World update: June 18 2019

Stories from Yemen, Iran, Canada, and more

THESE DAYS IN HISTORY

June 17, 1462: The Night Attack at Târgovişte

June 17, 1631: Mughal Empress Mumtaz Mahal dies. The favorite of Emperor Shah Jahan’s (d. 1666) wives, her death inspired her husband to order the construction of a glorious mausoleum to commemorate her. The result, the Taj Mahal, sees upwards of eight million visitors each year according to its website.

The Taj Mahal (Rajesnewdelhi via Wikimedia Commons)

June 18, 1815: The Battle of Waterloo. Spoiler warning for those who are listening to the excellent Age of Napoleon podcast, but this one doesn’t go too well for Napoleon.

June 18, 1940: Charles de Gaulle’s “Appeal of 18 April” and Winston Churchill’s “This was their finest hour” speech mark France’s World War II surrender and the birth of the French resistance movement.

June 18, 1953: Egypt’s toddler (he was about 18 months old) king, Fuad II, is ousted when Egypt is declared a republic. Fuad, as an infant, had already fled the country with his father, King Farouk, when the latter was ousted the year before in the 23 July Revolution.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem visited Beijing on Tuesday, but wound up taking a question from the media about Turkey—specifically, are Syria and Turkey about to go to war? They keep shooting at one another in northwestern Syria, so it’s a reasonable inquiry. Moualem told reporters that the Syrian government has no desire for conflict with Turkey but argued, not unreasonably, that it’s Turkey that needs to decide what it’s doing occupying so much Syrian territory.

The Senate’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act budgets increased funds to help the Syrian Democratic Forces manage their ISIS prisoners and asks the Pentagon to take a larger role coordinating their treatment. The SDF is struggling to manage its prisoner load and is getting little help from overseas. Most Western governments would rather see any of their nationals who ran off to join ISIS quietly dropped in the ocean than brought home for trial. The extra money will help but it’s only a stopgap, as the SDF is still not equipped to try its prisoners and eventually their living conditions will deteriorate no matter what steps the US might take. Also, it might be worth noting that the House NDAA doesn’t include this stuff.

YEMEN

Saudi media says the kingdom’s air defenses intercepted two more Houthi drones heading for Abha. These would presumably be the drones that the Houthis launched on Monday, according to their Al Masirah media outlet.

The Guardian has posted a lengthy piece on the importance that British assistance has had in sustaining the Saudi war effort in Yemen:

Saudi Arabia has in effect contracted out vital parts of its war against Yemen’s Houthi movement to the US and the UK. Britain does not merely supply weapons for this war: it provides the personnel and expertise required to keep the war going. The British government has deployed RAF personnel to work as engineers, and to train Saudi pilots and targeteers – while an even larger role is played by BAE Systems, Britain’s biggest arms company, which the government has subcontracted to provide weapons, maintenance and engineers inside Saudi Arabia.

“The Saudi bosses absolutely depend on BAE Systems,” John Deverell, a former MoD mandarin and defence attache to Saudi Arabia and Yemen, told me. “They couldn’t do it without us.” A BAE employee recently put it more plainly to Channel 4’s Dispatches: “If we weren’t there, in seven to 14 days there wouldn’t be a jet in the sky.”

Now imagine what would happen if the US stopped enabling this catastrophe.

TURKEY

The death of former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi was commemorated nowhere as intensely as in Turkey on Tuesday. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spoke at a funeral service held in Morsi’s honor in Istanbul, and among other things apparently wound up calling current Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi a murderer. That Erdoğan, always so careful with his words. Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party is heavily Muslim Brotherhood-influenced and has in turn influenced several Brotherhood parties around the Arab world. He and Morsi were close, and Turkish-Egyptian relations took a pretty steep nosedive when Sisi ousted Morsi in a 2013 coup.

EGYPT

Egyptian authorities buried Morsi as unassumingly as possible early Tuesday morning in a suburb of Cairo. Sisi’s government refused to send his body back to his hometown, the Nile Delta town of el-Adwah, and even shut down cafes in Cairo for fear of unrest. Despite those concerns, the day seems to have passed pretty calmly.

