World roundup: June 25 2025

Stories from Iran, China, NATO, and elsewhere

PROGRAMMING NOTE: I must apologize but a reaction to a vaccine I received yesterday (insert RFK Jr. joke here I guess) has got me feeling pretty poorly this evening so I am going to forego our usual voiceover. As always you can find text-to-voice functionality in the Substack app.)

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 is certainly the most famous 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.

The Custer Fight, a 1903 lithograph by American artist Charles Marion Russell (Wikimedia Commons)

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 fairly common occurrences 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

The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least 78 people across Gaza on Wednesday, at least 14 of them in incidents near aid distribution centers according to Al Jazeera. A reported named Hani Mahmoud offered some logistical context for these daily aid massacres—the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” positions its distribution points in close proximity to Israeli forces and then apparently gives huge crowds of aid seekers just 20 minutes to gather their parcels and leave. Anybody still in the area after 20 minutes may be fair game for Israeli forces. I thought I was being somewhat hyperbolic in characterizing the GHF as “kettling” Palestinians on the Israelis’ behalf and yet that doesn’t seem to be too far off of the mark. Israeli forces also killed a 15 year old boy near the West Bank city of Jenin on Wednesday, while a settler mob attacked the village of Kafr Malik near Ramallah and killed at least three Palestinians. Israeli soldiers killed a 13 year old boy in that same village earlier this week.