World update: June 23 2020
Stories from Saudi Arabia, Libya, Russia, and more
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THESE DAYS IN HISTORY
June 22, 1593: Local Ottoman forces from the Eyalet of Bosnia are routed by a Habsburg army at the Battle of Sisak. It’s one of the first serious Ottoman defeats in the Balkans, and the Ottomans’ desire for revenge contributed to the 1593-1606 Long War against the Habsburgs (there are some historians who consider Sisak part of that war). That war ended indecisively, which was typical for Ottoman-Habsburg conflicts until the late 17th century.
June 22, 1527: A force from the Javanese Demak Sultanate under its commander, Fatahillah, liberates the port of Sunda Kelapa from the Portuguese and renames it “Jayakarta.” I wonder whatever happened to that place.
Apparently it’s grown a bit since then (Georgi Kovachev via Wikimedia Commons)
June 23, 1280: A Castilian-Leónese army is decisively defeated by forces of the Granadan Emirate at the Battle of Moclín. Alfonso X of Castile sent an army to invade the emirate because that’s what you did back then if you were the king of Castile. But the Granadan forces suckered the Castilians in with a feigned retreat and then massacred them, killing more than 2800 including almost all the knights of the venerated Order of Santiago.
June 23, 1757: A British East India Company army defeats a combined Bengali-French army at the Battle of Palashi (Plassey). The aftermath resulted in the removal of Siraj ud-Daulah as the Nawab of Bengal and the annexation of Bengal into the East India Company’s territory.
June 23, 2016: UK voters opt to leave the European Union in the Brexit referendum. Almost there!
INTERNATIONAL
Worldometer’s coronavirus figures for June 23:
9,345,569 confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide (3,829,897 active, +162,994 since yesterday)
478,949 reported fatalities (+5465 since yesterday)
It got so hot in northern (as in, north of the Arctic Circle) Siberia over the weekend that the World Meteorological Organization is asking the Russian government to verify local temperature readings. The town of Verkhoyansk recorded a temperature of 38 degrees Celsius, or 100.4 Fahrenheit, prompting the request. I’m sure it’s just part of a normal cycle of solar activity or whatever. Nothing to worry about.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
231 confirmed coronavirus cases (+12)
7 reported fatalities (unchanged)
Syrian media is reporting that Israeli airstrikes on southern and eastern Syria killed at least two Syrian soldiers and wounded four others. All the casualties are from a strike that hit a military base near the southern city of Suwaydah, so it’s likely there are additional casualties that haven’t been reported from two strikes in eastern Syria’s Deir Ezzor province.
YEMEN
992 confirmed cases (+25)
261 reported fatalities (+4)
The Houthis announced Friday that they’d launched a major drone and ballistic missile attack overnight on the Saudi capital, Riyadh, targeting the ministries of defense and intelligence as well as the nearby King Salman Airbase. Saudi authorities say their air defenses intercepted the attack before the missiles and drones reached any of their targets.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
21,512 confirmed cases (+430) in Israel, 1169 confirmed cases (+168) in Palestine
308 reported fatalities (+1) in Israel, 3 reported fatalities (unchanged) in Palestine
Israeli police shot and killed a Palestinian man on Tuesday after he allegedly tried to run over one Israeli police officer in his car at a security checkpoint near the East Jerusalem suburb of Abu Dis.
At World Politics Review, journalist Dalia Hatuqa argues that the advent of the Kushner Accords and the forthcoming Israeli annexation of some part of the West Bank, the combined effect of which is to completely bury any chance of a “two-state solution,” should force Palestinian leaders to reassess their approach to ending the occupation:
“De jure annexation, and Israel’s ability to implement it without paying much of a price from the international community, calls into question the entire strategy of the PLO for the past several decades,” says Nathan Thrall, the author of “The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine” and the former director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group. “A successful annexation will provide nearly incontrovertible proof that the path of negotiations and diplomacy, and reliance on international law and international institutions, has failed.”
