World roundup: March 9 2021
Stories from Iran, China, Haiti, and more
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THESE DAYS IN HISTORY
March 8, 1010 (or thereabouts): Persian writer Abu’l-Qasim Ferdowsi completes his monumental epic, the Shahnameh.
March 8, 1722: At the Battle of Gulnabad, a Ghilzai Afghan army under Mahmud Hotak defeats the Safavid army, inflicting heavy casualties. The Safavid defeat exposed their capital, Isfahan, to the Afghan forces, who then besieged it. The Safavids surrendered on October 23, and while they had a brief semi-revival in the early 1730s, for all practical purposes this defeat brought their dynasty to a close.
March 8, 1963: Syria’s 8 March Revolution
March 9, 1500: Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral sets sail with a fleet bound for India by a circuitous route through the western Atlantic Ocean. In April, Cabral’s fleet made landfall in what is now eastern Brazil. It’s unclear whether he knew the land was there or just stumbled on it while making a wide turn toward the southern tip of Africa. Either way, this was the one part of the Americas that was far enough east to fall within Portugal’s allotted colonial domain under the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. Cabral’s fleet eventually continued on around Africa to Calicut, where he and his crew massacred around 600 people on ten merchant ships in retaliation for an attack on a Portuguese factory, and then back to Portugal.
March 9, 1862: The second day of the Battle of Hampton Roads features an extremely inconclusive engagement between the Confederate ironclad warship CSS Virginia and the Union ironclad USS Monitor. Neither vessel was able to defeat or even damage the other to any significant extent, which seems lame but in fact is why this engagement changed the course of naval warfare. Although ironclad warships had been on the horizon for some time (Britain and France were already working on theirs), an engagement between two such vessels showed conclusively that wooden hulled ships were on the brink of obsolescence, and the rest of the world responded accordingly.
INTERNATIONAL
Worldometer’s coronavirus figures for March 9:
118,146,046 confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide (21,690,691 active, +388,007 since yesterday)
2,621,154 reported fatalities (+8962 since yesterday)
In today’s global news:
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development now expects the global economy to expand by 5.6 percent in 2021. That’s substantially more optimistic, if you’re into economic growth, than the OECD’s December estimate of 4.2 percent. It cites the substantial US economic recovery package just passed by Congress as well as the early rollout of vaccines as reasons for the higher estimate. Of course that growth isn’t going to be evenly distributed, because nothing in this world ever is. The US and Chinese economies are expected to do particularly well, while developing countries, which at present can barely even find any vaccine supplies much less pay for them, will struggle. Shocking, I know.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
16,117 confirmed coronavirus cases (+75)
1074 reported fatalities (+6)
During a visit to Russia on Tuesday, UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan told reporters that efforts to reintegrate Syria into the Arab League are being complicated by US sanctions under the 2019 Caesar Act. To some extent I think Abdullah was kissing up to his hosts with this comment, but he still has a point. By its own rhetoric, Washington’s main concern with respect to Syria is somehow drawing it out of Iran’s orbit. The only way that can begin to happen is through the restoration of Syria’s links to the rest of the Arab world—and, in particular, to economic heavyweights like Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Unfreezing Syria’s Arab League membership would be a step in that direction. I have no doubt that US sanctions are making that more difficult, meaning by its own standard for success Washington’s current Syria policy, whatever you make of it, is counterproductive.
YEMEN
2586 confirmed cases (+41)
654 reported fatalities (+1)
The Saudi-led coalition in Yemen says it intercepted a Houthi drone on Tuesday that was heading toward southern Saudi Arabia. The Yemeni military, meanwhile, is saying that its forces killed a senior rebel commander in the Taiz region on Sunday. Fighting in Taiz appears to have flared up considerably over the past several days after having been largely frozen for several months. Pro government forces have reportedly captured Taiz province’s Jabal Habashi district, albeit amid reports of heavy civilian casualties.