SAUDI ARABIA

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo personally intervened to keep Saudi Arabia off of the State Department’s list of countries that employ child soldiers, according to Reuters, despite evidence that the kingdom is doing just that in Yemen. Human rights organizations have accused the Saudis of bringing in child soldiers from Sudan to prosecute their campaign against the Houthis, on the technicality that they’re Sudanese and therefore it’s Sudan’s problem. Sudan will, indeed, be added back to the list after having been taken off of it last year. If you just acknowledge that there’s nothing the Saudis could do that would cause this administration to even do a double-take, let alone actually doing something that might harm Saudi interests, you’ll be less surprised when these stories pop up.

IRAN

Donald Trump’s approach toward Iran seems to have a lot of people confused. In an interview with Time published on Tuesday, Trump upended days, or really weeks, of (deliberately, you could argue) escalating tensions in the Persian Gulf by saying that recent attacks against tankers around the Strait of Hormuz, which his administration has blamed on Iran, have been “very minor.” He also suggested that the only reason he’d go to war with Iran would be to prevent the Iranians from developing a nuclear weapon, which of course raises the question of why he backed out of the 2015 nuclear accord, which did prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that neither of those things is what John Bolton wanted to hear, and the interview undercut his Pentagon’s new military deployment to the Gulf as well as Pompeo’s threats of a military strike in response to the tanker attacks.

As we all know by now, Trump is a special dude whose beautiful mind doesn’t work the way most other minds work. In this case, as with North Korea, I think we’re entering the “I’ve solved the problem I created” mode, which is purely about Trump’s ego. Of course he’s solved the issue of North Korea’s nuclear weapons (after, uh, making the tensions much worse). I mean, he’s Donald Trump, duh. Obviously he’s neutered the Iranian threat, the one he spent two years overhyping. Again, he’s Donald Trump. To suggest that Iran was perpetrating acts serious enough to justify war, which is how Bolton, Pompeo, et al have been portraying these tanker attacks, would be to admit that his maximum pressure campaign has failed. And Donald Trump can’t possibly acknowledge failure.

Also, look, war is messy and hard work and people don’t like them after a while, and Trump knows all of this. He’s conflict averse. And it’s possible that the Iranians have realized that. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in particular has begun stressing the idea that Iran has no interest in going to war, and I think it’s clear he’s trying to communicate with Trump. But then why attack the tankers, if Iran (and by “Iran” I mean the entire Iranian government, not a rogue general or one element within the Iranian state acting on its own authority) is indeed responsible for attacking the tankers? Probably as a show of force, a demonstration that they can cause trouble that doesn’t actually cause very much trouble. The problem is it’s mostly a bluff. Can Iran disrupt the flow of oil traffic into and out of the Persian Gulf? Yeah. Can it seriously disrupt it? Probably not. There are just too many ways for the rest of the world to adjust to this kind of activity for the Iranians to be much more than an inconvenience. Even the worst case scenario—Iran completely closing the Strait of Hormuz—isn’t that bad. The Saudis can divert their oil to the Red Sea, other countries could temporarily boost production, and Iran can’t keep the strait closed indefinitely.

ASIA

TURKMENISTAN

Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow has named his son, Serdar, governor of Ahal province, a region that includes the capital city of Ashgabat. He’s presumably maneuvering the younger Berdimuhamedow into position to inherit the family business someday.

KASHMIR

A car bombing in southern Kashmir late Monday killed two Indian soldiers, while a clash in another part of southern Kashmir killed one Indian soldier and one Kashmiri militant. On Tuesday, at least two Kashmiri militants and one Indian soldier were killed in a gun battle, also in southern Kashmir. According to Indian officials the two militants were involved in February’s terrorist attack that kicked off a couple of weeks of tensions between India and Pakistan. Interestingly, Pakistani officials reportedly passed a warning to Indian officials about Monday’s car bombing before it happened.

