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TODAY IN HISTORY
November 10, 1444: The Ottomans, under Sultan Murad II, defeat a combined Hungarian-Polish “Crusader” army at the Battle of Varna in what is today Bulgaria. Murad was called out of retirement by his army after having abdicated in favor of his young son, Mehmed II (who would one day be known as “Mehmed the Conqueror” but not just yet) to lead them against the Crusaders, who were threatening an advance on Constantinople. The victory was not overwhelming—the Ottomans lost so many warriors that Murad initially wasn’t sure they’d won the battle—but the death of Polish-Hungarian ruler Władysław III/Vladislaus I shattered their alliance and the Crusade, ending the threat it posed to the Ottoman Empire.
November 10, 1659: The Maratha leader Shivaji and his outnumbered army defeat the Adilshahi under Afzal Khan at the Battle of Pratapgarh. It was the first major victory Shivaji would win over a Muslim kingdom, but it would definitely not be the last. His kingdom grew rapidly in the wake of the battle and became the nucleus of the Maratha Empire, which subjugated the Mughal Empire in the middle of the 18th century and became India’s dominant political entity until it was defeated by the British East India Company in the early 19th century.
MIDDLE EAST
LEBANON
Somebody opened fire on a United Nations peacekeeping (UNIFIL) patrol in the Tyre district in southern Lebanon on Tuesday. There were no casualties and the shooting apparently stopped after the patrol returned fire. UNIFIL’s mandate will lapse at the end of the year, with no apparent replacement in sight. G7 foreign ministers were meeting in Paris on Tuesday and agreed on “the need to move quickly toward a new security architecture” in southern Lebanon, but there doesn’t seem to be any consensus as to what that architecture might look like. In the meantime, the Israeli military (IDF) is continuing to pulverize southern Lebanon on a near-daily basis. Lebanese media reported that it carried out multiple airstrikes on Nabatieh province on Tuesday and particularly took aim at the town of Qantara.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The IDF killed at least eight people across Gaza on Tuesday, seven of them in multiple airstrikes on parts of Gaza city. UNICEF is claiming that Israeli authorities are blocking the importation of equipment that could be used to repair a damaged stormwater basin in Gaza city. Without repairs that basin could flood, spreading water and sewage and exacerbating the already dangerous environmental conditions that people are facing in the territory. In the West Bank, the IDF killed a 14 year old Palestinian and wounded two other teenagers during a raid on a village near the city of Nablus.
The Israeli Knesset opened its new legislative session on Tuesday and opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot is making a push to replace the current speaker, an ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Knesset speaker’s office is powerful, having control of the legislative agenda, so if Eisenkot is going to oust Netanyahu and hope to do much governing this is a move he’ll have to make. He should have enough votes to do so, even as he’s still working to coalesce those votes into a workable government.
YEMEN
A presumably Saudi airstrike hit a gas station near the Yemeni city of Sanaa overnight, killing at least one person and wounding nine. In Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, authorities said that their air defenses had intercepted two Ansarullah missiles that were heading for Riyadh.
KUWAIT
Gulf Cooperation Council member states agreed on Tuesday that they will open a “forward military command center” in Kuwait. While this is an indication of increased GCC cohesion under the collective pressure of the Iran war, several details remain unclear, including when this facility will open, how many personnel will be deployed to it and from where, and what it will be intended to do.
IRAN
Marco Rubio told his fellow G7 foreign ministers on Tuesday that the US doesn’t “need to conduct military strikes” on Iran when it can simply keep squeezing the Iranian economy. This appears to be the new position of some of the more hawkish elements of the Trump administration, who may perhaps be responding to last week’s midterm election and the apparent public demand for an end to the war but who are not interested in reaching a negotiated settlement with Tehran. In lieu of kinetic war, economic war will have to do. This certainly seems to be where Donald Trump himself is, at least for the moment. Economic war is, of course, still war, all the moreso when it’s being waged via a naval blockade that requires the perpetual deployment of massive military force around Iran. Spencer Ackerman puts it better than I can:
Beware any attempt at describing “the status quo” as the alternative to the Iran War. The status quo is the Iran War. Absolutely nothing, from the United States’ perspective, is resolved. No strategic effect sought by the United States has been achieved. What we can say instead is that a state of hostilities has instead been entrenched. Welcome to forever. You’ve been here awhile. And you’ve been in the neighborhood for much longer.