IRAN
1,706,559 confirmed cases (+8554)
60,867 reported fatalities (+81)
The Biden administration on Tuesday levied sanctions against two Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “interrogators” over alleged human rights abuses. These are Biden’s first Iran sanctions and, while they’re targeted and deal with human rights rather than Iran’s nuclear program, they’re not exactly going to help stimulate diplomacy. On a related subject, at Foreign Affairs Johns Hopkins’ Vali Nasr argues that domestic Iranian political trends make it imperative that the administration act with more urgency if it has any hope of reviving the JCPOA:
Some in the U.S. and European foreign policy establishment argue that Washington should press for full compliance—or even for further concessions—before rejoining the deal. It is easy to read desperation into Iran’s repeated calls for the United States to quickly lift economic sanctions, and Washington may be tempted to press its advantage. But delay will only weaken Biden’s hand, risking a total collapse of the 2015 agreement. If that happens, Iran could follow through on threats to increase its uranium enrichment and accelerate its nuclear weapons programs, precipitating a major crisis that could put the United States and Iran on a path to war.
Iran’s rulers know they must strengthen the economy, but they are also under tremendous political pressure to stand up to the United States. Growing U.S. economic pressure and the January 2020 killing of General Qasem Soleimani, the top commander of the elite Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—as well as the more recent assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, reportedly by Israeli operatives—have only strengthened hard-liners among Iran’s leadership, pushing moderate voices in favor of engagement and diplomacy to the margins. A recent wave of media meaculpas from those who previously spoke in support of the nuclear deal is telling of the country’s current mood, as is the ascendancy of those who frame the United States as an existential threat bent on Iran’s destruction.
Iran adopted “strategic patience” in response to Trump’s “maximum pressure,” but the longer Biden tarries, the more Iran’s leaders will be willing to use regional tensions and their country’s nuclear program and bomb-making capabilities to pressure the United States. For that reason, Biden must lead by example and move as quickly as possible to formally return to the nuclear deal, deferring U.S. demands for verification until U.S. and Iranian negotiators can agree on a precise sequence of steps that will bring both countries into full compliance with the accord.
ASIA
ARMENIA
175,198 confirmed cases (+182)
3232 reported fatalities (+7)
Thousands of protesters supporting Armenian opposition parties blockaded the parliament building in Yerevan on Tuesday to again press their demand for Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s resignation. This is normally the kind of thing that draws a response from state security forces, but Pashinyan may not be able to rely on their support. He’s still trying to fire army chief of staff Onik Gasparyan, who apparently refuses to leave despite having been, you know, fired. The PM’s recent offer to hold an early election hasn’t helped calm things down, opposition leaders having rejected any option that doesn’t involve Pashinyan stepping down.
MYANMAR
142,059 confirmed cases (+14)
3200 reported fatalities (+0)
Hundreds of anti-junta protesters who were besieged by police overnight in Yangon’s Sanchaung district were apparently able to leave the area early Tuesday morning after the police presence was relaxed. Before they left, police reportedly arrested at least 50 people in Sanchaung. Elsewhere, another senior official in Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League of Democracy party mysteriously died in government custody overnight. Zaw Myat Linn just happened to succumb to, well, something after being arrested, just as fellow NLD official Khin Maung Latt did after he was arrested on Saturday. Whatever happened to the two of them I’m sure it’s all very simple and believable.
CHINA
90,002 confirmed cases (+8) on the mainland, 11,121 confirmed cases (+21) in Hong Kong
4636 reported fatalities (+0) on the mainland, 202 reported fatalities (+0) in Hong Kong
The Russian and Chinese governments on Tuesday concluded a (very) preliminary agreement to collaborate on building a “research station” on the moon. The hypothetical facility would in theory be international in nature, so other countries could use it, kind of like the International Space Station but more lunar I guess.