CHINA

Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam offered yet another apology on Tuesday—her second or third, depending on how you took the two previous attempts—for trying to ram through a bill that opponents feared would lead to the extradition of political prisoners to mainland China and reduce Hong Kong’s autonomy. But this time around Lam changed her tune a bit. Where previously she’d suggested the extradition bill would only be temporarily pulled while her administration worked on amending it or at least rolling out a better messaging plan, on Tuesday she told reporters that she “will not proceed again with this legislative exercise if these fears and anxieties cannot be adequately addressed.” So in theory this might be the last anybody sees of the legislation, at least while Lam remains in office. Activists nevertheless aren’t satisfied—they want Lam to categorically withdraw the bill, which she hasn’t done, and then to follow it quickly out the door.

NORTH KOREA

Russia and China on Tuesday put a hold on a US request for the United Nations Security Council to block deliveries of refined petroleum products to North Korea. The US has accused North Korea of rampant sanctions violations via ship-to-ship transfers on the open sea, in breach of caps on the amount of refined petroleum it’s permitted to import under UN sanctions.

AFRICA

TUNISIA

Tunisian lawmakers have passed legislation that will bar Nabil Karoui, a businessman and the leader in early opinion polling, from running in November’s presidential election. The new measure disqualifies candidates who accept “foreign funding,” including for their own charities, meaning that Karoui’s Khalil Tounes Foundation makes him ineligible to run. Karoui denounced the law as a “setback” to democracy.

ALGERIA

Algerian army chief Ahmed Gaed Salah on Tuesday accused “certain parties” of trying to push Algeria into a “constitutional vacuum.” He’s obviously talking about protesters, who continue to insist on a wholesale removal of the country’s elite political cadre. Salah, who has emerged as the most powerful political figure in Algeria in the wake of the resignation of former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, has said ominous-sounding things like this before, but it may be only a matter of time before he takes drastic action to suppress the ongoing weekly protests in order to keep his hold on all that power.

MALI

Gunmen attacked two villages in central Mali on Monday evening, killing at least 41 people according to local officials. This would be the latest in a string of attacks caused by inter-communal hostility, primarily between the region’s Fulani and Dogon populations. Monday’s victims were predominantly Dogon.

EUROPE

UNITED KINGDOM

Boris Johnson took another step toward succeeding Theresa May as British Prime Minister on Tuesday, winning the second round of voting for a new Conservative Party leader. Johnson won 126 votes, up from 114 in the first round vote last week and well ahead of runner up Jeremy Hunt at 46 votes. Former Brexit minister Dominic Raab finished sixth out of six and was eliminated from contention. International Development Secretary Rory Stewart, the only candidate to absolutely reject a no-deal Brexit scenario, gained the most support, going from 19 votes in the first round to 37 in the second.

AMERICAS

CANADA

This seems fine:

Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.

A team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks said they were astounded by how quickly a succession of unusually hot summers had destabilised the upper layers of giant subterranean ice blocks that had been frozen solid for millennia.

“What we saw was amazing,” Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the university, told Reuters. “It’s an indication that the climate is now warmer than at any time in the last 5,000 or more years.”

When permafrost melts it releases more carbon into the atmosphere, making it one of several potential feedback loops that can overwhelm any human efforts to mitigate climate change. Fortunately, the Canadian government is going ahead with plans to expand the Trans-Mountain Pipeline, which will enable even more of Alberta’s extremely environmentally damaging tar sands to British Columbia for export. Because, hey, those eggheads didn’t say all the permafrost had melted, right? So there’s still work to be done.

UNITED STATES

Finally, Patrick Shanhan, who was Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary and the current acting defense secretary, has withdrawn his nomination and resigned from his temporary gig. At issue apparently are past domestic violence allegations involving Shanahan, his ex-wife, and their son. He will be replaced by Army Secretary Mark Esper, meaning that the Pentagon will go from being run by a former Boeing executive to being run by a former Raytheon executive. As long as we’re keeping it in the defense contractor community I think that should be fine.

Shanahan during a February trip to Afghanistan (Wikimedia Commons)