World roundup: January 16 2025
Stories from Israel-Palestine, China, Sudan, and elsewhere
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PROGRAMMING NOTE: As I mentioned in Tuesday’s roundup I need to take a few days away from the newsletter this weekend for family reasons. We will resume our regular schedule probably on Tuesday (although plans have changed a little bit so there is an outside chance that I could get back to the newsletter as soon as Sunday). Again I apologize for this, coming so quickly after our holiday break, and thank you for bearing with me. I also should apologize for the tone of Tuesday’s note, which I realized on rereading makes this situation sound more serious than it is. It’s not! Sorry about that!
TODAY IN HISTORY
January 16, 929: Abd al-Rahman III declares that his Emirate of Córdoba will henceforth be the Caliphate of Córdoba. This promotion in title did nothing to materially change the conditions of Umayyad rule in Andalus, but it did upgrade Abd al-Rahman’s international stature on par with the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad and (especially) the Fatimid Caliph in North Africa. The Umayyads were concerned about the possibility of a Fatimid invasion and wanted to meet the enemy on equal terms so to speak.
January 16, 1547: Grand Duke Ivan IV of Moscow, also known as “Ivan the Terrible,” has himself crowned Tsar of Russia. He wasn’t the first to use the title “tsar,” as his grandfather Ivan III had done so at least informally, but like Abd al-Rahman III’s decision to make himself caliph this formal promotion raised Ivan’s international stature to put him on par with, for example, Mongol khans and the Ottoman sultan. Ivan’s coronation is a milestone in Russia’s transition from principality to empire.
January 16, 1979: Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi flees Iran for Egypt at the height of the Iranian Revolution. Realizing that his position was untenable in the face of massive public opposition, the shah cut a deal with opposition leader Shahpour Bakhtiar of the National Front to establish a civilian transitional government and then skedaddled out of town. Unfortunately for Bakhtiar, whose intent was to end the revolution peacefully, the deal tainted him as an agent of the shah in the eyes of the Iranian public, and so his government had no legitimacy from the start.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Having previously succeeded in torpedoing Gaza ceasefire talks on the verge of completion, Benjamin Netanyahu may be trying to outdo himself by torpedoing them after completion. Scheduled to put the agreement to a cabinet vote on Thursday morning, Netanyahu instead postponed the vote while claiming that Hamas had introduced a new demand. It sounds like this new complication has to do with the identities of the Palestinian detainees who are to be freed under the agreement. Netanyahu and Hamas were each claiming to have final say on that question and there was some talk of Hamas attempting to add two additional detainees to the list. Whether or not that was the extent of the dispute reporting later on Thursday suggested that the impasse had been resolved and according to AFP the Israeli cabinet is now scheduled to hold its vote on Friday.
(Barak Ravid at Axios is reporting that the vote won’t take place until Saturday night, which will force a delay in the start of the ceasefire from Sunday to Monday. This is not over yet.)
What actually may be happening here is that Netanyahu is putting on a one-man show for the benefit of those far-right elements of his coalition that are threatening to defect over the deal. Two of them, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, collectively control enough votes to bring down Netanyahu’s coalition if they both leave it. I have been of the opinion that they’re bluffing, because both of them need Netanyahu as much as he needs them, but nevertheless the Israeli prime minister may feel like he has to at least be seen putting up a fight to keep them on side—hence, maybe, the stories about how he’s being bullied into accepting this deal by Donald Trump. To my point about bluffing, Ben-Gvir is now threatening to quit the cabinet but says he will not attempt to bring down the coalition. Smotrich won’t even go that far.
Assuming the deal does finally come into effect on Sunday the big question is whether it will endure beyond the initial six-week stage. Rhetoric out of Israel suggests, as Responsible Statecraft’s Annelle Sheline notes, that Netanyahu and company are dead set on resuming hostilities. But that may just be rhetoric ahead of negotiations on the still-hypothetical second and third phases of the agreement. Certainly though, if Netanyahu is really intent on “defeating Hamas” he will have to reckon with the fact that he hasn’t done so. I don’t know that it’s worth handwringing over this because even a six-week pause in fighting is better than the alternative, though I also can’t blame anyone for being pessimistic about the deal’s long-term prospects.
