World roundup: November 14 2024
Stories from China, Sudan, Peru, and elsewhere
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Today’s roundup is out early and somewhat abbreviated as I have a commitment this evening. We will catch up tomorrow. Thanks for reading!
TODAY IN HISTORY
November 14, 1965: The Battle of Ia Drang, the first major engagement between the United States and the North Vietnamese Army, begins. It ended on November 18 with both sides claiming victory, though the NVA’s ability to fight the much better armed US Army to a draw was a boost to their morale and probably the battle’s most important effect.
November 14, 2001: Fighters with the Northern Alliance rebel coalition enter and occupy the city of Kabul, marking the end of the US war in Afghanista—just kidding. I had you going there for a second, didn’t I?
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The United Nations Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices published a new report on Thursday finding that the Israeli government is “using starvation as a method of war” in Gaza, a tactic that is “consistent” with accusations of genocide. The committee further concluded that Israel is continuing, despite allegedly “binding” orders from both the International Court of Justice and the UN Security Council, to impose “collective punishment” on Gaza’s civilian population. The report seems to have been pretty comprehensive and while it’s not breaking any new ground for anyone who’s followed along with this atrocity it is important to have all the horrific details collected into one document.
Incidentally, Human Rights Watch also issued a new report on Thursday concluding that Israel is engaging in the deliberate forced transfer of Gaza’s population, which is a war crime. Primarily this has to do with the Israeli military’s (IDF) systematic destruction of swathes of Gaza that lie near the security fence separating the territory from Israel proper, which Israeli officials openly acknowledge (thus meeting the “deliberate” threshold) has been done to turn those areas into depopulated buffer zones. The intentional destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure and the expanding IDF presence along the “Netzarim Corridor” that bifurcates the territory north to south are also part and parcel of a forced transfer policy.
SYRIA
IDF airstrikes in and around Damascus killed at least 20 people, including at least three members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, on Thursday according to Syrian media and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Former Iranian parliament speaker Ali Larijani was supposed to arrive in Syria for meetings with Syrian officials, including President Bashar al-Assad, but it’s unclear whether the Israelis were trying to kill him. It may be worth noting that Israel has rather quietly been ratcheting up the frequency and intensity of its attacks in Syria, which isn’t exactly a “front” in its mass killing campaign the way Gaza and Lebanon are but is definitely feeling a halo effect.
TURKEY
Turkish Economy and Trade Minister Ömer Bolat revealed during an interview on Thursday that BRICS member states have offered Ankara a “partnership” with that bloc. Turkish officials confirmed earlier this year that they had applied for BRICS membership, so this is not out of the blue. However, “partner” status is not full membership—to be honest it’s not entirely clear what it is, given that the bloc only created this category at last month’s Kazan summit. It has been rumored that Turkey’s bid for full membership was blocked by the Indian government due to Ankara’s ties with Pakistan, but that’s just a rumor at this point. Partner status may also be less diplomatically challenging for Turkey given its membership in NATO.
IRAN
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) head Rafael Grossi visited Iran on Tuesday for talks on Iran’s largely unchecked nuclear program. President Masoud Pezeshkian reportedly expressed to him Iran’s “readiness to cooperate and converge with this international organisation to resolve the alleged ambiguities and doubts about the peaceful nuclear activity of our country.” As his visit wrapped up, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi took to social media to announce that Tehran is “willing to negotiate based on our national interest & our inalienable rights, but NOT ready to negotiate under pressure and intimidation.” Beyond that there’s no indication that the talks achieved anything especially noteworthy.
ASIA
PAKISTAN
A would-be car bomb reportedly detonated prematurely in northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Thursday, killing at least seven people including two children. A local Pakistani Taliban commander was apparently installing the bomb in a car when it exploded.
SRI LANKA
Sri Lankan voters headed to the polls on Thursday for the snap parliamentary election called by new President Anura Kumara Dissanayake back in September. It’s far too early to draw any conclusions, but initial returns do have Dissanayake’s leftist National People’s Power coalition out in front.
