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TODAY IN HISTORY
August 29, 1526: The first of two battles involving the Ottoman Empire near the town of Mohács, in what is now southern Hungary, ends in a decisive Ottoman victory. The Ottomans were concerned about potential Habsburg expansion into the Balkans (prompted by King Louis II of Hungary’s 1515 marriage to Mary of Habsburg) and were being encouraged by their French allies to attack their common Habsburg foe from the east. Louis died during a panicked retreat and his Jagiellonian dynasty died with him. Hungary effectively ceased to exist as a kingdom, with its northern and western portions coming under Habsburg rule and the rest held as an Ottoman vassal. The battle opened central Europe up to the Ottomans, a state of affairs that would reach a high water mark of sorts in their failed 1529 siege of Vienna.
August 29, 1842: Britain and Qing China sign the Treaty of Nanjing, ending the 1839-1842 First Opium War. China was obliged to pay reparations to Britain and Hong Kong became a British colony, which it remained until 1997. The treaty also ended China’s “Canton System,” which had forced all foreign trade to run through the port city of Guangzhou (Canton) and was the means by which the Chinese government controlled those foreign commercial interactions, and forced the Qing to accept unequal conditions on Chinese-British trade.
August 30, 1363: The navies of two competing factions of the Red Turban rebels vying to replace the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty—one led by Zhu Yuanzhang and the other by Chen Youliang—begin a five week battle on China’s Lake Poyang. When it was over, Chen Youliang was dead and Zhu Yuanzhang’s faction was ascendant. Zhu and his forces eventually overthrew the Yuan and he took the throne as the Hongwu Emperor, the first ruler of China’s Ming Dynasty.
August 30, 1922: The Republican Turkish army defeats an occupying Greek force at the Battle of Dumlupınar in western Anatolia. In their victory the Turks destroyed the better part of an entire Greek army corps and began driving the rest of the Greek army toward the western Anatolian coast. The Greek position was untenable and they withdrew completely from Anatolia in mid-September.
MIDDLE EAST
LEBANON
The Israeli military (IDF) carried out air and artillery strikes on multiple towns across southern Lebanon on Saturday. There’s no indication of casualties but there are indications of potentially substantial damage.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The IDF killed at least four people in Gaza on Saturday and at least two people, including a child, on Sunday. Saturday’s attacks also included a drone strike on a medical supply “warehouse” (which in Gaza these days means a tent) that drew condemnation from the Doctors Without Borders NGO.
In the West Bank, Israeli settler-militants carried out another attack on Palestinian homes around the village of Qusra on Saturday. IDF personnel deployed to the village and unsurprisingly appear to have joined in the attack rather than stopping it, firing tear gas into one of the homes and reportedly detaining and beating some of the residents. In the nearby village of Jalud, settler-militants interrupted an NBC News interview with a local Palestinian woman by attacking both the woman and the news crew. These incidents received so much attention that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “condemned” the violence on Saturday, though he attempted to blame it on a handful of individual bad actors rather than acknowledging it as the obvious outcome of his entire career-long political project.
IRAN
The US military attacked Iran’s Larak island on Sunday, striking “launchers that were set to fire rockets carrying mines towards the Strait of Hormuz” as Al Jazeera put it. This was the first US attack on Iran in several weeks, as the Trump administration has been trying to shift its kinetic war to an economic war. Iranian officials have reported “several” soldiers killed and wounded in the attack. They retaliated by attacking military facilities in Jordan that are used by the US.
The resumption of hostilities, even if it’s brief, is an interesting counterpoint to Sunday’s Washington Post report that senior US military officers are pushing for an end to the war:
Several U.S. military leaders have advised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere, including the U.S. homeland, according to people familiar with a recent assessment prepared for the Pentagon chief.
The warnings — detailed for Hegseth by the heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force and the four-star commanders overseeing U.S. operations throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America — appear in the Aug. 14 edition of the Secretary of Defense Orders Book (SDOB), these people said. They described the assessment to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity because the document is classified.
The SDOB, typically produced twice monthly, outlines the worldwide availability of U.S. warships, aircraft, personnel and weapons systems. It reflects the president’s priorities for the force, which are carried out by the defense secretary, and includes insights from the military’s top generals and admirals that inform the directives the Pentagon issues.
