World roundup: June 5-6 2023
Stories from Saudi Arabia, China, Sudan, and elsewhere
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TODAY (AND YESTERDAY) IN HISTORY
June 5, 1963: In what’s become known as the 15 Khordad Movement (because it took place on the 15th day of the Iranian month of Khordad), protests and riots break out in cities across Iran after the arrest of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini over his criticisms of the Iranian government. The previously little-known Khomeini emerged suddenly on the public stage months earlier when he angrily denounced Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s “White Revolution” reforms as contrary to Islam. The outpouring of anger over his arrest cemented him as a leading opposition figure, a status he carried with him into exile and all the way through the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
June 5, 1967: The Six Day War begins.
June 6, 1982: The Israeli military invades Lebanon, beginning a new phase in the Lebanese Civil War that’s also known as the Lebanon War.
June 6, 1944: The Allied invasion of France begins with the “D-Day” amphibious landings in Normandy, the largest amphibious military operation in history. Despite heavy losses, the Allies were able to establish five beachheads and by mid-June (though it took longer than planned) they secured a small but crucial foothold in northern France. From there they began the final phase of World War II on its Western Front.
INTERNATIONAL
In today’s global news:
Worldometer is tracking COVID-19 cases and fatalities.
The New York Times is tracking global vaccine distribution.
The United Nations General Assembly elected five new UN Security Council members for the 2024-2025 term on Tuesday. Joining The Gang on January 1 will be Algeria and Sierra Leone in two African seats, South Korea in one Asia-Pacific seat, Guyana in one Latin America and Caribbean seat, and Slovenia in one Eastern European seat. The only competitive race was for that Eastern European seat, with Slovenia just squeaking past Belarus by a 153-38 margin. If the Belarusians had been hoping to capitalize on some secret well of support for Russia and its allies within the UNGA it would appear they miscalculated.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
A two year old Palestinian child shot by Israeli security forces near the West Bank village of Nebi Saleh last Thursday died on Monday. Israeli authorities claimed last week that they responded to reported gunfire targeting an Israeli settlement in that area and wound up opening fire themselves, I guess intending to shoot the gunmen. The Israeli military says it’s investigating the incident but you can probably predict how that will go.
KUWAIT
Lucky duck Kuwaiti voters headed to the polls on Tuesday for their third parliamentary election since December 2020. This vote stems from the Kuwaiti Supreme Court’s decision back in March to annul last September’s snap election and restore the parliament that had previously been in place. Gridlock between the Kuwaiti ruling family and the National Assembly, which is unique among Gulf legislatures in that it actually does have real political power, underlies this rapid succession of elections and there’s not much reason to expect this one to result in a stable political consensus.
SAUDI ARABIA
The world of professional golf was rocked on Tuesday by news that the LIV Tour, the product of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, was merging with the PGA Tour. Put less euphemistically, the Saudis now own the PGA Tour and, it would seem, the game of golf itself more or less. This is not a sports newsletter so I won’t try to unpack What It All Means For Professional Golf, but there are clear geopolitical issues at play here, which Defector’s David Roth discussed a few months ago:
LIV Golf is not a scam in the same way that the people trying to get my mother to purchase Walmart gift cards over the phone is a scam. It's both less direct and more ambitious than that, but it is at least a real thing you can watch. The best-case scenario for the Saudi-backed start-up golf tour is that it's a clunky vanity project from a reactionary petro-state's whimsical and murderous rulers; a likelier one is that the tour is a soft-power play that has more to do with following the incentives of a post-consequences moment and, more directly, bribing eminently bribable American elites than it does any kind of image-burnishing sportswashing. None of these options are great, really. That it does not seem to matter that it so obviously not-great is maybe the most unsettling thing about it. If the purpose of LIV Golf is to move money around in variously advantageous and plausibly deniable ways, it does not and will not mean anything that the product isn't very good and that the sporting public does not seem very interested in it. At the most basic level, that's not what it's for.
All of this—the sportswashing, the vanity project, the potential for moving money around to stuffed shirt American elites who already love golf as an outward expression of that elite status (among other reasons—just got turned up exponentially. I was exaggerating above when I said the Saudis now own golf, but only a bit.