The forever war also comes with a constant risk of escalation. On that note, Iranian forces attacked Oman’s Didamar island overnight. Didamar is uninhabited but it houses navigational equipment, including a lighthouse, to assist vessels that are transiting the Strait of Hormuz. This attack was meant to hinder that traffic. Along with the semi-regular US attacks on Iran’s Qeshm island this low-level war over the strait seems like it will continue indefinitely in concert with the blockade.
ASIA
MYANMAR
Myanmar state media reported on Tuesday that the country’s military had captured a rebel “military command headquarters” along with ten other militant bases along the border between Myanmar’s Mon state and the Bago region. This was allegedly (there’s no way to confirm the story) the outcome of a six day military operation in that area. The captured facilities belonged variously to elements of the “People’s Defense Force,” which emerged in opposition to the military’s 2021 coup, and the Karen National Liberation Army.
INDONESIA
The office of Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto claimed on Tuesday that Vice President Gibran Rakabuming Raka had offered his resignation at a meeting earlier in the day. Gibran has been embroiled in a scandal over whether or not he actually met the educational requirements to run for his current office in 2024. Indonesia’s Constitutional Court and Supreme Court ruled last month that the documents he submitted to prove his education level were insufficient.
Gibran is the son of former Indonesian President Joko Widodo, and he’s also become enmeshed in the breakdown of the political alliance between his father and Prabowo. Their factions were aligned in 2024 but have fallen out since then, and that may have something to do with the wiretapping scandal that recently got Prabowo’s chief of staff arrested for allegedly eavesdropping on his boss. Though Prabowo has reportedly expressed support for Gibran, his political faction may be trying behind the scenes to push the VP out.
AFRICA
SUDAN
Rapid Support Forces drone strikes killed at least nine civilians in a village in southeastern Sudan’s Blue Nile state on Tuesday. This incident took place near the town of Kurmuk along the Ethiopian border, which has been under RSF control since August.
NIGERIA
According to the United Nations refugee office, violence in northern Nigeria has displaced “nearly 64,000 people” into neighboring Niger this year. This includes jihadist violence primarily concentrated in northeastern Nigeria as well as bandit attacks elsewhere. Needless to say this has caused considerable strain on both Niger, which already hosts hundreds of thousands of Nigerian refugees, and on the UN and aid groups. The UN is failing even to register the new arrivals and concerns about malnutrition and sickness are rising.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
Reuters is reporting that “renewed Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil refineries since late October have reduced Russia's oil refining capacity by about 30%.” Those attacks, which resumed after the Ukrainians paused those strikes under pressure from the Trump administration, have hit “nine of Russia's 35 major refineries over the past week” accounting for around 300,000 metric tons of refining capacity per day.
Elsewhere, the Russian government expelled a Moldovan diplomatic staffer on Tuesday. This was in retaliation for the expulsion of a Russian staffer from Moldova last month following the crash of a Russian drone on Moldovan soil.
UKRAINE
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described Tuesday’s US-Ukraine-Russia peace talks in Abu Dhabi as “constructive and quite substantive,” while US envoy Jared Kushner also characterized them as “constructive.” Nobody is going into much detail, though that may be understandable given that the negotiations are continuing on Wednesday. The main sticking points still appear to be a) Russia’s insistence that Ukraine give up the rest of the Donbas and b) Moscow’s preference for working out a Europe-wide security framework first and the details of a Ukraine settlement later. The Ukrainian position is that the peace deal should come first and the security framework later.
FRANCE
The French government summoned the Iranian ambassador in Paris on Tuesday to protest the alleged Iranian hack of cooling units in several French grocery stores. Sanctions will likely follow. The Iranian government, unsurprisingly, has denied any involvement in the hacks.
UNITED KINGDOM
Police in the UK have arrested a US soldier on suspicion of spying for Russia. The scope of his espionage hasn’t been made public. Metropolitan Police counterterrorism personnel reportedly worked with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and the US military in their investigation, so one assumes that there won’t be any interference from Washington as the case proceeds.
