You’re reading the web version of Foreign Exchanges. If you’d like to get it delivered straight to your inbox, sign up today and get 40% off on your first year:
PROGRAMMING NOTE: In the interest of maintaining some degree of lucidity I will not be doing a newsletter tomorrow barring some major news event/development. We will catch up on Sunday.
TODAY IN HISTORY
August 13 (or thereabouts), 838: An Abbasid army sacks the Byzantine city of Amorium, killing tens of thousands of people and carrying off thousands more as slaves. This was arguably the worst defeat the empire had suffered to the Arabs since the great conquests of the 7th century and represents a low point in Byzantine history. However, the Byzantine Empire’s fortunes soon began to improve under the “Macedonian” dynasty, for a variety of reasons, while the Abbasid caliphs lost effective control of their empire in the 860s and it began to fragment internally.
August 13, 1521: Spanish and allied forces under Hernán Cortés conquer Tenochtitlan and capture the Aztec Emperor Cuauhtémoc. It’s estimated that somewhere between 100,000 and 240,000 people were killed during the two and a half month siege of the city. Cuauhtémoc remained in place as a puppet ruler, but the Aztec Empire was over and Cortés eventually executed him in 1525.
MIDDLE EAST
TURKEY
The Turkish Defense Ministry revealed a bit more about the “Mecca Joint Defense Agreement,” the pact underpinning a new Pakistan-Saudi Arabia-Turkey military alliance, during a Thursday press briefing:
“Under the accord, strategic political and military mechanisms plan to be established involving the Defence Ministers, Foreign Ministers, and Chiefs of General Staff/Armed Forces Commanders, and that coordination among the three countries will be conducted at the highest level,” it said.
The ministry added that joint military exercises involving land, naval and air forces, as well as air defence and unmanned systems were planned, in addition to deeper defence industry cooperation.
“The aim is to provide not only product and system supply, but also joint development and production, technology cooperation, and sustainable maintenance and logistics support,” it said, adding that unmanned and autonomous systems, electronic warfare and artificial intelligence capabilities would be prioritised.
The alliance is apparently open to expansion and there’s already considerable speculation about Egypt joining (along with questions about why it wasn’t part of the initial group). It would also appear that Turkey will be joining the Saudi Red Sea naval coalition in the near future.
LEBANON
The Lebanese government is denying last week’s Reuters report that it and the Israeli government had agreed on “a shortlist of countries that could send troops to verify the disarmament of Hezbollah.” The outlet had subsequently reported that said shortlist included Indonesia, Italy, Switzerland, and the UK. Lebanese officials insist that they’re still discussing the list with their US interlocutors.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least two people in Gaza on Thursday, including another senior official in the territory’s police force. It has now killed at least 1260 people in Gaza under the current “ceasefire.”
In the West Bank, Israeli settlers are besieging “three Palestinian families” in the village of Qusra, which is located near the city of Nablus. They’ve cut water and electricity to the homes and are surrounding the properties. This has been ongoing and intensifying since Sunday, despite what appears to have been a somewhat tepid intervention by the IDF on Wednesday in which they more or less asked the settlers politely to leave and then bugged out when the settlers refused.
Israeli soldiers moved back into Qusra on Thursday and made the interesting decision to occupy six homes including the besieged residences. I say “interesting” because while this could be an attempt to protect the residents and break the siege it could also be the start of a mass displacement of the village considering who’s involved. It’s also worth noting that at least one of the besieged families includes dual US-Palestinian nationals, which has greatly raised the profile of this incident and even prompted US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee to call the siege a “horrific act of terror” via social media. It’s unclear whether the Israeli government would be involved at all had this situation not attracted US attention.
YEMEN
The Yemeni military is claiming that its forces thwarted an Ansarullah/Houthi attack in Yemen’s Taiz province. There’s no word as to casualties. It’s also reporting additional Houthi drone strike attempts on the port city of Mokha, though air defenses may have intercepted most/all of the devices, and the Houthis also appear to have carried out another attack on Aramco’s oil refinery in the Saudi city of Jizan though there’s no indication of any damage as yet.
OMAN
Al Jazeera is reporting that the UK-based maritime risk management firm Ambrey has been contracted to clean up the rapidly expanding oil spill that’s now hitting the coast of Oman. The operation will entail salvaging the remains of the grounded tanker that caused the spill and attempting to clean up and ameliorate the environmental damage. Weather and regional tensions are going to make this a very challenging task and the company has offered no timetable as yet.
IRAN
According to officials in the UAE, two Abu Dhabi National Oil Company tankers came under Iranian attack on Thursday while transiting the Strait of Hormuz. There’s no indication of any casualties.
The Navy Times reported earlier this week that conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, which has been at sea for over eight months mostly involved in operations against Iran, have deteriorated to such a degree that “multiple” sailors have attempted to jump overboard. The Lincoln’s deployment was supposed to end in May but has been indefinitely extended while the Trump administration settles into a forever war footing. The USS Theodore Roosevelt was supposed to replace it at some point, but amid the bad press the Navy is now reportedly rushing to redeploy the USS George Washington from the South China Sea to the Middle East. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called accounts from the Lincoln “completely misrepresented” on Thursday, without explaining why these sailors would be trying to jump off of the ship if conditions aren’t actually so bad.