CHINA
With Chinese President Xi Jinping heading to Latin America for the forthcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Peru and the G20 summit in Brazil, The Wall Street Journal argues that he’ll be taking something of a victory lap over his commercial and diplomatic successes in the region—which have been driven to a large extent by a failure of US policy:
Few see Latin America as the U.S.’s backyard anymore.
The region’s nations are generally sincere in their desire for warm relations with the U.S., but they are often seen as a secondary priority in Washington. Beijing’s diplomats and executives, meanwhile, actively engage with local and national governments almost regardless of their political leanings.
“It’s super frustrating because this region has everything you’d think American companies would want,” said Ryan Berg, director of the Americas program at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies.
On top of deepening economic linkages, Xi promotes a governance model that breaks with the U.S.-led postwar order that he suggests is an outdated relic of colonialism. Xi’s sustained attention to the region “is symbolic, and countries of the Global South need that recognition,” said Alvaro Mendez, director of a unit at the London School of Economics and Political Science that studies China’s influence.
AFRICA
SUDAN
A new study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s “Sudan Research Group” suggests that the war between the Sudanese military and the Rapid Support Forces group has killed far more people than generally acknowledged. The UN has been maintaining an estimate of 20,000 deaths while acknowledging that it is likely well off the mark due to the difficulty of getting information out of the country. This new study estimates a death toll of 61,000 people in Sudan’s Khartoum state alone, while suggesting that casualties in that region have been undercounted by some 90 percent. Around 26,000 are thought to have been killed as a direct result of the violence while the rest have died from ancillary effects like the resulting lack of food and medical care. These findings probably can’t be replicated exactly for the rest of the country, but in particularly war-torn areas like Darfur the undercounting may be even more egregious.
Elsewhere, a report from Amnesty International finds that the Sudanese military has been capturing “armored vehicles manufactured by the United Arab Emirates and equipped with French defense systems” from RSF fighters. It’s long been accepted fact that the UAE is arming the RSF in violation of a UN embargo, despite repeated Emirati denials. But these French components are a new discovery and put the onus on the French government to take steps to ensure that the weapons it sells to the UAE aren’t being reexported to Sudan. It may be incumbent upon Paris to stop the sale of these particular systems to the UAE altogether.
KENYA
Africa Is a Country’s Wangui Kimari warns that Kenyan President William Ruto is overseeing an escalating spate of human rights abuses:
Ruto’s government is abducting people every day. Literally. There is not one day that has passed since the anti–finance bill protests started in June when Kenyans are not being bundled into unmarked Subaru cars by unidentified persons understood as plainclothes police officers (in all of their shades of vigilantism). While the president and his acolytes deny these events, which are often captured on city CCTV cameras or by citizen phones, these state kidnappings continue.
The Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) documents that in the period since the protests began, they have investigated 60 cases of extrajudicial killings and 71 cases of “abductions and forced disappearances.” But the public understands that the figure is likely much higher, since dozens of people who took part in the protests remain unaccounted for. Likely sinister evidence for this is the Nairobi City Mortuary’s admission that it received more bodies than average—over 50 percent more—in June, the period that corresponds to the height of these Gen Z–led street protests.
EUROPE
UKRAINE
According to Reuters, the Russian military’s multi-wave assault on Kupiansk briefly broke through defensive lines into the northeastern Ukrainian city on Wednesday. Ukrainian forces were eventually able to expel them from the city, but this sort of breakthrough usually suggests that those defensive lines are weakening and a more sustained breakthrough may not be far off. How the Russians respond may have much to do with how many losses they took on Wednesday, which is difficult to ascertain.
ITALY
The Guardian highlights the ongoing failure of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s grand asylum deportation program:
A multimillion-dollar migration deal between Italy and Albania aimed at curbing arrivals was presented by the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, as a new model for how to establish processing and detention centres for asylum seekers outside the EU.
The facilities in Albania were supposed to receive up to 3,000 men intercepted in international waters while crossing from Africa to Europe. But it seems neither von der Leyen nor Italy’s far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, had taken existing law into account.