At Responsible Statecraft, Quincy’s Michael Swaine doesn’t like what he’s seen of the Biden administration’s China policy thus far:
Before taking office, Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and others who have now joined the Biden Administration explicitly stated that they do not favor a Cold War with China, titanic ideological struggles, or fruitless efforts to restore American primacy. And they certainly expressed a desire for more positive consultation with allies and partners than occurred during the failed Trump Administration.
But since taking office, the dominant themes and initiatives on China and East Asia today sound more like the old zero-sum, dominance-oriented Trump “strategy” toward Beijing of yesterday. These include repeated references to strategic competition and the correctness of Trump’s basic hardline approach to Beijing, its formation of a Pentagon Task Force focused on how best to counter China and its assertions of a need to restore America’s “traditional role” in Asia. There have been formal statements by leading Biden officials hyping the central importance of the “pacing threat” posed by China, and, as noted above, the usual throw-away lines about cooperation with Beijing in some areas, as needed. While correctly stressing the top-priority requirement to strengthen U.S. competitiveness and the Washington’s image in the world, the Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, as with other Biden documents and statements, seems to avoid talking specifically about how best to engage Beijing and East Asia in more positive-sum, cooperative ways that benefit all parties.
The continued (albeit slightly reduced) Biden emphasis on great-power competition with China both inflates the threat China poses to the United States and risks downplaying the need to cooperate deeply with Beijing on handling an array of urgent transnational perils, including (but not limited to) climate change and pandemics. It also seems to ignore the risks and costs of a China-centered East Asia policy in which Washington is apparently to play its traditional role as the dominant regional security guarantor. This will increase, not decrease, the likelihood of crises and conflict with Beijing, something no Asian nation wants.
Whatever you may think of Joe Biden’s approach toward China, I wouldn’t expect it to change anytime soon, not with Biden scheduled to participate this week in his first meeting with the other leaders of the “Quad” (Australia, India, and Japan)—whose sole reason for being is to fret over What Is To Be Done About China—and certainly not with senior US military officers advocating increases to the US military presence in the western Pacific.
AFRICA
LIBYA
140,688 confirmed cases (+1030)
2297 reported fatalities (+9)
Libya’s dueling parliaments are still considering Prime Minister-designate Abdul Hamid Dbeibah’s proposed interim government at their joint session in Sirte. Dbeibah addressed the body on Tuesday to plead his case, amid a brewing scandal over claims that he only won election to his current post because his supporters bribed members of the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum to vote for him. Those allegations aren’t doing Dbeibah any favors, certainly, and while it wouldn’t be surprising if they were true it also wouldn’t be surprising if they’d been invented by somebody with designs on his upcoming gig.
On the plus side, if for some reason you want to fly from Misrata to Benghazi it’s now possible to do that, as flights between those two cities resumed on Tuesday. A baby step to be sure, but given that it’s been about seven years since those flights were halted because of the war, it is a sign of progress.
IVORY COAST
35,477 confirmed cases (+146)
206 reported fatalities (+2)
Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara’s Rally of Houphouëtists for Democracy and Peace party has emerged from Saturday’s parliamentary election victorious, according to an announcement from the country’s national electoral commission on Tuesday. It does not appear, as far as I can tell, that the commission released the results of the vote—it just announced that RHDP had won a majority—so there’s no indication how the party performed relative to the number of parliamentary seats it controlled going into the vote. The opposition Democratic Party of Ivory Coast has already alleged fraud, but so far there has not been the kind of unrest that characterized last October’s presidential election.