Drop Site’s Peiman Salehi reports on the effect that US airstrikes have had on Iranian civilian life:
When U.S. strikes resumed in early July following a two-month pause, the attacks focused heavily on southern Iran. Interviews with residents in hard-hit southern provinces like Khuzestan, Hormozgan, Sistan, and Baluchestan describe strikes not only on military facilities, but also on critical civilian infrastructure, including fishing ports, bridges, telecommunications networks, power plants, hospitals, and transportation corridors.
Dozens of communications towers have been knocked offline in repeated attacks, disrupting internet and telephone services. One attack on a transmission tower near Tappeh Aluakbar in Bandar Abbas killed five people, including a woman who died shielding her son with her body, local residents told Drop Site.
Transportation infrastructure has sustained similar damage. Alireza, a resident of Hormozgan who studies screenwriting and is carefully tracking recent events in the hopes of making a documentary about the war, described strikes on Tappeh Aluakbar overlooking Bandar Abbas, bridges linking Bandar Abbas to Khamir and Rudan, railway infrastructure, and key transportation routes connecting the province. At one destroyed crossing, road crews carved a temporary dirt route through a dry riverbed within hours simply to keep vehicles moving.
The damage extends to the sea as well: Alireza estimates that roughly 300 civilian fishing boats have been destroyed across Bandar Abbas, Bandar Lengeh, Sirik, and Jask, affecting the livelihoods of thousands of people. Two maritime search-and-rescue vessels operating near Bandar Abbas, Qeshm, and Hormuz Island were also put out of service.
ASIA
AFGHANISTAN
Afghan authorities reportedly detained two United Nations staffers in the city of Herat on Sunday without offering a justification. On Thursday, Human Rights Watch called for their release along with the release of six employees of the Women and Children Legal Research Foundation who were “forcibly disappeared” last month in Kabul. Nothing more is known about their status.
NEPAL
The Trump administration’s foreign aid cuts appear to be fueling a rise in child mortality around the world, with 2025 likely (full data isn’t available yet) to be the first year this century in which child mortality increased over the previous year. A new AP piece focuses on the harm that’s being done in Nepal:
Maternal and child health programs are perhaps the clearest foreign aid example of small, relatively cheap interventions leading to the greatest good. Packets of fortified peanut paste that cost less than a dollar each can bring a malnourished child back from the brink of death within weeks. Clean birth kits that cost a few dollars slash the risk of mothers and newborns dying from infections.
In Nepal, a five-year, $35 million program canceled by the U.S. cuts reached more than 100,000 women and girls in its first three years. The program equipped birthing centers and trained nurses, midwives and outreach workers known as female community health volunteers. These workers regularly visited pregnant women’s homes, explained the warning signs of complications and urged them to attend prenatal appointments, often escorting them there.
When the program was canceled, many pregnant women were left to navigate a medical system they struggle to trust or understand, Sherpa says.
The consequences can be found in the dusty, sun-scorched villages of Nepal’s Rautahat district, home to Kabita’s family and one of the poorest and least-literate parts of the country. At a birthing center in Rautahat’s municipality of Dewahi Gonahi, the number of women coming for prenatal checks has halved since the funding cuts, says the officer in charge, Kishori Shah. Because of that, women aren’t identifying complications fast enough, he says, leading to emergencies.
AFRICA
SUDAN
Rapid Support Forces and Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North militants appear to have retaken the border town of Kurmuk in southeastern Sudan’s Blue Nile state. Al Jazeera reported on Thursday that the groups’ fighters had entered the town and that the Sudanese military (SAF) was withdrawing. This comes after three days of what local officials described as heavy artillery and drone attacks by the militants. The SAF held on to Kurmuk for about a month after seizing it from the RSF. Its location along the Ethiopian border makes it an important logistical hub for the militants.
Elsewhere, Al Jazeera is also reporting that the SAF fended off a militant assault on the town of Jabra al-Sheikh in Sudan’s North Kordofan state. And the pro-SAF “Joint Forces” militia alliance is claiming that its fighters captured the town of Amburu in Sudan’s North Darfur state. The RSF, which seized Amburu back in December, is conversely claiming that it repelled the Joint Forces attack.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
One person has died of Ebola in the northern DRC’s Bas-Uélé province, confirming that the country’s ongoing outbreak has now spread to a sixth state. The outbreak began in Ituri province and has since spread to North Kivu, South Kivu, Haut-Uélé, and Tshopo provinces. Official figures now stand at 4566 confirmed cases and 2128 deaths. The World Health Organization is now warning that this outbreak could surpass the 2014-2016 West Africa Ebola outbreak, which saw more than 11,000 people die.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
Vladimir Putin paid a visit to the island of Iturup on Thursday, drawing a nearly immediate rebuke from the Japanese government. That’s because Iturup, known in Japan as Etorofu, is one of the southern Kuril Islands whose ownership has been contested since the Russian military seized them during the final days of World War II. Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae called the visit “absolutely unacceptable,” after which the Russian Foreign Ministry rebuked her for trying “to brazenly dictate to Moscow which regions of a country its leader can or cannot visit.”