For decades, Palestinians have pursued a formal peace process while Israel has continued to expand settlements deeper into Palestinian lands. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Israelis were never really negotiating in good faith, or that anything that was negotiated in good faith was far less than any Palestinian would accept. Either way, the peace process as it had been known for more than 25 years is now dead and buried, with no chance of resuscitation.
Trump’s plan “lays everything clearly out on the table, without this diplomatic facade,” says Yara Hawari, a senior policy analyst at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank. But, she believes, these developments could actually force Palestinians to reevaluate their quest for statehood. “This really is an opportunity for self-reflection,” she says, “and thinking about why our leadership has failed, and what are the current mechanisms for leadership. It’s very clear that it’s time for serious and radical change in the leadership, one that would lead to a body that would represent all the Palestinian people.”
SAUDI ARABIA
164,144 confirmed cases (+3139)
1346 reported fatalities (+39)
Saudi authorities are still working out the details of their greatly reduced Hajj. But in addition to limiting participation to those who are currently in the kingdom they will reportedly be capping total attendance at somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 pilgrims and screening out the elderly and anyone else at high risk from the coronavirus. Canceling the pilgrimage altogether probably would have been smarter, but that would have been an embarrassing first for the Saudis in their role as the Custodians of the Two Holy Mosques.
Having jailed most of his critics or potential rivals within Saudi Arabia and murdered at least one living abroad, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is now reportedly trying to nab a former intelligence official named Saad al-Jabri, and has tossed two of his (adult) children in prison. Jabri was a close advisor to former Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef (MBN), who was removed from the line of succession in 2017 and then placed under house arrest earlier this year. MBS apparently believes that Jabri has documents that could help him bury some of his internal rivals (MBN chief among them) and/or could bury MBS himself.
IRAN
209,970 confirmed cases (+2445)
9863 reported fatalities (+121)
The Trump administration has reportedly begun circulating its draft UN Security Council resolution that would indefinitely extend an international arms embargo against Iran that is otherwise due to expire in October. The resolution will be vetoed by Russia and China, and that’s assuming it can otherwise get the nine votes it would need to pass, which is questionable at best. That would then trigger the administration’s plan to invoke the “snap back” mechanism from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal to reimpose all international sanctions that had been in place against Iran prior to that agreement. If that doesn’t work—and I still think it may—then the speculation is that Trump will try to use the whole thing as a wedge issue in the fall election.
ASIA
TURKMENISTAN
No acknowledged cases
The Turkmen government is ticked off at the US embassy in Ashgabat, after embassy staff posted an alert on the embassy’s website about “reports of local citizens with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 undergoing COVID-19 testing and being placed in quarantine in infectious diseases hospitals for up to fourteen days.” The Turkmen government has of course maintained that there are no cases of the coronavirus in the country at all, despite the absurdity of that claim, and so it’s accused the embassy of spreading “fake news.”
PAKISTAN
185,034 confirmed cases (+3946)
3695 reported fatalities (+105)
The Indian and Pakistani governments have resolved to expel half of each other’s embassy staffs after the Indian government alleged the existence of a spy operation in the Pakistani embassy in New Delhi. Indian authorities announced their expulsion first and Pakistani authorities then retaliated in kind. These kinds of spats flare up between India and Pakistan with some regularity, but this particular incident is notable for the sheer size of the expulsions.
INDIA
456,115 confirmed cases (+15,665)
14,483 reported fatalities (+468)
The Trump administration is either shutting down or severely curtailing most US work visa programs, ostensibly to help American workers recover from the pandemic but really to appeal to xenophobes for electoral reasons. One of those bans is likely to impact both the tech sector and US-India relations:
President Trump’s order to freeze a type of visa most often used by software engineers provoked dismay and disbelief in India, which has sent hundreds of thousands of professionals to work on technology projects in the United States. Indians account for 75 percent of visa applications under the H-1B program for skilled workers, according to the latest government data. Nearly 85,000 immigrants are admitted on H-1Bs every year.