IRAN
The Iranian government reopened its Saudi embassy in Riyadh on Tuesday. That facility has been closed since the two countries severed diplomatic ties back in 2016, but they agreed (with mediation from several countries including China, Iraq, and Oman) to restore relations back in March. Saudi officials have visited Iran to discuss reopening their embassy in Tehran, but I do not know when they’re expecting to do so. Both countries should also be reopening their former consulates, a Saudi outpost in Mashhad and an Iranian one in Jeddah.
The US Treasury Department on Tuesday blacklisted seven individuals and six entities with alleged ties to Iran’s ballistic missile program. Among the targets are a Chinese manufacturing firm and a Hong Kong company that allegedly serves as its front. Probably not coincidentally, the Iranian government has unveiled what it claims is a “hypersonic missile,” the “Fattah,” boasting a Mach 15 top speed and a 1400 kilometer range. Those are solid specs, if they’re accurate, but the whole category of “hypersonic” weapons seems rife with exaggerated claims about capabilities so it’s best to take them all with a grain of salt.
ASIA
AFGHANISTAN
The acting governor of northern Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province was killed along with his driver in a bombing in the city of Fayzabad on Tuesday. Unsurprisingly, Islamic State subsequently claimed responsibility for the attack, which also wounded six people.
PAKISTAN
Pakistani security forces and a group of militants—presumably Pakistani Taliban (TTP) fighters—battled in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province late Sunday. At least two Pakistani soldiers and two militants were killed and Pakistani authorities say they seized a “cache” of arms.
CHINA
Foreign Policy reports that, some recent rhetorical softening from the Biden administration aside, the US and China are increasingly in an economic conflict:
Ever since the Biden administration sought to hobble China’s semiconductor industry with export controls last October, one of the big questions has been how Beijing would retaliate. More than seven months later, it finally made a big move.
The Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s main cybersecurity regulator, announced on May 22 that it would bar semiconductors made by Idaho-based industry giant Micron from being used in key infrastructure projects, citing a failure to pass a weeks-long “cybersecurity review.” Micron said the restrictions could result in the loss of a “high single-digit percentage” of its revenue—a potential multibillion-dollar hit.
The move against Micron wasn’t a one-off, but the latest in a series of escalating economic spats between the United States and China, with tit-for-tat moves on products such as microchips. There’s an entire cottage industry meant to wean the United States off Chinese-supplied rare earth minerals. Meanwhile, U.S. Navy ships routinely transit waters Beijing claims. Taiwan looms large in the background. The Micron decision shows that any efforts to “thaw” relations, as U.S. President Joe Biden recently predicted would happen, will be easier said than done, according to multiple officials, lawmakers, and experts who spoke with Foreign Policy.
“Even if the Biden administration and everybody in the United States tomorrow says we want a thaw in relations, China’s policy is not going to change,” said Shehzad Qazi, the chief operating officer of data at advisory firm China Beige Book. “There could be a cosmetic thaw, but underneath the surface, it will be difficult to really ease tensions.”
AFRICA
SUDAN
The Sudanese military and the Rapid Support Forces unit have reportedly agreed to reopen ceasefire talks with US and Saudi mediators. Saudi media broke the news on Tuesday, saying that the two sides had agreed to resume “indirect” talks. There’s not much reason to expect the negotiations to be any more efficacious than they were before they broke down last week, but at least there’s a chance of some sort of breakthrough that didn’t exist when the sides weren’t talking. Heavy fighting was reported on Omdurman on Tuesday, as the RSF targeted the headquarters of the Sudanese Army Engineers corps. The military, which has generally fared poorly in clashes between opposing ground forces, apparently used its air power edge to maintain control of the facility.
The RSF has also reportedly besieged Tuti Island, which lies at the confluence of the Blue Nile and White Nile rivers in between Khartoum, Omdurman, and Bahri. Potentially thousands of people could be trapped there, though it’s unclear how many of the island’s residents have remained there amid the conflict.
SENEGAL
The Senegalese government has closed a number of overseas consular offices after those facilities were targeted in various acts of vandalism in recent days. Senegalese officials have not directly linked those incidents to unrest over the legal status of opposition leader Ousmane Sonko, which has sparked at least 16 deaths inside Senegal over the past few days. But it seems reasonable to assume a connection.
