stand out among the Houthis’ other attacks on commercial shipping in recent months is that it took place some 600 kilometers from the Yemeni coast, well out into the Arabian Sea and nearly into the Indian Ocean. There had been no previous indication that the Houthis were able to threaten ships at that distance. There’s some speculation that Iranian forces might have carried out the attack and let the Houthis take credit for it.

ASIA

AFGHANISTAN

An Islamic State gunman killed at least six people in a Shiʿa mosque in western Afghanistan’s Herat province on Tuesday. IS frequently targets Afghan Shiʿa, both for ideological reasons and to discredit the Taliban-led government that has promised to protect Afghan minority communities.

PAKISTAN

Gunmen killed a police officer guarding a polio vaccination team in northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Tuesday. That makes ten vaccine team guards killed in Pakistan so far this year. There’s been no claim of responsibility but the Pakistani Taliban is generally behind these kinds of attacks and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is the group’s main stomping ground.

INDIA

Indian security forces killed seven Maoist insurgents in India’s Chhattisgarh state on Tuesday. Indian authorities have undertaken at least three raids against Naxalite rebels in Chhattisgarh this month, killing upwards of 50 militants.

PHILIPPINES

Philippine military officials on Tuesday accused the Chinese Coast Guard of damaging two Philippine vessels with water cannons in waters around the disputed Scarborough Shoal in a recent incident. Chinese vessels reportedly rammed one of the Philippine vessels as well. The Scarborough Shoal lies within the Philippines exclusive economic zone but also lies within the Chinese government’s expansive maritime territorial claim in the South China Sea. The two countries have clashed repeatedly over those incompatible claims.

JAPAN

Responsible Statecraft’s James Park warns that the emerging US-Japan-South Korea security partnership will make East Asia more unstable:

Since the Camp David summit, Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo have worked to enhance their collective combat readiness, such as conducting regular joint naval and aerial maneuvers in regional maritime and air spaces, to strengthen deterrence and demonstrate their own opposition to North Korea and China.
Policymakers in the three capitals may believe that continuous reinforcement of trilateral military cooperation and posturing will act as a deterrent to aggressive behavior by Pyongyang and Beijing. However, such optimism may prove unfounded. The evolving Japan-U.S.-South Korea trilateral partnership might pose considerable risks because their approach to deterrence overlooks security dilemmas faced by North Korea and China. In a new Quincy Institute report, Mike Mochizuki and I examine this issue and offer recommendations to address it.
Insecurity about regime survival plays a decisive role in North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons and its strategic calculations as to whether and when to use them. An effective strategy to deal with North Korea would therefore seek to deter North Korea but, at the same time, to avoid fueling its anxiety about foreign efforts to engineer regime change or collapse.
Unfortunately, the current trilateral approach appears likely to exacerbate Pyongyang’s worst fears and insecurities in this regard.

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AFRICA

MALI

Jihadist militants are believed to have killed ten pro-government militia fighters in eastern Mali’s Gao region on Monday. There’s no indication as to the attackers’ identity beyond the “jihadist” label.

SOUTH SUDAN

Jacobin’s Stefan Bakumenko warns that South Sudan’s elite-driven civil conflict is threatening to escalate into another war:

But rather than a “two feuding generals” narrative (as we see again in discussion of Sudan today), violence in the country has always been tied to local realities. The many factions in South Sudan are hardly top-down or ideologically driven. Elites in Juba and provincial capitals can only fight over personal wealth by paying off militias and mobilizing patronage networks that took decades to build. Since the 1980s, [President Salva] Kiir, [Vice President Riek] Machar, and others have been arming communities, promoting ethnicized violence, and cynically politicizing traditional beliefs and rituals that had once regulated murder and theft.
Rather than intrinsic hatred, ethnic/tribal identity became a tool to create networks of mutual protection and profit during the deprivations of civil war. In instances in which the supposed ethnic loyalties of factions have come into conflict with their material interests, the latter have often won out. For example, the Nuer White Army, diffuse bands of cattle raiders responsible for Bor and essential to the 2013 civil war, have often ignored or killed Nuer elites that opposed them.
The official peace of 2018, focused on formal institutions and power-sharing in Juba, could hardly resolve the zero-sum economic competition, instrumentalized identities, and coercive nature of such diffuse networks. South Sudan is now in its sixth year of “transition” with very little to show for it. The unified armed forces are starved of money and support, political offices are treated as personal coffers, and Kiir’s repression in the run-up to December elections is creating a powder keg for renewed violence.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

The UN’s Congolese peacekeeping force (MONUSCO) is concluding its operations in the eastern DRC’s South Kivu province as of Wednesday. MONUSCO is still active in North Kivu and Ituri provinces, but in keeping with its plans to shut down completely by the end of the year it will begin winding down its North Kivu operations over the next couple of months.