SYRIA
For what to my knowledge is the first time since it chased Bashar al-Assad out of the country last month, Syria’s new government on Thursday criticized Israel for its occupation of new territory in southern Syria’s Golan region. The Israeli military (IDF) has seized control of a buffer zone in southern Syria created under a 1974 agreement brokered by the United Nations and there is every reason to believe the Israeli government intends to hold on to that territory for months if not years. De facto Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa and visiting Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani both called on the Israelis to leave Syrian territory on Thursday, one day after an IDF airstrike killed two soldiers and the mayor of a village in southern Syria’s Quneitra province.
Elsewhere, Syrian Democratic Forces commander Mazloum Abdi headed to Iraq on Wednesday for a meeting with Kurdistan Democratic Party boss Masoud Barzani in Erbil. Barzani remains the preeminent political figure in Iraqi Kurdistan though he left the KRG presidency in 2017. He’s also on good terms with the Turkish government, and Abdi no doubt was appealing to him to intervene with Ankara on the SDF’s behalf. Tensions between the SDF and Turkish-backed militants in northern Syria have moved from a rapid boil to more of a simmer in recent days but the possibility of escalation leading to another Turkish invasion of Syria is still very much in play.
ASIA
INDIA
The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) successfully docked two of its satellites together on Thursday, becoming the fourth country to accomplish that feat after Russia (well, the Soviet Union really), the United States, and China. While it may not seem like much, this is an important intermediate step on the road to bigger space goals like building a space station and undertaking a manned mission to the moon—something the Indian government says it’s aiming to do by 2040.
CHINA
The Wall Street Journal suggests that if US President-elect Donald Trump is intent on starting a trade war with China, Beijing is well-positioned to weather it:
Donald Trump kicked off a new era of Western economic rivalry with Beijing when he took office in 2017. As he prepares for his second term, China’s dominance of global manufacturing is greater than ever.
China just posted a trade surplus with the rest of the world of almost $1 trillion for 2024, according to official data released this week. That giant gap between exports and imports—roughly equal to the annual output of Poland—is now three times what it was in 2018 when decades of Western orthodoxy favoring open trade were upended by Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports.
China today accounts for around 27% of global industrial production, according to United Nations data, up from 24% in 2018. By 2030, the U.N. predicts, China’s share of industry will have risen to 45%—a level of dominance unmatched since the U.S.’s postwar manufacturing heyday or the U.K.’s in the 19th century.
AFRICA
SUDAN
The Biden administration on Thursday blacklisted Sudanese military commander Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, accusing his Sudanese Armed Forces of attacking civilians and denying access to food as a tactic of war. It also sanctioned one individual and one company accused of helping the SAF to procure weapons. The decision to sanction Burhan bookends the administration’s move to blacklist Rapid Support Forces leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo earlier this month. But it’s also more significant than that, because Burhan is Sudan’s de facto head of state in its internationally recognized government (or what passes for one), so sanctioning him has ramifications that sanctioning Dagalo did not. Although it wasn’t part of the formal sanctions announcement, The New York Times reported on Thursday that the administration believes the Sudanese military has used chemical weapons—specifically chlorine gas—on at least two occasions during its war against the RSF and that factored into the decision to penalize Burhan.
NIGERIA
According to Nigerian authorities, a clash between military forces and Boko Haram fighters in northeastern Nigeria’s Borno state on Tuesday left at least nine soldiers dead with five still missing. The soldiers were returning from the burial of some 40 farmers who’d been killed by Islamic State West Africa Province militants over the weekend when the battle took place. There’s no word as to any Boko Haram casualties.
EUROPE
EUROPEAN UNION
European leaders are debating how to manage the incoming Trump presidency, with some including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen favoring a very short-term transactional approach (essentially buying more stuff from the US). At Foreign Affairs, Erik Jones and Matthias Matthijs argue for a different approach:
Europeans must make long-term investments in industry, including for defense. To that end, some of the best answers to Trump’s provocations can be found in two major reports published last year. In April, the Council of the European Union released a report, prepared by former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta, on reforming the single market. In September, the European Commission published another report, by former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, on enhancing EU competitiveness. Both reports argue that Europe’s relative economic decline constitutes an existential threat to the European Union and stress the importance of strengthening research, innovation, and sustained investments in new technologies to reverse that decline. And both explain that the only way the EU will achieve these goals is by making it easier and more attractive for Europeans to invest their savings within the EU, rather than burrowing them in savings accounts or investing them abroad.