BURKINA FASO
Recently released government data paints a grim picture of Burkina Faso’s conflict against Islamist militants. That conflict has displaced more than 2 million people within the country and as a result has generated massive humanitarian need, which is being largely unmet by an international community that only ponied up around half of the $800 million aid organizations requested for their Burkinabé operations in 2022. Presumably readers will already know what I’m going to say about the US military budget so let’s just leave it at that.
NIGERIA
Islamic State West Africa Province fighters attacked a military convoy in northeastern Nigeria’s Borno state on Friday, causing “substantial” casualties according to Nigerian officials. ISWAP claimed that its fighters killed or wounded at least 20 Nigerian soldiers. Elsewhere, armed attackers on motorcycle killed at least 30 people in strikes on six villages in northern Nigeria’s Sokoto state over the weekend. Authorities and local residents are referring to the attackers as “bandits,” which is a common framing for these sorts of incidents in that part of the country.
ETHIOPIA
A new report from Human Rights Watch accuses the Ethiopian government and Amhara regional security forces of engaging in a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” against Tigrayans in the region of “Western Tigray.” That area, which has long been the subject of an Amhara-Tigray land dispute, was occupied by security forces from Amhara during the Ethiopian government’s 2020-2022 war against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. According to HRW, the peace deal that ended the conflict has not led to any improvement in the treatment of Tigrayans in that region, where they’re being subjected to (among other violations) arbitrary detention and forced expulsion. Ethiopian officials are rejecting the report’s claims, calling them “distorted and misleading” and “not substantiated by evidence.”
EUROPE
RUSSIA
In Russia news:
The Biden administration on Tuesday blacklisted seven people with alleged ties to Russian intelligence services. They’re accused of trying to “destabilize democracy” in Moldova. The European Union, meanwhile, sanctioned nine Russians linked with the prosecution and imprisonment of Russian opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza, who received a whopping 25 year sentence in April for having criticized the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The EU penalties include a travel ban and asset freezes.
Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin’s ongoing love affair with the Russian military has escalated to the point where his fighters have reportedly captured the commander of Russia’s 72nd Brigade, Lieutenant Colonel Roman Venevitin. Prigozhin filmed Venevitin confessing to having ordered his soldiers to fire on Wagner Group fighters while they were withdrawing from Bakhmut, blaming a “personal dislike” for the mercenary firm. Prigozhin had alleged some sort of attack on a column of his fighters last week so this is vindication. It’s hard to believe he would have done something so provocative without some sort of wink and nod arrangement with a senior Russian official or two.
Another document from the prodigious Discord leak reportedly says that “a European intelligence service” informed the CIA that the Ukrainian military had a plan to blow up the Nord Stream gas pipelines in June 2022, about three months before said pipelines blew up (purely coincidentally, I’m sure). According to The Washington Post, details about this plan align pretty closely with details the German government has uncovered in its investigation into the blasts, and with an emerging (but largely unspoken) European consensus that Ukraine was behind the bombing. If this is true it suggests that the US government at the very least allowed the Nord Stream attack to take place.
UKRAINE
The Nova Kakhovka hydroelectric dam on Ukraine’s Dnipro River burst on Tuesday, sending a wall of water rushing downstream from the Kakhovka reservoir and sending the Russian and Ukrainian governments into a frenzy of finger-pointing. There is no solid evidence as to who might have been responsible for the collapse and indeed it’s possible nobody was directly responsible for it, as neglect coupled with war damage could in theory have simply worn the structure out. Apparently there are some indications of an explosion at the scene, but given that this was a hydroelectric dam even that may not definitively prove anything.
If this was a deliberate act there are arguments to be made for either side having perpetrated it. Geographically the downstream flooding is likely to have battered the eastern side of the Dnipro, the side under Russian control, harder than the western side. The destruction of the dam also threatens the canal that supplies Russian-controlled Crimea with most of its fresh water. At the same time, if the Ukrainian military was planning to cross the southern portion of the Dnipro as part of its grand counteroffensive, the flooding will probably make that more difficult. Destroying the dam seriously impacts Ukraine’s power infrastructure and could threaten a swathe of Ukrainian agricultural land. And it could threaten disaster at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which relies on the reservoir’s water to cool the facility, though the International Atomic Energy Agency says there’s no “immediate” risk on that front.
