World roundup: August 19 2025
Stories from Israel-Palestine, India, Venezuela, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
August 19, 1745: An Iranian army under Nader Shah decisively defeats a much larger Ottoman army at the Battle of Kars. This, combined with the destruction of a second Ottoman army near Mosul by an Iranian army under Nader’s son, effectively brought the Ottoman-Persian war of 1743-1746 to an end by wiping out the Ottoman offensive. Although he began the war with big goals for defeating the Ottomans, Nader—ill and growing more paranoid about internal threats by the day—opted to settle the conflict with a restoration of Ottoman-Iranian borders as they had been at the fall of the Safavid dynasty.
August 19, 1953: Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh is removed from office in a UK/US-backed coup.
August 19, 1991: A group of Soviet leaders calling themselves “the State Committee on the State of Emergency” undertakes a coup and arrests President Mikhail Gorbachev. The whole thing fell apart three days later under pressure from the Soviet public, rallied by Russian President Boris Yeltsin—who, as a result, became effectively the most powerful person in the USSR. This was such a cataclysmic failure that it led to the collapse of the entire Soviet Union.
INTERNATIONAL
The United Nations says that 383 aid workers were killed around the world last year, a “record” figure that reflects an increase of 31 percent over 2023. Over half of those deaths occurred in just two conflicts—Gaza (181) and Sudan (60), and the main “perpetrators” were “state actors.” Preliminary data for 2025 from the “Aid Worker Security Database” shows 265 deaths and counting this year.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The Israeli government is reportedly considering the ceasefire proposal to which Hamas signaled its assent on Monday, and says it will deliver a response by Friday. But a “senior Israeli official” told AFP that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meant it when he said earlier this month that he’s no longer interested in a partial or staged ceasefire and will demand the release of all of the remaining Gaza captives under any new deal. This seems like a fairly convenient shift in policy—Netanyahu has previously rejected such a comprehensive deal because it would mean stopping short of ethnically cleansing Gaza—that just so happens to give him a justification for rejecting a proposal that the Qatari government says is “almost identical” to one that he’d previously accepted.
IRAQ
Syria may be dealing with its “worst drought in 36 years,” but Al Jazeera reports that neighboring Iraq is “experiencing its driest year on record since 1933” entailing a water level drop of “up to 27 percent” on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers:
The crisis is badly impacting the southern Iraqi city of Basra, where the available water is heavily polluted and where declining water levels on the Shatt al-Arab (which flows from the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates to the Persian Gulf) have allowed salt water from the Gulf to move upstream.
ASIA
AFGHANISTAN
Around last week’s fourth anniversary of the Afghan Taliban’s return to power, Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada issued a decree ordering all Afghan government officials to remove the acting/caretaker/interim label from their titles. The Afghan government has maintained the pretense that the government it installed in 2021 was eventually going to transition to something else, no matter how farcical that had come to seem by, say, the third anniversary of its takeover. Akhundzada’s declaration simply acknowledges that there will be no transition and at least on paper it confers a slightly higher status to those officials.
INDIA
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi capped off his visit to New Delhi by meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday, during which Modi affirmed that he will attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in China later this month. It will mark his first visit to China in seven years and, as The Wall Street Journal notes, it highlights recent improvements in Indian-Chinese relations that have received a boost from none other than Donald Trump:
In a visit to India this week, China’s top diplomat said the two Asian nations should deepen cooperation amid international threats to free trade, a sign that President Trump’s trade war could accelerate a thaw in the frosty relationship between Beijing and New Delhi.
Both countries have faced hefty tariff threats from Trump over their trade policies, with India singled out in recent weeks for its large-scale purchases of Russian oil.
In remarks in New Delhi on Monday at a meeting with his Indian counterpart, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi made a veiled reference to the U.S. by noting that New Delhi and Beijing should find ways to coexist against a backdrop of “unilateral bullying.”
China and India “should view each other as partners and opportunities rather than adversaries or threats,” Wang said Monday, according to a statement from China’s Foreign Ministry.
