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TODAY IN HISTORY
October 24, 1648: The Peace of Westphalia (mostly) ends the Thirty Years’ War. The settlement—which took the form of two treaties, the Treaty of Münster between the Holy Roman Emperor and France and the Treaty of Osnabrück between the Holy Roman Emperor and Sweden—reinforced the idea that the Emperor could not impose religious terms on the empire’s constituent states but also repudiated the idea that state sovereigns had the right to compel their subjects to adopt said sovereign’s chosen religion. It also made Calvinism a legally recognized variant of Christianity and established the legal equality of Catholics and Lutherans. Many IR scholars credit Westphalia with reifying the concept of national sovereignty, with its emphasis on the sanctity of national borders and the principle of non-interference in domestic affairs—hence the term “Westphalian sovereignty.”
October 24, 1912: On the same day, the Ottoman Empire suffers two decisive defeats, one to a Bulgarian army in the Battle of Kirk Kilisse in modern Turkey and the other to a Serbian army in the Battle of Kumanovo in modern North Macedonia. The simultaneous defeats set the tone for the First Balkan War, which had begun on October 8 and would end in May 1913 with a decisive victory for the Balkan League (Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia). The Bulgarian victory at Kirk Kilisse gave its armies an open path to Istanbul, though in two battles at Çatalca (on the outskirts of the city) in November and then in February-April, the Ottomans were able first to stop and then to rout the Bulgarian offensive. Thus, although they lost the war, the Ottomans were able to defend their capital and preserve what was left of their empire.
October 25, 1147: The Siege of Lisbon ends. This siege involved soldiers who had initially set out for the Holy Land to join what we now call the Second Crusade. And speaking of which, this is also the date on which the army of Holy Roman Emperor Conrad III was thoroughly defeated by the Seljuks at the Battle of Dorylaeum, removing it as a potential factor in that crusade. We’ve seen how the Crusade eventually turned out (SPOILER ALERT: not well).
October 25, 1917: The Bolsheviks begin an uprising in Petrograd that would within a day see them overthrow the provisional Russian government of Alexander Kerensky and, after a lengthy civil war, become the new leaders of Russia. This is the Old Style (Julian calendar) date of the revolution, which according to the Gregorian calendar actually took place on November 7. But since it’s called the “October Revolution” I feel weird commemorating it in November.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
Gunmen reportedly attacked a security checkpoint in southern Syria’s Daraa province on Sunday, killing one “highway security officer” and wounding two others according to The New Arab. Two of the attackers were captured and I haven’t seen any indication as to their affiliation(s). Elsewhere, TNA is also reporting that the Israeli military (IDF) resumed excavation work on an earthen fortification that it’s been building in southern Syria’s Quneitra province “after a pause of about six weeks.” It’s unclear why this work has resumed or if it means some further escalation is in the offing.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The IDF killed at least eight people in multiple attacks across Gaza on Sunday. Al Jazeera reported that one “massive” strike targeted the campus of Islamic University in Gaza city, from which there may be additional casualties. The New Arab reported on Saturday that Israeli bombing had “cut off the water supply to large parts of Gaza City after damaging a main supply line.” Municipal officials were attempting to organize repairs to the line.
In the West Bank, the IDF is continuing the operation it began following Friday’s shooting that killed two Israeli soldiers near Hebron. Israeli operations have displaced over 2600 people in the Hebron vicinity and have closed off outside access to (and exits from) the city. Israeli forces have also raided at least 15 towns across the northern West Bank and are planning to close off the territory’s borders altogether on Tuesday, the day of Israel’s Knesset election.
YEMEN
Ansarullah claimed on Saturday that Saudi airstrikes had killed at least 16 people in cities of Sanaa and Hudaydah. The group also claimed responsibility for several strikes on the city of Aden along with attacks targeting multiple sites in Saudi Arabia. Despite those attacks the Saudi government partially reopened King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh on Saturday, two weeks after Ansarullah strikes forced that facility’s closure. Sunday brought another wave of attacks across the kingdom. Saudi authorities reported at least two people injured by falling missile debris but I haven’t seen any further word as to casualties or damage.
