World roundup: January 10 2025

Stories from China, Russia, Venezuela, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

January 10, 49 BCE: Julius Caesar proverbially “crosses the Rubicon” by literally crossing the Rubicon River and marching his army toward Rome. Caesar, whose term as proconsul in Gaul had ended, took the provocative action of bringing his army back with him to the capital due to fears that he would be prosecuted by his political opponents without some kind of leverage on his side (specifically, the kind of leverage you get from bringing along thousands of armed men who are ready to start killing people on your orders). The act kicked off a civil war between Caesar and Pompey (plus his traditionalist allies in the Roman Senate), that did much to hasten the end of the Roman Republic.

French painter Adolphe Yvon’s 1875 work Caesar Crosses the Rubicon takes a bit of artistic license but you get the idea (Wikimedia Commons)

January 10, 1475: Stephen III of Moldavia defeats the Ottomans at the Battle of Vaslui. Sparked by a dispute over the ruler of neighboring Wallachia and really over control of the key region of Bessarabia, the battle was the culmination of an extended scorched earth campaign by the Moldavians, who lured the larger Ottoman army deeper and deeper into their territory and finally into a place where it could be easily surrounded. Stephen’s success was relatively short-lived, as more successful Ottoman invasions in 1476 and 1484 eventually forced him to accept the status of tribute-paying imperial vassal.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

According to Reuters, US diplomat Daniel Rubinstein met with de facto Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa in Damascus earlier this week and brought with him a “warning” about the role that “foreign jihadists” appear to be playing in Syria’s new caretaker government. Sharaa has named a number of non-Syrians, people who fought with/alongside his Hayat Tahrir al-Sham faction (and its predecessors) during the Syrian civil war, to prominent security posts in his ad hoc administration. The appointments are not going to do much to calm publicly expressed Western fears that Sharaa and HTS intend to govern Syria in accordance with their Salafi-jihadist roots, and the US, French, and German governments have been sending that message.