EUROPE

UKRAINE

Al Jazeera reports on recent Russian advances in eastern Ukraine:

In recent weeks, outmanned and poorly supplied Ukrainian forces have been losing ground in the eastern Donetsk region that has been contested since 2014 between Kyiv and Moscow-backed separatists and that has become the war’s new focal point.
The Russians intensified their attacks ahead of the arrival of US military aid that includes antitank missiles and 155mm-calibre shells that may put an end to the desperate “shell hunger” of outgunned Ukrainian troops.
“We are firing one shell in response to 10 ones from their side,” a serviceman stationed in Donetsk told Al Jazeera.
The Russians pummel Ukrainian-held trenches, towns and villages with mammoth airdropped glide bombs and artillery fire, and relentlessly send troops, sometimes dozens of times a day, paying little attention to casualties and loss of armoured vehicles.
Ukrainian forces have retreated from Ocheretyne and several more towns and villages, creating a wedge for Russian forces and endangering larger towns in the Kyiv-controlled part of Donetsk.

GERMANY

The International Court of Justice on Tuesday rejected a Nicaraguan petition for provisional measures against the German government over Berlin’s support for the Israeli military operation in Gaza. The Nicaraguan government had asked the ICJ to block German arms shipments to Israel.

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AMERICAS

MEXICO

According to The Washington Post, the Mexican government is doing Joe Biden a favor by reducing the number of asylum seekers arriving at the southern US border:

Illegal crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border are down more than 40 percent since December and have remained relatively stable through the first four months of 2024, bringing a modest reprieve for President Biden on an issue regarded as a liability to his reelection campaign.
Crossings often increase sharply during early spring, but that did not happen for the first time since Biden took office.
In April, U.S. border agents have encountered about 130,000 migrants who entered illegally from Mexico, a level that is high by historical standards but lower than February and March, according to the latest U.S. enforcement data obtained by The Washington Post.
U.S. officials say a crackdown on migrants by the Mexican government is the biggest factor. Using military patrols and highway checkpoints, Mexican authorities have been intercepting roughly 8,000 U.S.-bound migrants per day, according to officials in both countries.

The Mexican government apparently began this crackdown at the Biden administration’s request in December and has now even agreed to begin accepting large numbers of non-Mexican asylum seekers from the US for the first time. It’s unclear whether Mexico can sustain this policy and there are already indications that its migration controls may be slipping along the Californian border.

HAITI

Haiti’s new transitional council elected former Haitian Senate president Edgard Leblanc Fils as its president on Tuesday. The Gang then named former sports minister Fritz Bélizaire as Haiti’s new prime minister. An obscure and somewhat surprising choice, Bélizaire replaces Michel Patrick Boisvert, who became interim PM when Ariel Henry resigned last week and had been serving as de facto PM with Henry in de facto exile in the US since late February. Bélizaire’s obscurity likely made him an ideal compromise choice for the various factions represented on the council. The next order of business will be appointing a new cabinet. At some point I assume the council will get around to figuring out how to actually govern Haiti, because right now its authority barely extends beyond whatever room it’s using for its meetings.

UNITED STATES

Finally, Spencer Ackerman sees echoes of the post-9/11 days in the elite response to the campus protest movement:

From Columbia University in Manhattan to the University of Southern California, police repression of student occupations of campus isn't stopping those demonstrations. By most accounts I've read this week, they're making students realize the desperation of the administrators they're trying to influence, to say nothing of the desperation of the broader political structure in the U.S. that's supporting the Israeli devastation of Gaza.
And so those authorities are turning to a language they understand, and have grown comfortable using over the past 20-plus years of normalization: the language of terrorism and counterterrorism.
"There is an appropriate time for the National Guard," said Speaker of the House Mike Johnson at a Columbia press conference on Wednesday. Students were so unintimidated by the dweebish accidental speaker that they heckled him and his colleagues, who were left sputtering that Hamas supports them and they should be ashamed.
But they are not ashamed. They dismiss the claims to moral leadership of those who would provide weapons and apologies for a genocide. So they must be called the handmaidens of terrorists, and treated as such.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams effectively declared war on the protesters at Columbia earlier today and NYPD personnel are preparing what sounds like an armed assault on the campus. Let’s at least hope they don’t cause any casualties.

World roundup: April 30 2024