AFRICA
NIGERIA
Gunmen attacked a mosque in northern Nigeria’s Katsina state early Tuesday, killing at least 27 people. There’s no indication as to responsibility, and while an attack on a mosque suggests a motive beyond simple banditry nothing can be ruled out absent any additional information.
UPDATE: The death toll is now at least 50, with at least 60 more abducted.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
Although they blew past Monday’s deadline for negotiating a final peace deal, the Congolese government and the M23 militant group are still “engaging very positively” in the peace process according to the mediating Qatari government. Both principals have accused each other of violating the statement of principles they adopted last month and fighting has reportedly been on the rise again in the eastern DRC, but Qatari officials submitted a draft peace deal to them on Sunday and at the very least neither of them has outright rejected it yet. That’s not much but it does support the contention that the process isn’t completely kaput.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
If the US government has now foresworn further sanctions against Russia (more on that in a moment), Foreign Policy’s Keith Johnson contends that there are still economic levers that European governments can pull to try to affect the war in Ukraine:
That might start with the low-hanging fruit of further constraining Russia’s ability to smuggle crude oil to global markets by using illegal tankers, the so-called shadow fleet. Successive EU and U.K. measures, as well as many by the Biden administration, have already taken many of Russia’s black-flagged ships out of business and forced around half of Russia’s oil exports to be conducted in legal fashion. More could be done, though, that would be much more effective with the long reach of the U.S. Treasury, experts say. (The Trump administration has not added to any of the Biden-era sanctions on Russian oil tankers.)
A related step, even without designating new tankers, would be to further constrain Russia’s ability to use the Baltic Sea and the vital Danish straits to lawlessly get its oil to global markets. Some European states have already taken steps to enforce international law and have taken tentative steps to limit Russia’s ability to contravene Western sanctions.
Another long-standing option for Europe would be to seize the approximately $220 billion in Russian Central Bank reserves already frozen three years ago by Europe and the United States. Fear of reprisals by Russia and worries that such a seizure could undermine the appeal of the euro as a global reserve currency have stayed the hand of key EU member states, especially Belgium. But those frozen funds could underwrite years of Ukrainian arms purchases and provide a down payment on the half-trillion-dollar reconstruction bill Ukraine already faces.
Realistically if these governments were going to take any of these steps they would have done so by now. In much the same way that it’s hard to imagine other European states going to war to protect Ukraine from Russia—possible “security guarantees” notwithstanding—it’s also hard to imagine them significantly threatening their own economies (via oil price spikes, undermining the euro, etc.) on Ukraine’s behalf.
UKRAINE
Also, let’s consider that these same European leaders were most recently seen gathered around Donald Trump’s desk in the Oval Office like this fall’s incoming class of White House interns, so their ability to project anything more than subservience at this point is very much in question. In fairness, their abruptly arranged session with Trump on Monday does appear to have swayed his position on the Ukraine conflict back toward something like neutrality after Friday’s summit with Vladimir Putin had clearly shifted it in Russia’s favor.
Observers have commented, jokingly (well, maybe half-jokingly), that Trump’s opinion on any given issue is usually based on whatever he heard from the last person with whom he’s spoken. But on Ukraine it seems to be literally true that after he talks to Putin he leans toward Russia and after he talks to Volodymyr Zelensky and/or other European leaders he leans toward Ukraine. And so after a flurry of activity and commentary between Friday’s meeting with Putin and Monday’s meeting with Zelensky and company the question is: has anything about this war actually changed?