Just a month after the much-publicised opening, only 24 asylum seekers have been sent to Albania, and none remain there now; five spent less than 12 hours in a detention centre, while the rest stayed for just over 48 hours.
All were transferred to Italy after Italian judges deemed it unlawful to detain them in Albania prior to repatriation to countries, such as Bangladesh and Egypt, considered “safe” by Rome. In doing so the judges were upholding a 4 October ruling by the European Union’s court of justice (ECJ) that a country outside the bloc could not be declared safe unless its entire territory was deemed safe.
The Italian right is now outraged at the judges, while Meloni’s government is on the hook for a cool $1 billion that she might as well have lit on fire.
AMERICAS
ARGENTINA
After a phone conversation with Donald Trump earlier this week, Argentine President Javier Milei is reportedly thinking about pulling his country out of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. I don’t know that there’s any evidence that one of these things has to do with the other, but the coincidence is pretty jarring given that Trump is likely to take the same step once he’s back in the White House. Milei has already pulled his delegation out of the UN’s COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan but the Paris withdrawal is not a done deal as yet. Argentine officials insist that their government does not deny the reality of climate change, which is interesting given that Milei has on multiple occasions explicitly and publicly denied the reality of climate change.
BRAZIL
Evidence is mounting that Wednesday’s twin bomb blasts in Brasília were (unsurprisingly) the result of an attempted act of far right terrorism. Brazilian authorities have reportedly identified the bomber, Francisco Wanderley Luiz, as, according to Reuters, “a former city council candidate from ex-President Jair Bolsonaro's right-wing party with a history of heated political rhetoric online.” He apparently threw one explosive device at the Brazilian Supreme Court building and then detonated a second device in the square outside, killing himself. Bolsonaro has already disavowed any responsibility for the attempted attack, attributing it instead to Luiz’s “mental health issues.”
PERU
Returning to the subject of China’s Latin American inroads, Xi Jinping was scheduled to open a new Chinese-owned port complex in the Peruvian city of Chancay on Thursday. However, the AP reports that despite the economic activity this facility is likely to generate there’s not much enthusiasm for it locally:
On the edge of Peru’s coastal desert, a remote fishing town where a third of all residents have no running water is being transformed into a huge deep-water port to cash in on the inexorable rise of Chinese interest in resource-rich South America.
The megaport of Chancay, a $1.3 billion project majority-owned by the Chinese shipping giant Cosco, is turning this outpost of bobbing fishing boats into an important node of the global economy. China’s President Xi Jinping inaugurates the port Thursday during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Peru.
The development — expected to encompass 15 quays and a large industrial park drawing more than $3.5 billion in investment over a decade — has met a skeptical response from impoverished villagers, who say it is depriving them of fishing waters and bringing no economic benefit to locals.
“Our fishing spots no longer exist here. They destroyed them,” said 78-year-old fisherman Julius Caesar — “like the emperor of Rome” — gesturing toward the dockside cranes. “I don’t blame the Chinese for trying to mine this place for all it’s worth. I blame our government for not protecting us.”
UNITED STATES
Finally, Foreign Policy in Focus’s John Feffer argues that Joe Biden’s greatest legacy may be having “reinvigorated” the US empire just in time for Donald Trump to take the wheel:
When President Biden first entered office in January 2021, one of his top priorities was to restore the global American empire from the chaos of the first Trump administration. Seizing upon the imperial trope of the United States as an organizer of the international system, Biden spoke about the need for the United States to restore order to a chaotic world.
“We are the organizing principle for the rest of the world,” Biden said in 2022.
Despite some initial failures, including the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan, the Biden administration achieved many of its imperial goals, such as the revitalization of U.S. alliances, a major strategic advantage of the United States over its rivals.
Trump has repeatedly asserted that the United States is a nation in decline, seizing upon President Biden’s cognitive decline and some of his imperial failures to insist that the United States is no longer respected. Soon, however, he will find himself in a position to lead a resurgent empire.
After all, the Biden administration spent the past four years rebooting the American empire, bolstering U.S. imperial power while making some of its most brazen moves in Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East.