World roundup: June 25 2024

Stories from Lebanon, Ukraine, Mexico, and elsewhere

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PROGRAMMING NOTE 1: We need to talk about the next couple of weeks, because the FX crew is taking our annual summer break. Long-time readers may recall that we used to do this in August, but my daughter’s high school schedule has obliged us to push it back to July now and this is around the time we took our break last year. We’ll be on our regular schedule through Sunday night’s newsletter and will return to that schedule no later than July 16. My preference is to resume things on July 14 but I’m not sure that will be doable so I want to set expectations accordingly. Thanks for reading!

PROGRAMMING NOTE 2: American Prestige is planning a livestream event during the US presidential debate on Thursday evening. As it stands now Danny and I will be welcoming several guests including journalist Emily Tamkin, FX columnist Alex Aviña, ettingermentum of the popular Ettingermentum Newsletter, and Courtney Rawlings of the Quincy Institute. Plus you can watch me try to participate in the banter while probably working on that night’s newsletter, so that’s sure to be fun. Please do check it out!

TODAY IN HISTORY

June 25, 1876: US Army Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry Regiment encounter an Indigenous village near the Little Bighorn River in what was then the Montana Territory. The following morning, Custer led his men into battle against a substantially larger force of Lakota Sioux, Dakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho fighters. In one of the most widely-known battles in US frontier history the Indigenous forces thoroughly defeated Custer’s regiment, killing some 270 of its roughly 700 personnel including Custer himself. The Battle of the Little Bighorn was likely the largest battle of the Great Sioux War of 1876, but despite its outcome the war was won by the US military and resulted in the annexation of Sioux lands.

June 25, 1950: The Korean War begins with, by most accounts, a North Korean invasion of South Korea, although the Korean People’s Army claimed that South Korean forces invaded their territory first. There was already a North Korean-supported insurgency in South Korea, and conflicts at the Korean border had been going on almost since the Allies liberated and partitioned the peninsula in 1945, but the US decision to intervene two days later makes the June 25 incident stand out as the “official” start of the conflict. The war still hasn’t technically ended, but the fighting stopped in 1953 in a stalemate after two failed North Korean/Chinese invasions of South Korea sandwiched around one failed South Korean/US invasion of North Korea.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

A new report highlights the precarity of Gaza’s food situation:

Palestinians throughout the Strip face a “plausible” risk of famine in the coming months, according to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis. “A high risk of Famine persists as long as conflict continues, and humanitarian access is restricted,” it said.

The report described how more than half of households have exchanged clothing for food. A third have resorted to picking up trash items to sell. More than 20 percent of people surveyed have gone entire days and nights without eating.

Most Gazans were already reliant on international aid before the conflict began, as a years-long Israeli and Egyptian blockade took a heavy toll on the enclave’s economy. After eight months of war, and with the flow of aid often subject to Israeli restrictions or security concerns, almost half a million Gazans are facing “catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity,” the IPC said.

An earlier report had predicted that famine would take hold across Gaza’s northern regions by May. The IPC said Tuesday that a significant increase in aid deliveries throughout March and April temporarily alleviated conditions. But the situation has since deteriorated again, after the main crossing for aid deliveries during this conflict was closed during Israel’s offensive against the remaining Hamas units in Rafah.

Potentially making matters much worse, the United Nations has reportedly informed the Israeli government that it “will suspend aid operations across Gaza” unless Israeli officials take steps to better protect aid workers. At the top of the UN’s list of demands, it wants aid workers to have direct lines of communication to the Israeli military (IDF), which is a fairly typical “deconfliction” procedure but is apparently not the way the IDF does business.

The Israeli Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to begin conscripting ultra-orthodox Jewish men into the IDF. A legal exemption from conscription for seminary students expired at the end of June 2023 but Netanyahu’s cabinet has maintained a de facto exemption in deference to two ultra-orthodox parties on whose support his coalition depends. It remains to be seen how they will react to this ruling, though so far there’s no indication that they’re planning to quit the coalition. It also remains to be seen how Netanyahu will react. His coalition has been trying to craft a new conscription law that meets the needs of both the ultra-orthodox parties and more nationalist elements that oppose the exemption, but it’s unclear whether they’ll be able to thread that needle. The court ruling may force Netanyahu to begin conscription while that law is still being formulated.