The “dimmest picture” apparently comes from Chief of Naval Operations Daryl Caudle, whose service can’t even make payroll and who warned that the maintenance burden of extended ship deployments “jeopardizes the fleet’s availability should other conflicts arise.”
ASIA
MYANMAR
Al Jazeera reports that Myanmar’s military has been making steady gains at the expense of rebel groups but likely doesn’t have the capacity to strike a truly “decisive” blow against them:
The military has opened new operations this year in Chin, Kachin, Kayin and Rakhine States, and according to ISP-Myanmar, an independent think tank, it has now retaken 22 of the 101 towns it lost after the [2021] coup. That amounts to 9 percent of the lost territory, but the areas are strategically located and include key trade corridors linking border areas to central Myanmar, where the military’s main bases are located.
Their capture has disrupted the “economic and logistical capacity of many resistance groups,” Su Mon, an analyst at [the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project], wrote in a recent briefing note. While the military has yet to fully restore its own administration in these areas, she said, “the victories have effectively hindered resistance coordination,” pushing opposition groups “away from large-scale coordinated offensives to defensive guerrilla warfare”.
Still, the military is unlikely to score “existential or politically decisive wins” against the opposition, she added, warning that the country “faces a protracted war of attrition” in the coming months.
The military’s run of success seems mainly attributable to its massive air power advantage, which it employs indiscriminately against civilians and combatants alike, coupled with the manpower boost provided by its conscription program. The Chinese government has also contributed, pushing some rebel groups into accepting ceasefires and helping to choke off the supply of arms to others.
CAMBODIA
Chhay Sinarith, the Cambodian government’s “senior minister in charge of combating online scams,” claimed on Thursday that “large-scale scam activities have been brought fully under control, and there are currently no online scam compounds remaining in the country.” He was not asserting the total eradication of those scam operations, which have apparently adopted smaller and more decentralized structures to evade authorities. But if this is true, and in fairness there’s a good deal of skepticism about the claim, the elimination of those compounds could be a very positive development considering the extent to which they’d been “staffed” by people whom the scam operators trafficked into effective slavery.
AFRICA
SUDAN
The Sudan Doctors Network is accusing the Rapid Support Forces militant group of attacking two villages near the town of Barah in Sudan’s North Kordofan state, killing at least five people and displacing over 3000. The Sudanese military (SAF) took Barah from the RSF last month and the group’s retreating/rampaging fighters have been attacking and looting communities in the area since then.
LIBYA
Libya’s eastern and western governments agreed on Sunday to hold elections for president and parliament within a “period not exceeding 24 months.” This was the finalization of a United Nations-brokered deal that the two governments’ negotiators reached earlier this month at a meeting in Tunisia. There is good reason to be skeptical here, as Libya’s ruling elites have thwarted previous attempts at organizing elections since the outcome could threaten their positions.
GUINEA-BISSAU
Guinea-Bissau’s ruling junta held a referendum on Sunday on the adoption of a new constitution ahead of elections in December. The main thrust of the draft constitution is the empowerment of the country’s presidency at the expense of its legislature and particularly its premiership. It will shrink parliament from 102 to 65 seats and give the president the ultimate authority over naming and sacking prime ministers as well as dissolving the legislature. Turnout was expected to be low due in part to an opposition boycott, and anecdotal accounts seemed to bear that out.
NIGER
Niger’s ruling junta fended off an attempted coup on Saturday, when mutinying soldiers seized a base near Niamey’s airport and attempted to attack state broadcasting facilities and the presidential palace. Russian “Africa Corps” personnel reportedly played a major role in putting down the uprising and helping the junta to restore a semblance of order in the capital. There were casualties, at least among the mutineers, but I have not seen any figures.
EUROPE
UKRAINE
In Ukraine news:
A Russian drone strike hit an munitions depot in a village near Kyiv late Friday night, killing at least 38 people and wounding at least 20 more at last count. On Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky partially blamed the incident on those who “stored explosives right next to people” and said that a criminal investigation had already been opened, while calling on the Defense Ministry to “audit” the locations of its other arms depots. This was the second depot to be hit near Kyiv in the past two months.
A Ukrainian missile strike killed at least two people in the Russian city of Belgorod on Sunday evening.