For now I would say “probably not.” There’s some nebulous prospect of a meeting between Putin and Zelensky, maybe also including Trump, though the Russian government is hedging quite a bit on that and at any rate having the two of them speak with virtually no preliminary work to draft a peace deal is unlikely to accomplish very much. The whole affair has renewed interest in a European “security guarantee” for Ukraine and The Gang now appears to have gotten Trump to at least consider lending US air support to the effort, but the nature of that guarantee will be determined at least to some extent by negotiations with Russia that aren’t yet happening and Trump could wake up tomorrow morning and decide that he’s not willing to support it after all. On the territorial front Putin did give a bit in terms of his expressed willingness to freeze the current front line in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, but that came with the demand that Ukraine give up substantial territory in Donetsk oblast that Russia doesn’t control yet (and that at its current rate of advance wouldn’t control for months or years barring a Ukrainian military collapse). I guess Trump now seems to have ruled out new sanctions on Russia but he’s hemmed and hawed about sanctioning Russia so many times since January that it was already pretty clear that he wouldn’t go through with it.
With respect to all of the reporters and commentators who have devoted a lot of time and attention to the events of the past five days, all of this sounds pretty much like where things stood on Thursday.
AMERICAS
VENEZUELA
The AP reported on Tuesday that the US military is deploying no fewer than three naval destroyers to “to the waters off Venezuela,” where they are somehow supposed to “combat threats from Latin American drug cartels” in keeping with Donald Trump’s recent order to that effect. I’m sure it’s all very simple and believable. Perhaps they’re planning to shoot cruise missiles at suspected cartel members, as one does. I’m sure it’s not part of what increasingly seems to be a regime change project (under a counternarcotics guise) directed at Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who purely coincidentally is now fetching a cool $50 million on the US government’s bounty list. Which is why it was so odd to see that Maduro announced the mobilization of “more than 4.5 million militiamen” on Monday in response to what he termed “extravagant, bizarre and outlandish threats” from the Trump administration. Venezuela’s national militia probably doesn’t actually have that many members though I suspect Maduro was more interested in the statement his call-up made than in the actually call-up itself.
MEXICO
On a similar note, the US Drug Enforcement Administration announced on Monday that it’s embarking on what it called a “bold bilateral initiative” with the Mexican government to tackle drug smuggling, something it’s calling “Project Portero.” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum told reporters on Tuesday that she has no idea what the DEA is talking about, though in fairness maybe she wasn’t copied on a memo or something. Sheinbaum did say that her foreign ministry and the US State Department are “practically ready” to roll out a new “security coordination agreement” that could even open the door to something like this “Project Portero” depending on how it’s supposed to operate. But that seems some ways off from what the DEA announced on Monday.
UNITED STATES
Finally, Foreign Policy in Focus’s Lawrence Wittner looks at the second Trump administration’s efforts to defund and otherwise cripple the UN and notes that this doesn’t seem to be what the US public wants:
The Trump administration has also worked to cripple the UN by reducing its very meager income. In July 2025, rescissions legislation sponsored by the administration and passed by the Republican-controlled Congress pulled back $1 billion in funding that U.S. legislation had allocated to the world organization in previous budgets. This action will have devastating effects on a broad variety of UN programs, including UNICEF, the UN Development Program, the UN Environment Program, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and the UN Fund for Victims of Torture.
Moreover, the administration’s fiscal 2026 budget proposes ending UN peacekeeping payments and pausing most other contributions to the United Nations. Although U.S. funding of the United Nations is actually quite minimal―for example, dues of only $820 million per year for the regular UN budget―the U.S. government has now compiled a debt of $1.5 billion (the highest debt of any nation) to the regular budget and another $1.3 billion to the separate UN peacekeeping budget.
The Trump administration’s hostility to the UN is sharply at odds with the American public’s attitude toward the world organization. For example, a Pew Research Center poll in late March 2025 found that 63 percent of U.S. respondents said that their country benefited from UN membership―up 3 percent from the previous spring. And 57 percent of Americans polled had a favorable view of the United Nations―up 5 percent since 2024.
Furthermore, a University of Maryland public opinion survey in June 2025 found that 84 percent of Americans it polled wanted the U.S. government to work with the UN at current levels or more. This included 83 percent supporting UNICEF, 81 percent UN Peacekeeping, 81 percent the UN World Food Program, 79 percent the World Health Organization, and 73 percent the UN Environment Program.