LEBANON

According to POLITICO, while the Biden administration is supposedly urging the Israeli government not to go to war with Hezbollah, it’s been telling Hezbollah that it will support Israel if/when that war starts. This is sort of the US-Israel relationship in a nutshell, in that the easiest way for the Biden administration to get the Israeli government to do what it supposedly wants (not going to war with Hezbollah) would be to tell them, politely to be sure, that if they go to war they’ll be doing it on their own. But Washington can’t conceive of such an approach, so instead it beg Israeli leaders not to do a thing while promising to support them fully if they do that thing.

Lest you assume that the US is just promising to help defend Israel from an outside aggressor, that POLITICO piece notes that even the US intelligence community believes “that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah doesn’t want a war.” One could infer from this that the USIC also regards the Israeli government as the aggressor in this situation, though nobody in the US government is willing to say so. Along the same lines, it might be fair to assume that the administration is sending these messages to Hezbollah in an attempt to strong-arm the group into backing down and thus avoid the war. But again it’s hard to know whether Hezbollah “backing down” would mean anything when it’s the Israelis who seem intent on escalation.

IRAN

The Biden administration on Tuesday blacklisted more than 50 people and entities that are allegedly part of a “shadow banking network” working for Iran’s defense ministry and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. According to the US Treasury Department, this “network” enables these entities to conduct business on the global financial system despite sanctions that are supposed to prevent them from doing that.

ASIA

MYANMAR

The rebel Arakan Army group has reportedly seized control of the beach resort town of Ngapali in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state, after several days of fighting. Security forces withdrew to another town nearby. The AA already controls much of Rakhine and has begun a new offensive targeting the remaining areas under junta control. Elsewhere, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army rebel group has reportedly attacked military positions around the town of Kyaukme in northern Myanmar’s Shan state. This new attack comes a few days after the TNLA accused the junta of having violated a Chinese-mediated ceasefire that’s been in place in Shan since January.

CHINA

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal published on Tuesday, US ambassador to China Nicholas Burns argued that while the Chinese government says that it is “in favor of reconnecting our two populations,” it is “taking dramatic steps to make it impossible.” According to Burns, this includes “pressuring” Chinese citizens not to attend events organized by the US embassy and interfering with student exchange programs. The Biden administration still seems to feel that it is entitled to take actions against China—sanctions, for instance—but it’s somehow inappropriate for the Chinese government to retaliate, or for those actions to have any negative impact on the overall state of US-Chinese relations.

NORTH KOREA

The North Korean military reportedly fired some sort of projectile into the sea off of North Korea’s eastern coast on Wednesday morning. As I think was more or less expected. Earlier this week Pyongyang also floated a new fleet of trash balloons into South Korea, the sixth time it’s done so in a bit over a month. It’s fair to say that inter-Korean relations have seen better days, though so far these latest provocations are more of the “nuisance” variety than the “genuinely concerning” variety.

AFRICA

NIGER

An apparent jihadist militant attack left at least 20 soldiers and one civilian dead in southwestern Niger’s Tillabéri region on Tuesday. At least nine people were wounded in the incident.

KENYA

Protesters angered by President William Ruto’s tax increase plan stormed the Kenyan parliament building in Nairobi on Tuesday. Police opened fire on the crowd, killing at least five people, while the protesters apparently set fire to part of the building. At least 31 people were wounded in the melee, including 13 shot by live ammunition and another four shot with rubber bullets. Ruto is attempting to raise revenue to try to close Kenya’s annual budget deficit, partly at the behest of the International Monetary Fund and partly because servicing the country’s increasing debt is handcuffing its annual budget. The protesters are demanding Ruto’s resignation, while he’s accusing unspecified “dangerous people” of having fomented Tuesday’s “treasonous events.”

Protesters in Nairobi on Tuesday (Gerald Anderson/Anadolu via Getty Images)

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

The UN peacekeeping mission in the DRC (MONUSCO) closed its main office in South Kivu province on Tuesday, taking another step toward its planned withdrawal from the country by the end of this year. The UN Security Council voted in December to wind down the mission, at the Congolese government’s behest. It’s been largely unsuccessful at keeping any sort of peace, and its presence in the DRC has become increasingly unpopular. MONUSCO’s staged withdrawal will continue in North Kivu and Ituri provinces.