NIGERIA
159,252 confirmed cases (+346)
1988 reported fatalities (+6)
Bandits reportedly kidnapped 25 people in attacks on two villages in Nigeria’s Niger state early Monday. The epidemic of kidnapping for ransom across northwestern and north-central Nigeria is really beginning to reach crisis levels. Little continues to be known about the gangs that engage in this behavior apart from the fact that their motive seems clearly to be financial rather than something more ideological.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
26,684 confirmed cases (+57)
712 reported fatalities (+0)
The Biden administration on Tuesday imposed sanctions on an Israeli billionaire, Dan Gertler, over allegations of corruption surrounding his company’s mining operations in the DRC. Or rather it reimposed those sanctions, which had been lifted by the Trump administration. I don’t know all the details, but it would seen that Gertler made a number of sweetheart deals with former Congolese President Joseph Kabila that, according to the US Treasury Department, cost the DRC over $1.3 billion in lost export revenue. The Trump administration froze Gertler’s US-based assets in 2017, but after he’d retained Donald Trump’s lawyer/pal Alan Dershowitz as counsel, the administration decided to do him a solid and unfroze those assets this past January. In the meantime Gertler has presumably moved most or all of the money he had in the United States to friendlier environs, meaning the effect of blacklisting him again is likely to be muted.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
4,342,474 confirmed cases (+9445)
89,809 reported fatalities (+336)
The Russian government is apparently a bit disturbed at reports that the United States is preparing one or more cyber attacks against Russian targets. And, you know, I can see how that might be disconcerting. The Kremlin suggested that these attacks would amount to “international cyber crimes,” which is probably true to the extent that there is such a thing. But as the hacker-friendly Russian government surely knows, there’s really no international cyber law without somebody to enforce it.
Russian officials also seem perturbed by accusations from the Biden administration that “Russian intelligence services” are trying to “discredit” the COVID vaccines produced by Moderna and Pfizer. The administration claims that it’s “monitoring” Russian efforts to spread “disinformation” about those vaccines, presumably to drive demand for Russian-made vaccines instead. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that “Russia has never participated and does not intend to participate” in any effort to undermine confidence in any vaccine.
CYPRUS
37,650 confirmed cases (+420)
233 reported fatalities (+0)
Meeting with Cypriot Foreign Minister Nikos Christodoulides in Nicosia on Tuesday, Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio told reporters that Italy would never accept a “two-state solution” to the Cyprus dispute. Turkish Cypriots, with the Turkish government’s support/incitement, increasingly seem more inclined to seek an amicable divorce from rather than a reconciliation with their Greek neighbors. The United Nations is trying to restart peace talks, which last broke off back in 2017, but there doesn’t seem to be much urgency or momentum behind the effort. Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar, a nationalist whose election last year suggested that the island’s Turkish population had soured on the idea of negotiations, has been cool to the idea of new talks and particularly cool to the idea of European Union participation in new talks. But given that Cyprus is an EU member state, some level of EU involvement is inevitable.
AMERICAS
BRAZIL
11,125,017 confirmed cases (+69,537)
268,568 reported fatalities (+1954)
I’m not sure how much stock you can put in it, but at least one recent poll suggests that former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva would defeat incumbent Jair Bolsonaro were he to run in next year’s election, which he’s now suddenly eligible to do. Jacobin’s Benjamin Fogel is encouraged by this news, though he notes the array of forces that will undoubtedly fall in line behind Bolsonaro if Lula is his opponent:
Brazil’s center-right is also in full-on panic mode as their own electoral chances are going to sink rapidly. Despite their official opposition to Bolsonaro, many of them would prefer a second term of the far-right president to a PT government. The “moderates” have been vainly searching for somebody — a Brazilian Macron — who can pose as the leader of the broad front for democracy against Bolsonaro, while pursuing the more or less same economic agenda as Brazil’s president.
For all the moderate opposition’s talk about democracy, it is unlikely that they would back a center-left candidate in the second round against Bolsonaro. Brazil’s centrists not only removed Dilma Rousseff from office in 2016 but helped elect Bolsonaro in his contest against the PT’s Fernando Haddad. Some of the names being floated as potential candidates like former health minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta served in Bolsonaro’s cabinet and others like Doria and Huck supported Bolsonaro in 2018.
