LIVESTREAMING NOTE: I will be appearing on The Global Gambit with Pyotr Kurzin this Friday at 12 PM eastern. FX subscribers should get an email when the stream goes live but you can also watch it at this link.
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 Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported this week that at least 350 aid workers were killed around the world in 2025. Most of those killings occurred in Gaza (186), with Sudan in a distant second-place (71). As high as that figure is, it’s actually down a bit from the 377 who were killed worldwide in 2024.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least ten people in Gaza on Wednesday, nine of them in one strike on a police station that killed eight officers and one 13 year old child. Israeli officials claimed that they were targeting Hamas fighters. These killings come one day after the IDF’s attack on a cafe in Gaza city, the death toll from which now stands at seven.