The International Atomic Energy Agency reported on Saturday that Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is running on diesel generators after its connection to the Ukrainian power grid was apparently severed over a week ago. The plant is offline and requires outside electricity to maintain its safety/coolant operations. Diesel generators can substitute, unless the war prevents new supplies of fuel from getting to the facility. The agency is trying to negotiate a temporary localized ceasefire to allow for repairs to reconnect the plant to the power grid.
Axios is reporting that US Central Intelligence Agency director John Ratcliffe proposed a Russia-Ukraine-US summit when he visited Moscow on Tuesday. Zelensky has previously expressed support for such a meeting but the Russians have rejected it. It’s unclear whether Ratcliffe was able to convince his interlocutors to raise the issue with Russian President Vladimir Putin, though even if he was it seems unlikely that Putin will agree to it.
The Turkish government summoned Ukraine’s ambassador in Ankara on Saturday after two “Turkish-operated” commercial ships came under attack in the Black Sea in recent days. Several other Turkish vessels have been attacked in recent weeks, in most or all cases likely by Ukrainian drones.
ICELAND
Icelandic voters rejected the reopening of accession talks with the European Union in Saturday’s referendum. The margin was not large—52.8 percent to 47.2 percent—but the outcome confounded polling that mostly suggested a “yes” victory with a smaller possibility of a narrower “no” victory. The Icelandic government had put EU membership back on the national agenda mainly in reaction to Donald Trump’s designs on Greenland and concern that Iceland could be next on his acquisition list. This outcome probably puts the issue to rest for at least another decade if not longer.
AMERICAS
VENEZUELA
Donald Trump’s new deal to loot Venezuela of billions of barrels of oil has surprisingly not gone over terribly well in Venezuela. Many who supported former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro regard signing over a large portion of the country’s oil wealth as affirmation that Venezuela is now a mercantile colony of the United States. Many who opposed Maduro are worried that the deal will further cement whatever remains of his government, now under the control of reliable US lackey Delcy Rodríguez. In all cases the concern revolves around sovereignty, and whether Venezuela still has any.
Rodríguez delivered a televised address on Saturday in which she insisted that the deal does in fact maintain Venezuelan sovereignty, which feels like the kind of thing that would go without saying if it were actually true. She emphasized that the arrangement should bring significant foreign investment into the Venezuelan oil sector (perhaps upwards of $100 billion) and that a whopping $19 of every barrel of oil Venezuela provides to the US “will flow to Caracas.” Again this seems exploitative but to be fair it doesn’t apply to all of Venezuela’s oil reserves—just a large portion of them from some of the country’s most productive oilfields.
Trump, of course, is portraying this as the greatest Business Deal in human history, which in and of itself should be a warning to Venezuelans that they’re getting screwed. On Sunday Trump said that he intends to use his Venezuelan booty to refill the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is currently at or near its lowest point in more than four decades. Trump blamed that state of affairs on Joe Biden, even though he’s been releasing oil from the reserve for the past six months to try to tamp down oil prices amid his Iran war.
UNITED STATES
Finally, Current Affairs’ Nathan Sledjeski considers Guam’s position in the US empire:
“Is this really America?”
As I marched through Agaña’s humid suburbs in 2013—a dense, unfamiliar jungle pressing in on one side, cul-de-sacs with stilted houses and long roadways on the other—this question played over and over in my head. In the sky, American military helicopters passed. On the road, sun-bleached American cars. Every so often, a McDonald’s. Yet none of it could shake the question until, over time, it curdled into something deeper: Should Guam be a part of America? Better yet, does America deserve to keep it?
Around the world, conversations around neo-colonialism are evolving—in Palestine, in the DRC, in dozens of places once written off as settled history. Welcome as that shift is, it far too often leaves out Guam’s ongoing fight for self-determination, along with the rest of the Western Pacific Islands. I don’t raise this as a criticism so much as an opening: this moment of decolonial reckoning is precisely the moment to bring Guam into the fold, and to ask what is hiding behind the opaque label of “territory.”
I was once told that there is no difference between a colony and a territory. A colony, according to Merriam-Webster, is “an area over which a foreign nation or state extends or maintains control.” One could argue that Guam does not fit that definition—after all, the U.S. is not technically foreign to Guam, and vice versa.
But empires have always been fluent in the art of renaming what they claim as theirs. “Territory” is modern-day colonialism. It just has better PR.