The Yemeni government claimed on Sunday to have “neutralized” 218 Ansarullah fighters over the previous 24 hours. The Yemeni government makes a lot of claims and only some of them wind up being true so take this with a grain of salt.
IRAN
Donald Trump told reporters on Saturday that he was “thinking about” resuming war with Iran, “maybe tomorrow.” When “tomorrow” became “today” he called the war off, at least for the time being. Maybe tomorrow, I guess.
Elsewhere, a new memo penned by US Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and sent to Secretary of State Marco Rubio claims that “we have received intelligence that Iran has substantially increased efforts to target US personnel,” adding that “the lethal plotting efforts by the Iranians against US citizens have reached advanced stages in both the Middle East and certain other countries.” This assessment may help to explain the State Department’s recent moves to evacuate diplomatic personnel and family members from regional offices. “Two Iranian officials, one of them a member of the Revolutionary Guards” seemed to confirm the memo’s general thrust in comments to The New York Times, citing the Israeli and US targeting of senior Iranian officials and their families over the past several months to argue that US diplomats and other personnel are “fair game.”
ASIA
PAKISTAN
The Pakistani government denied via social media on Saturday that it is recruiting and arming Afghans to battle militant groups and/or the Afghan military. It was responding to a charge leveled by former US ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad the previous day. Khalilzad didn’t say how he’d come by this alleged information but to be fair there is some precedent for that sort of thing. Pakistani officials also rejected the Afghan government’s argument that they are blaming Kabul for their own security failures, citing evidence of militant infiltration from Afghanistan into Pakistan as evidence that the roots of Pakistan’s militant problems lie on the Afghan side of the border.
NORTH KOREA
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un visited the Chinese city of Dandong on Saturday in what appears to be an indication that he is not, in fact, dead. On a more serious note he made the trip in order to highlight (and symbolically bless) the newly-opened New Yalu River Bridge, which immediately became the largest road crossing between the two countries when it began operating earlier this month. He was accompanied by Wang Huning, the chairperson of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. They reportedly visited a Korean War memorial in Dandong. This was Kim’s first known trip outside of North Korea since he attended the Chinese government’s Victory Day military parade in Beijing last September.
AFRICA
NIGER
The Algerian government is reportedly planning to deploy military forces to a base at Madama in northern Niger, after winning parliamentary approval for the mission on Sunday. According to Reuters this will be the Algerian military’s first “foreign” deployment since it dispatched units (most of which arrived too late to get in on the fighting) to join the Egyptian military during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. The Nigerien government is welcoming the Algerians in what is the latest indication of improving ties between Algiers and the three “Alliance of Sahel States” juntas (in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger). Earlier this month the Algerians reportedly brokered a deal in which the rebel Azawad Liberation Front withdrew from the northern Malian town of Kidal, allowing the junta to retake it.
NIGERIA
Gunmen attacked a village in eastern Nigeria’s Taraba state on Friday night, killing at least 48 people at last count. That figure has risen sharply from an initial government claim of ten and may rise further — Amnesty International says that it has confirmed 52 deaths, and recovery work is ongoing. The attackers may simply have been bandits though Taraba is certainly close enough to Nigeria’s jihadist-plagued northeast that a more ideological group can’t be ruled out.
EUROPE
UKRAINE
A Russian bombardment killed at least four people in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk oblast on Saturday evening. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed the deaths in a social media post on Sunday in which he called for “unblocking” the delivery of US-made Patriot air interceptors to Ukraine. These are missiles that have been purchased by European governments on Ukraine’s behalf, but the US has been slow in delivering them presumably because it needs all the Patriots it can muster for use in the Persian Gulf. Donald Trump’s irritation with Zelensky may also be a factor. In Russia, a pair of Ukrainian drone strikes overnight and on Sunday killed at least four people in Belgorod oblast.