If European leaders find the political will to implement the reports’ recommendations, the EU will be home to a single market that can punch at its true weight in the international arena; it will become stronger and more self-sufficient. Should Europeans fail to act in unison to realize this vision, they will lose jobs, investment, and innovation to the United States and China, at the cost of ever-lower standards of living.
BULGARIA
The Bulgarian parliament on Thursday approved a new government led by the conservative GERB party with former parliament speaker Rosen Zhelyazkov as prime minister. The vote came one day after President Rumen Radev designated Zhelyazkov for the job. Bulgaria’s parliamentary election in October was its seventh since April 2021, and given that it produced another heavily fragmented legislature there is reason to wonder whether this government is going to have much staying power.
FRANCE
French Prime Minister François Bayrou and his government withstood a no confidence vote in parliament on Thursday. The resolution had been advanced by the leftist France Unbowed party, which was unable to get the support of either the center-left Socialists or the far-right National Rally party. The resolution garnered the support of just 131 legislators, with 288 votes required to oust the government. Bayrou became PM in December after his predecessor, Michel Barnier, lost a confidence vote. While Bayrou probably doesn’t have substantially greater parliamentary support than Barnier had, legislators may have taken into account polling that indicates the French public is pretty tired of these sorts of parliamentary shenanigans.
AMERICAS
GREENLAND
One reason why Donald Trump wants to buy and/or conquer Greenland is to tap into its apparently abundant mineral reserves. As The Wall Street Journal points out, that’s easier said than done:
Beneath its desolate, icy expanse, Greenland holds some of the world’s biggest untapped reserves of the raw minerals used to make everything from smartphones and electric cars to F-35 Lightning II jet fighters.
Good luck getting them out of the ground.
President-elect Donald Trump has said the U.S. needs Greenland for national security. Part of the island’s allure are its rare earths, metals and other raw materials. America now mostly relies on China for its supplies of some key materials, and Beijing could wield its access to them as a weapon in a trade war.
But Greenland’s harsh climate, hazardous shipping, limited infrastructure and tiny local workforce have for years left a promised gold rush frozen in its tracks.
Increasing geopolitical competition, rising need for rare elements and a warming climate are now fueling hopes for the development of a mining industry on Greenland. Any significant extraction, though, is still years away, experts and industry participants say.
UNITED STATES
Finally, Human Rights Watch published its annual report on Thursday decrying the Biden administration’s “double standard” when it comes to the human rights of Ukrainians versus the human rights of Palestinians. On that front, ProPublica’s Brett Murphy has written what may be the definitive chronicle of the administration’s indulgence of Israeli war crimes:
Authorities in and outside government said the acquiescence to Israel as it prosecuted a brutal war will likely be regarded as one of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of the Biden presidency. They say it undermines America’s ability to influence events in the Middle East while “destroying the entire edifice of international law that was put into place after WWII,” as Omer Bartov, a renowned Israeli-American scholar of genocide, put it. Jeffrey Feltman, the former assistant secretary of the State Department’s Middle East bureau, told me he fears much of the Muslim world now sees the U.S. as “ineffective at best or complicit at worst in the large-scale civilian destruction and death.”
Biden’s warnings over the past year have also been explicit. Last spring, the president vowed to stop supplying offensive bombs to Israel if it launched a major invasion into the southern city of Rafah. He also told Netanyahu the U.S. was going to rethink support for the war unless he took new steps to protect civilians and aid workers after the IDF blew up a World Central Kitchen caravan. And Blinken signaled that he would blacklist a notorious IDF unit for the death of a Palestinian-American in the West Bank if the soldiers involved were not brought to justice.
Time and again, Israel crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in a meaningful way, according to interviews with government officials and outside experts. Each time, the U.S. yielded and continued to send Israel’s military deadly weapons of war, approving more than $17.9 billion in military assistance since late 2023, by some estimates. The State Department recently told Congress about another $8 billion proposed deal to sell Israel munitions and artillery shells.
“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,” said Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a preeminent authority on U.S. policy in the region. “The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.”