UKRAINE
A Russian drone strike killed at least two people on a passenger train in southwestern Ukraine’s Odesa oblast on Thursday. In Crimea, meanwhile, at least five people were killed while attempting to defuse an explosive device in Sevastopol. The provenance of the explosive is unclear and it may have been a previously unexploded Ukrainian weapon of some sort, but a definitely intentional bombing in the same city reportedly killed a former Ukrainian submarine commander who defected to Russia in 2014.
Reuters is reporting that the Ukrainian government has passed a message to Moscow “suggesting they both halt attacks on civilian targets in the Black Sea” in response to rising food prices fueled by their recent activity in that region. There’s no indication yet as to how (or whether) the Russians intend to respond.
NETHERLANDS
The AP reports that the drought that’s accompanying Europe’s heatwave is beginning to have a significant effect on agriculture in the Netherlands and elsewhere:
A cloud of dust billows behind Maarten Janse’s tractor as he spreads a mixture of compost, straw and manure over a field to nourish the parched soil.
Janse’s farm on the fertile land of the Netherlands’ southwestern Zeeland Province is drying out despite his efforts to make it more drought resistant as accelerated human-caused global warming and a supersized El Nino batter fields across Europe.
The drought that is roasting much of Europe this summer is taking a heavy toll on crops across the continent, from potatoes in the Netherlands to corn in Bosnia and grapes in Italy. Even when farmers try to adapt, the extreme weather is hitting their crops and water supplies.
Triodos, a Dutch bank that has a focus on sustainability, published an analysis this week that estimated the heatwaves and drought could reduce gross domestic product across the European Union by 1% for 2026 or around 180 billion euros ($208 billion). Farmers are among the hardest hit, with their crops set to be badly affected by soaring temperatures and lack of water. In large parts of the Netherlands, farmers are no longer allowed to use water from streams and drainage channels to irrigate fields and orchards.
AMERICAS
ECUADOR
The Washington Post has traced those mysterious/unclaimed attacks on Ecuadorian fishing boats to “a covert CIA program”:
While many details about the agency’s involvement were not clear, one person with knowledge of the matter said the strikes were part of a “covert action” program, a type of secret operation overseas that is approved by the president but where the role of the U.S. government is not publicly acknowledged. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity.
No agency or government has claimed responsibility for the incidents, including the disappearance in January of a fishing vessel and eight of its crew members.
The CIA’s involvement adds a new and secretive dimension to the Trump administration’s otherwise highly publicized campaign against alleged drug traffickers at sea. It was not clear whether other actors were involved, such as private contractors or authorities from other countries.
It is unclear why, when the US military is conducting an out-in-the-open killing spree targeting boats in the Pacific and the Caribbean, the CIA is separately engaged in a secret operation to do more or less the same thing.
COLOMBIA
New Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella has decided to recognize the Israeli government’s claim over the occupied Golan region in southern Syria. I don’t have much to say about this because it’s really not that big a deal (in contrast with the US recognition of the Golan claim back in 2019), but I will say that it’s refreshing to see de la Espriella so quickly and clearly focused on the issues that really matter to the Colombian people.
UNITED STATES
In US news items:
The Trump administration is imposing tariffs of up to 100 percent on drones and drone components in an apparent effort to reduce US dependence on foreign-made unmanned vehicles especially for military purposes. The 100 percent level will apply to “drones of a certain size or with certain capabilities that are particularly sensitive for national security purposes,” while smaller/less sensitive drones will be hit with a 25 percent levy. Tariffs of 10 percent and 15 percent will apply to drone imports from a select few friendly countries.
Earlier this week I noted that the Pentagon has acknowledged killing 153 civilians in Yemen last year. This was not clear from the reporting I saw at the time but apparently the Pentagon is absurdly insisting that those were the only civilians it killed anywhere in the world in 2025. We know that US airstrikes killed civilians in Somalia and it’s virtually certain that at least some of “Operation Southern Spear’s” casualties have been civilians (arguably all of them, depending on your definition of “civilian”), so this is a flat out lie.
Finally, The Guardian reports on the Trump II administration’s cartoonish degree of corruption:
Donald Trump’s use of his second presidency to grow his personal fortune has alarmed legal and ethics experts and congressional Democrats as he has reaped an “unprecedented” $2.2bn in 2025 revenues by amassing big cryptocurrency holdings, benefiting from wealthy foreign interests, expanding his Truth Social business and more, while federal oversight of his actions has waned.
Trump last year raked in at least $1.4bn from his crypto ventures according to financial disclosure forms he filed in June. Simultaneously, about one million investors in a Trump crypto scheme suffered almost $3.8bn in losses as their volatile crypto holdings tanked in value.
Monetizing his presidency further this summer, Trump’s Truth Social media business is pushing a new scheme that offers wealthy buyers special early access to his posts for a fee of $100,000 a month, which top Democrats and public interest groups say pose serious conflict of interest and corruption issues.