EUROPE

EUROPEAN UNION

The leaders of the European Union’s 27 member states appear to be nearing an agreement to reappoint current European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for a second term. Von der Leyen represents the conservative European People’s Party, one of the three blocs in the European Parliament that divvy up the EU’s top executive jobs. Alongside her, the Socialists and Democrats bloc will reportedly get to name former Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa as president of the European Council and the Renew Europe bloc will put current Estonian PM Kaja Kallas forward as the EU’s new foreign policy coordinator. They will replace incumbents Charles Michel and Josep Borrell, respectively.

RUSSIA

The EU has also reportedly decided to blacklist 19 Chinese firms over their alleged support for the Russian war effort in Ukraine, among a group of 61 total firms newly designated in the EU’s latest tranche of Russian sanctions. The EU and the US have been blacklisting Chinese firms for several months over claims that they’ve provided non-lethal materiel to Russia.

Elsewhere, the International Criminal Court on Tuesday issued warrants for the arrests of former Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the senior commander of the Russian military, Valery Gerasimov. They’re accused of war crimes as well as one crime against humanity, the crime of inhumanity, for their roles in past Russian attacks against Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure.

UKRAINE

The EU has also also decided to open accession talks with Moldova and Ukraine. While this news was undoubtedly welcomed by the governments of both countries, those talks will take years to conclude, assuming they do reach a conclusion. Both countries will need to address EU concerns around governance and corruption and will need to align their laws and regulations with EU standards across 35 policy areas. Unanimous approval from all EU member states is required in each of those areas before their membership processes can advance.

Meanwhile, The Nation’s Mark Episkopos reports that the Ukrainian public’s opinion regarding peace talks seems to be shifting:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly said that his country must keep fighting—no matter the costs—until its 1991 borders are restored. The presumption that the vast majority of Ukrainians share this goal underpins the West’s tacit support for the Zelensky administration’s war aims. 

But new polling showing significant Ukrainian support for diplomacy to end the war—paired with a closer look at other indications that Ukrainians are rejecting risking everything for victory—challenges this understanding.

The narrative of totally unified Ukrainian opinion is premised on polls from the earliest days of the war showing nearly unanimous Ukrainian support for the government and its handling of the war effort. This seeming consensus has steadily eroded since the peak of Ukraine’s battlefield successes in 2022, when 70 percent of survey respondents affirmed that Ukraine “should continue fighting until it wins the war.” That number dropped to 60 percent in the summer of 2023, according to Gallup. Polling since the failure of Ukraine’s 2023 offensive shows that 44 percent of Ukrainians favor entering into talks with Russia and only 48 percent—still a plurality but, notably, no longer a majority—believe Ukraine should fight on. Other recent polling shows that even in Kyiv, where Ukraine’s elite and bureaucracy is concentrated and political investment in the war effort is at its highest, complete confidence in Ukrainian victory is weakening.

Tellingly, recent surveys—including a new poll from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace— suggest that the share of Ukrainians open to a negotiated settlement has dramatically risen over the past year and, if present trends hold, is well on the way to becoming a majority-held view.

AMERICAS

MEXICO

Finally, in case you missed it, please check out Alex Aviña’s latest FX column. This time around he tackles the US media’s distorted view of Mexico:

“It’s not easy living next door to a superpower,” Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote in 1987, particularly when “twin sisters, ignorance and arrogance, characterize a general American attitude toward its southern neighbor.” Ignorance and arrogance, alive in the past as demonstrated by [former US presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter], continue to thrive in the present. And not just because Todd Richman—co-chair of a Zionist Democratic Party advocacy group—tweeted that President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum “is not involved in the Jewish community and thanked Jesus for her victory.” Sheinbaum indeed thanked Jesus for her victory: Jesús María Tarriba, her husband.

On a more serious note, the 2024 elections demonstrate, yet again, that key segments of US media—those writers and commentators consumed most by policymakers and political elites—look at our southern neighbor through ominous sepia-colored lenses. Similar to some movies—perhaps most famously in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2001)—the view of Mexico they offer is darker and hazier than the reality. “Everything in the United States is technicolor, it’s neat and beautiful, while Mexico is sepia, old, and shadowy,” Mexican politician Dulce Maria Sauri remarked after that movie’s release.