Elsewhere, the US military evacuated several refueling tankers from the UK Royal Air Force base at Mildenhall on Tuesday over another alleged Iranian threat. As you may recall, it did something similar with respect to RAF Fairford last month. The nature and seriousness of this alleged threat are apparently still being debated internally but the Pentagon has also upgraded the “threat level” at both Mildenhall and RAF Lakenheath, another facility with a US presence. The US Justice Department has also charged three Iranians partly in connection with the alleged RAF Fairford threat.
AMERICAS
PARAGUAY
World Politics Review’s James Bosworth says that the banking scandal that brought down Paraguayan President Santiago Peña last week involved a good deal of “political infighting”:
Behind the scenes, this was as much about political infighting within the ruling party as it was the banking issue. Peña’s Colorado Party has ruled Paraguay for all but five years since 1947. Its current caudillo is Horacio Cartes, one of the country’s wealthiest men who served as president from 2013 to 2018. Cartes made his money in the tobacco industry and had been sanctioned by the U.S. for ties to corruption and illicit trafficking, though he successfully lobbied the Trump administration to be removed from the sanctions list last year.
Peña came to power as an ally of Cartes, but the two men had been clashing in recent months over several issues, including whom the party would nominate for president in the next election in 2028. [New President Pedro] Alliana, who has taken Peña’s place as president, is close to Cartes, and rumors are flying that Cartes and his allies sent tips to regulators and journalists to sink Peña and move Alliana into the top job.
Once Cartes announced Thursday morning that he endorsed impeaching Peña, it became clear that the president likely only had hours remaining in office. The opposition and all branches of the Colorado Party unified behind the impeachment effort. When Peña attempted to resign—which would have allowed him to keep the lifetime immunity granted to former presidents—Cartes made sure Colorado Party lawmakers rejected the resignation and proceeded with impeachment so that Peña would be prosecuted.
VENEZUELA
ExxonMobil has signed a “memorandum of understanding” with Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA, “to assess upstream oil opportunities.” The company left Venezuela in 2007 after then-President Hugo Chávez effectively nationalized the country’s oil reserves. This very preliminary agreement doesn’t mean it’s returning, but it does offer further evidence that the Trump administration is opening Venezuela up for business/exploitation now that it’s seized control of the country.
HAITI
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele claimed on Tuesday that his country’s military forces had destroyed the “headquarters” of the powerful 400 Mawozo gang in the Croix-des-Bouquets neighborhood outside Port-au-Prince. I put headquarters in quotes because the building in question is also the home of gang leader Wilson Joseph, who said last week that he’d contacted the Haitian government’s National Commission for Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration about prospects for negotiation. Joseph apparently wasn’t there when the attack took place, but 20 people were killed. Bukele had threatened to attack Joseph’s house if it could be located.
Axios reported on Tuesday that “officials” in the US State Department “have quietly raised objections to El Salvador's gang-fighting efforts in Haiti,” even though the operation apparently has Donald Trump’s blessing. The US chargé d’affaires in Haiti, David Howell, has objected to what he says is a lack of coordination between Salvadoran forces and the UN-backed “Gang Suppression Force,” which became a serious issue after the Salvadorans reportedly intervened in a GSF operation earlier this month. The US embassy in San Salvador filed a protest with Bukele’s government, which responded angrily on Monday by questioning Howell’s description of that incident and, more broadly, his “credibility.”
UNITED STATES
The UN Human Rights Council postponed its scheduled review of human rights in the US on Tuesday until sometime in January, after the Trump administration indicated that it would not participate. The council reviews the human rights records of every UN member state on a rotating basis but the administration simply refuses to recognize its legitimacy. Donald Trump pulled the US off of the council last year and this is actually the second time that this review has been delayed — it was initially scheduled for November 2025. The council is hoping somehow to convince the administration to participate in the review by January, which seems unlikely but I suppose it’s good to keep hope alive.
Finally, the US House of Representatives briefly considered articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday before voting 211-204 to refer them to the Judiciary Committee, where they will presumably lay dormant at least until the next legislative session begins in January. Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie introduced the articles but was unable to get any other Republicans to support them. Every Democrat who was present voted to keep the impeachment process alive but, somewhat embarrassingly, 11 House Democrats simply didn’t show up for the vote. Had they managed to be there the referral motion would have been defeated. Some of the absent Democrats are, I shit you not, blaming traffic.