One thing that is certain is the environmental damage the dam’s destruction has caused, due to flooding as well as the downstream release of various contaminants picked up by the waters. There’s no indication as to any casualties and that may not be possible for quite some time. Likewise there’s no way to measure the displacement this has caused, though that’s likely to be quite substantial. Global wheat and corn prices rose in the aftermath of the incident, though wheat eventually closed down for the day and corn seems to have closed basically level. But any long-term damage to Ukrainian agriculture could have substantial effects on global food prices.
Elsewhere, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on Tuesday pronounced Ukraine’s counteroffensive “thwarted,” following three days of fighting in which he claims Russian forces killed or wounded some 3700 Ukrainians. The Ukrainian military is still denying that it’s begun the counteroffensive, though it has been “shifting to offensive actions” around Bakhmut and US officials are speculating that this could indeed be the opening move in said counteroffensive. Prigozhin, for whatever it’s worth, is calling Russian claims of heavy Ukrainian losses “just some wild fantasies,” though he may be a bit biased.
POLAND
The European Court of Justice ruled on Tuesday that the Polish government’s 2019 judicial reform law contravenes the European Union’s rule of law standards by undermining judicial independence. Among other provisions, that 2019 law imposes limits on the use of EU law in Polish courts and on cases that judges could refer to the ECJ. The ruling is a win for the European Commission, which has been withholding EU aid money from Poland and fining it over the judicial dispute.
BULGARIA
The Bulgarian parliament on Tuesday confirmed a new cabinet, borne out of what may be a rather tenuous coalition between the rival GERB and We Continue the Change parties. Former education minister Nikolay Denkov takes over as prime minister, with plans to turn that office over to GERB’s Maria Gabriel in nine months. Their coalition agenda includes judicial reform and anti-corruption measures, though mostly they’ll be hoping to maintain some stability after a period in which Bulgaria has held five parliamentary elections over about two years.
AMERICAS
VENEZUELA
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro visited Saudi Arabia on Monday. While he and his team reportedly discussed a number of deals with the Saudis, including Crown Prime Mohammed bin Salman, from what I can tell they didn’t reach any substantive outcomes. Instead the Saudis may have used Maduro to deliver another one of their pointed “we’re not your sidekicks” messages to the US—it can’t be a coincidence that Maduro visited just before US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Additionally, the Saudis may view improving relations with Maduro as a way to prise Venezuela out of its ongoing relationship with Iran, a relationship based in large part on their mutual experience under US sanctions.
COLOMBIA
The Colombian government on Monday withdrew its arrest warrant for National Liberation Army (ELN) rebel leader Antonio García. President Gustavo Petro requested the withdrawal as a gesture of good faith toward García, who has been participating in the latest round of ELN peace talks with Petro’s government. The move suggests that those talks are trending in a positive direction.
UNITED STATES
Finally, let’s wrap up with some unfortunate climate news:
The first summer on record that melts practically all of the Arctic’s floating sea ice could occur as early as the 2030s, according to a new scientific study — about a decade sooner than researchers previously predicted.
The peer-reviewed findings, published Tuesday, also show that this milestone of climate change could materialize even if nations manage to curb greenhouse gas emissions more decisively than they are currently doing. Earlier projections had found that stronger action to slow global warming might be enough to preserve the summer ice. The latest research suggests that, where Arctic sea ice is concerned, only steep, sharp emissions cuts might be able to reverse the effects of the warming already underway.
“We are very quickly about to lose the Arctic summer sea-ice cover, basically independent of what we are doing,” said Dirk Notz, a climate scientist at the University of Hamburg in Germany and one of the new study’s five authors. “We’ve been waiting too long now to do something about climate change to still protect the remaining ice.”
Although the study offers the hope of those “steep, sharp emissions cuts,” we all know those aren’t in the offing and so what this study means is that Arctic summer sea ice will inevitably become a thing of the past relatively soon. This climatic upheaval has been challenging for Arctic communities and is destroying Arctic ecosystems, but it’s also bad news for the rest of the planet in that the loss of sea ice is a feedback loop. Ice reflects sunlight back into space, so the less of it there is the more that energy is absorbed by the water. In this case that’s likely to speed up the melting of Greenland’s ice cap, which unlike the Arctic ice cap is mostly on land and therefore will cause sea levels to rise as it melts into the ocean. Faster Arctic heating will also change global weather patterns in unpredictable ways.