VENEZUELA
142,774 confirmed cases (+0)
1391 reported fatalities (+0)
The Biden administration decided on Monday to grant Temporary Protected Status to some 320,000 Venezuelans currently living in the United States. The decision gives those Venezuelans who apply 18 month residency in the US with a pathway toward citizenship. It’s meant to put a smiley face on a Venezuela policy that so far is pretty much the same as Donald Trump’s Venezuela policy in terms of the toll it’s taking on Venezuelans who are still in Venezuela. Trump, for all his supposed antipathy toward Nicolás Maduro’s government, never granted TPS to Venezuelans in the US and in fact was fairly keen to deport them whenever possible.
HAITI
12,594 confirmed cases (+58)
250 reported fatalities (+0)
At Responsible Statecraft, human rights lawyer Brian Concannon see a US hand in Haitian President Jovenel Moïse’s slide into authoritarianism:
As thousands of Haitians protest each Sunday against Jovenel Moïse, their embattled and increasingly authoritarian president, their protest signs and songs exhort the U.S. ambassador and the head of the United Nations mission in Haiti, who is also a career U.S. diplomat, “to stop supporting a dictatorship.” The protests reflect a broad consensus among politicians, intellectuals, lawyers and others in Haiti, supported by human rights experts and members of the U.S. Congress, that the Biden administration is propping up Moïse and preventing the emergence of a Haitian-led solution to the political crisis.
The Trump administration had backed Moïse despite revelations of spectacular corruption, government-linked massacres, and the expiration of Haiti’s parliament. In just one incident, the 2018 La Saline massacre, government-allied gangs killed at least seventy people to retaliate against anti-government organizing in the neighborhood. I interviewed survivors, and their stories were eerily similar to the stories I had heard 30 years before from the survivors of the 1988 St. Jean Bosco Church massacre — also in La Saline — by the vestiges of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s Tonton Macoute death squad.
Haitians were hopeful that the Biden administration would change course before February 7, the day that Moïse’s term in office ended, according to Haiti’s judicial oversight body, the bar federation, and religious leaders, as well as the leadership of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee. But on February 5, the State Department, citing the position of Luis Almagro, Secretary-General of the Organization of American States, pronounced that Moïse’s term extended until 2022. This interpretation is based on a constitutional ambiguity generated by election delays in 2015 and 2016. But, as most commentators note, it is inconsistent with electoral law and with precedent set by Moïse himself.
UNITED STATES
29,801,506 confirmed cases (+55,683)
540,574 reported fatalities (+1704)
Finally, the Pentagon on Tuesday approved an extension of the National Guard’s deployment at the US Capitol, which began in response to the January 6 riot there but is beginning to look like an indefinite thing that we’re all going to have to accept as The Way Things Are Now. Foreign Policy’s Stephen Walt sees in this some evidence that the American Empire is coming home:
“Fortress America” is a derogatory term that usually refers to extreme forms of isolationism. Last week, however, CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria gave the idea a new and equally disturbing twist. In a thought-provoking column in the Washington Post, Zakaria described how excessive concerns for security are making the United States more “imperial” in appearance than the old colonial empires, with embassies, public buildings, and even the U.S. Capitol itself surrounded by barricades, moats, or fortifications. Instead of presenting a welcoming visage to the outside world and to the American people, one that conveys confidence, strength, and openness, America’s public face appears uncertain, vulnerable, fearful, and distant.
According to Zakaria, such concerns have also encouraged an excessive regard for secrecy, new layers of hierarchy and restriction, and a timid and sclerotic approach to public policy. In his words, “the U.S. government now resembles a dinosaur—a large, lumbering beast with much body and little brain, increasingly well-protected but distant from ordinary people and unresponsive to the real challenges that confront the nation.”
I couldn’t agree more, having noticed much the same tendency a few years ago. But the big question is: Why is this happening? Is it simply because the world has gotten more dangerous, or is there a connection between how the United States has been acting abroad and various threats to liberty at home?