World roundup: August 23 2024

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Indonesia, Sudan, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

August 23, 1595: An outnumbered Wallachian army under Prince Michael “the Brave” defeats an Ottoman army under Grand Vizier Koca Sinan Pasha at the Battle of Călugăreni, today located in southern Romania. Michael had to retreat afterward due to the Ottomans’ decisive advantage in numbers, but the victory became an important symbolic event in Romanian national history. This battle was part of the 1593-1606 Long War between the Ottomans and Habsburgs, which ended inconclusively but did stabilize the Ottoman-Habsburg frontier for several decades.

August 23, 1939: The Nazi German and Soviet governments sign the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, a nonaggression treaty that included an agreement to divvy up parts of Eastern Europe. The accord grew out of negotiations on an economic cooperation agreement and Soviet concerns about a potential war with Germany (and the reliability of France and the UK as potential allies). The pact paved the way for the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, which sparked World War II, but relations between the two countries broke down over the next several months and the Nazis terminated it when they invaded the USSR in June 1941.

INTERNATIONAL

Courtesy of Alex Thurston’s Sawahil newsletter, the Carnegie Endowment has published a new report on the contours of military-business ties in several “Global South” countries:

The interaction of national armed forces and private business sectors offers a useful lens for viewing the politics of numerous countries of the so-called Global South. A rising trend of military political activism—often accompanied by military commercial activity—underlines the importance of drivers and outcomes in these relationships. Whether as a business actor or as a gatekeeper to wealth and power, the military’s role significantly shapes the political trajectories of these countries.

As this compilation—which looks at countries in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, and South and Southeast Asia—shows, power triangles comprising the armed forces, private sector, and state leaders are in many countries likely to block democratization or at least redirect it into highly controlled channels. This runs counter to conventional democracy theory, which assumes that greater degrees of private sector autonomy and influence will translate into the emergence of sociopolitical alliances backing democratization, and conversely that less private sector autonomy will undermine such prospects. The precise distribution of advantage within these power triangles varies, but in all cases their upshot is predominantly to maintain what Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, Steven B. Webb, and Barry R. Weingast labeled “limited access orders,” in which the members of power triangles limit the access of other social forces to valuable resources (land, labor, and capital) and activities (trade and markets and public services).

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

It’s increasingly clear that the Biden administration is gaslighting everyone about the status of Gaza ceasefire talks, up to and including the other participants:

Officials involved in Gaza cease-fire talks disagree on many things, but they are starting to find common ground on at least one position: The United States, a key player in the negotiations, has been overselling how close the warring parties are to reaching an agreement.

Whether to stave off an Iranian attack on Israel, pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end the war or to boast progress at the Democratic National Convention, U.S. officials have in recent weeks insisted that the negotiations were making headway, while glossing over intense disagreements between Israel and Hamas, officials familiar with the matter say.

Earlier this week, the United States publicly announced that Israel had agreed to a U.S. cease-fire proposal, a move that surprised Israeli negotiators who had not yet resolved a dispute over whether the Israeli military could remain along the Egypt-Gaza border, a key obstacle to the deal. The announcement also angered Hamas, which assumed the statement meant the United States had bowed to Israel’s demands, making it more difficult for mediators to persuade the group to sign onto the proposal.

That piece goes on to argue that part of the disconnect is due to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s duplicity. We’re told that in private he convinced Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this week that he was ready to compromise on his demands and agree to Blinken’s “bridging proposal,” only to turn around and torpedo the effort by publicly declaring his refusal to compromise. The thing is, Netanyahu has pulled this exact move so many times that if Blinken is still dumb enough to fall for it then he shouldn’t be allowed to use scissors unsupervised, let alone serve as the US government’s top diplomat.