The Starlink/Starshield saga appears to be over, maybe, as Ukrainian officials reported on Saturday that both services were “fully functional” for the first time in over a week. However, SpaceX oligarch Elon Musk hopped on social media overnight to argue that the Ukrainian military had violated Starlink’s terms of service by using it to facilitate “offensive drone strikes.” He said that this “loophole was closed last week,” which would suggest that the restrictions he imposed are still in place.
Part of the issue here may be some blurriness about where Starlink ends and Starshield, its military subscription component, begins. According to Musk any restrictions imposed on the latter service would be imposed by the US military, not SpaceX. Ukraine uses both services and Kyiv seemed to indicate that both had been throttled. Ukrainian officials rejected Musk’s “terms of service” claim, which implied that they were using Starlink to carry out long-range drone strikes in Russia even though Starlink doesn’t work at all in Russia and the one part of the Ukrainian war machine that seemed to continue unabated despite the Starlink throttling was those strikes inside Russia. The Ukrainian government has reportedly opened discussions with Finnish firms Nokia and ICEYE about developing a Starlink alternative.
BULGARIA
Bulgarian voters headed to the polls on Sunday for a presidential election that looks to be heading to a November 1 runoff thanks to historically low turnout. Interim incumbent Iliana Iotova, who took over as president when Rumen Radev quit that office in order to run for prime minister earlier this year, is running for a full term and her main challenger is Andrey Gyurov, who briefly served as caretaker PM earlier this year before Radev assumed that office following April’s election. They differ markedly on the subject of the war in Ukraine, with Iotova favoring dialogue with Russia while Gyurov supports arming Ukraine. Iotova appears to be winning but it doesn’t matter because turnout is expected to be below 40 percent, when the threshold for a legitimate first round victory is 50 percent or higher.
SERBIA
In a monumental political shakeup, long-time Serbian leader Aleksandar Vučić’s right-wing Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) lost Sunday’s parliamentary election to the “Student List,” a bloc formed by the organizers behind the Novi Sad protest movement. Vučić conceded defeat in a speech in which he projected that the student bloc would end up with “between 135 and 140 seats” in the 250 seat Serbian National Assembly. SNS is projected to wind up with around 105 seats. Turnout looks like it may set a record at around 70 percent, which helps to explain the outcome since the student list was going to have to mobilize traditional nonvoters in order to unseat SNS.
Vučić had been president of Serbia from 2017 until his resignation earlier this year and was prime minister for about three years prior to that, so he has been the central figure in the country’s politics for about 12 years. It is unclear who will succeed him in that role. The student-led protest movement hasn’t had a clear leader and if that bloc has already put someone forward as its PM candidate I have not seen it reported. Serbia must hold a presidential election by the end of the year and presumably the student movement will have the inside track in that contest. Vučić is term-limited and resigned prior to the parliamentary election in hopes of making himself prime minister after an SNS victory.
FRANCE
Hundreds of thousands of people hit the streets of cities across France on Saturday for another massive protest primarily over school conditions and cost of living grievances. In contrast with last weekend’s demonstrations this one appears to have been relatively peaceful, though police did make around 1000 arrests nationwide. As was the case last week French authorities and protest organizers had wildly divergent participation estimates, with the former claiming that some 410,000 people turned out and the CGT union alliance claiming a number roughly twice as large.
AMERICAS
BRAZIL
In an outcome that surpasses even the Serbian election (see above) for shock value, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won Sunday’s runoff against challenger Flávio Bolsonaro with nearly 52 percent of the vote. The latter’s surprise win in the first round earlier this month had upended expectations for a coin-toss runoff and left Bolsonaro as the presumptive favorite, a status backed up by polling that appears to have been almost as unreliable before this round as it was before the first round, but in the opposite direction. Higher than expected turnout (possibly higher than the first round) appears to have driven the unexpected outcome.
The election hit a snag earlier in the evening after both candidates made last minute requests to keep polling sites open beyond their scheduled close, Lula because of busing snafus in São Paulo (possibly a deliberate effort to suppress turnout but I digress) and Bolsonaro because of heavy rains in the southern part of the country where he has considerable support. The Brazilian Supreme Court agreed to keep the sites open for an extra two hours but Bolsonaro is now refusing to accept the outcome and may make the extension his main argument for its “illegitimacy” even though his campaign also requested an extension.
To his credit, Lula hit the proverbial campaign trail hard over the past three weeks to make himself the first presidential candidate in Brazil’s contemporary period (after the end of the country’s last military junta and the restoration of democracy in 1985) to win the presidency after losing the first round vote. Two head-to-head debates and a number of promises to boost welfare programs and public transit funding, among other things, may have helped. As far as those promises are concerned, however, with the composition of Brazil’s incoming Congress Lula’s fourth term in office may be spent mostly acting as a block to a right-wing legislative agenda (and trying to fend off backlash from the very pro-Bolsonaro Trump administration). At least the Amazon rainforest may have a new lease on life, which is certainly not nothing.
VENEZUELA
Venezuelan opposition leader and brief caretaker of Donald Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize María Corina Machado announced on Sunday that she has returned to Venezuela from exile. Machado fled the country in December when she traveled to Norway to accept the Nobel that she later gave to Trump. She has not returned, despite the Trump administration’s removal of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro the following month, in large part because the Trump administration reportedly didn’t want her to return and risk complicating things for its compliant vassal government in Caracas. Abject groveling really doesn’t get you very much these days, it seems. It’s unclear what Machado intends to do now or how much weight she still carries within Venezuelan politics.
COLOMBIA
Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella claimed on Sunday that military forces had killed at least ten National Liberation Army (ELN) rebels in an operation in the southwestern Cauca department on Thursday. Two fairly senior ELN commanders were allegedly among the dead. I say “allegedly” because de la Espriella has adopted a “tough on crime” approach to Colombia’s armed groups and so he’s incentivized to portray every operation like this as a crippling blow to whichever group is involved.
HAITI
Four bodies recovered in Haiti on Saturday do not appear to be those of the four Salvadoran military personnel who disappeared after a gang attack near Port-au-Prince last Sunday. According to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele one set of remains was a child’s and another was wearing a Chadian military uniform. Bukele has launched a military operation to rescue the four Salvadorans and has threatened a larger operation if they are dead.
UNITED STATES
Speaking of Donald Trump and the Nobel Peace Prize, he’s so angry over not getting the 2026 edition that he called Norway a “shit house country” in a campaign speech in Michigan on Sunday and told the crowd that he no longer wants to accept Norwegian immigrants. There’s no indication that a Norwegian immigration ban is in the offing but who knows? At any rate it’s always comforting to be reminded that we’re led by a very stable, thoughtful person.
Finally, Reuters reported on Friday that the Biden and Trump administrations have asked SpaceX to manipulate its Starlink service in multiple countries over the past several years, not just in Ukraine recently (see above). That includes requests to turn it off in Lebanon and Yemen to hinder Hezbollah and Ansarullah, respectively, and requests to activate or expand the service in Iran and Ukraine to support anti-government protesters and the war effort, respectively. With as ubiquitous as Starlink has become it perhaps comes as no surprise, then, that this manipulation has caused a number of US allies to try to minimize their reliance on the service:
Elon Musk’s decision to abruptly impose limits on Ukraine’s use of his Starlink communications network—which is critical to the country’s efforts to fight off Russia’s invasion—is prompting U.S. allies to intensify efforts to come up with their own alternatives.
Europeans are expressing concerns about relying on a system with a built-in kill switch that gives Musk the power to deactivate a vital network without consultation.
“The more you play politics with your products, the more you damage your brand,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said to Musk in a post on X after Ukraine reported having problems with Starlink, which is a SpaceX system. Warsaw helps pay for Ukraine’s usage of the system.
Aside from the Ukrainian-Finnish project I mentioned above the Canadian firm Telesat is working on a Starlink alternative and the European Union is developing what it calls the IRIS² satellite network. None will be ready to deploy before 2028 at the earliest.
Nobel prizes are not transferable. It is still her Nobel, even if she gave the Mad King the physical symbol of it.