Trump said the order would protect U.S. workers suffering job losses resulting from the pandemic; critics say he is using the crisis as an opportunity to implement sweeping changes to the immigration system. The measures apply only to applicants abroad.
The move was condemned by U.S. technology companies that rely on the program for their workforces. Sundar Pichai, the Indian American chief executive of Google, said in a tweet that he was “disappointed.” Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, said he disagreed with the move, calling it “too broad.” In India, Hemant Mohapatra, a partner at the venture capital firm Lightspeed India, called on professionals to come back to India, describing the ban as a “personal betrayal.”
CHINA
83,418 confirmed cases (+22) on the mainland, 1178 confirmed cases (+16) in Hong Kong
4634 reported fatalities (unchanged) on the mainland, 6 reported fatalities (+1) in Hong Kong
Indian and Chinese military commanders along the Ladakh-Aksai Chin border region have reportedly agreed to stand down and withdraw their forces from along the disputed and poorly delineated border, also known as the “Line of Actual Control.” This should reduce the tensions stemming from last week’s brawl in Galwan Valley that killed 20 Indian soldiers and a still-unknown number of Chinese soldiers. However, agreeing to withdraw and agreeing on how to withdraw aren’t necessarily the same thing, and it appears there are still some details to work out as far as the latter is concerned.
NORTH KOREA
No acknowledged cases
According to North Korean state media, Kim Jong-un led a meeting of his party’s Central Military Commission on Tuesday in which he decided not to take any military action against South Korean. So that’s really generous of hi-wait, what the hell? Yes, in addition to blowing up the inter-Korean liaison office in Kaesong last week and reinstalling its propaganda loudspeakers along the South Korean border, Pyongyang was apparently considering a military response to, uh, propaganda leaflets sent by defectors in South Korea. That seems perfectly hinged. Fortunately, the military plan doesn’t appear to have involved a direct attack on South Korea, but rather a substantial remilitarization of the border zone.
OCEANIA
KIRIBATI
No confirmed cases
Incumbent Kiribatian President Taneti Maamau easily won reelection on Monday, taking 59 percent of the vote. Maamau cut Kiribati’s ties with Taiwan last year in favor of opening diplomatic relations with Beijing, which cost him his parliamentary majority in April’s election but apparently didn’t damage his personal political fortunes. His reelection upends any chance of restoring relations with Taipei.
AFRICA
LIBYA
639 confirmed cases (+44)
17 reported fatalities (+7)
With Libya’s warring sides and their foreign backers gearing up for what could be a major battle over the city of Sirte, Giorgio Cafiero wonders if we’re on the cusp of a war between Turkey and Egypt:
The GNA’s recent gains have left officials in Cairo and some other Arab capitals worried about Turkey establishing itself as the “kingmaker” in Libya. Questions about what has motivated Turkey to intensify its military intervention in Libya have spurred much debate across the Middle East and North Africa, as well as Europe. The Turks are unquestionably driven, at least in large part, by their energy interests in the gas-rich eastern Mediterranean. Also, following the Egyptian coup of 2013, which transformed Egypt from a Turkey-friendly Arab country to an anti-Turkish one, officials in Ankara do not want to see Haftar dominate Libya, which would only push Turkey into more of a state of relative isolation in the eastern Mediterranean.
Yet as many Arab actors see it, Ankara’s decisive actions in Libya factor into the Turkish leadership’s purported quest to re-establish the Ottoman Empire. Like other parts of the Arab region where Turkey has recently sent its military forces, or made plans to do so — including Iraq’s Sinjar, Syria’s Idlib, Sudan’s Suakin Island, and Qatar — Libya is a regional hotspot that the Ottomans once controlled. To many in the region, this fact of history cannot be ignored when assessing Turkish interests in Libya. Whether or not it is fair to argue that Turkey’s foreign policy is “Neo-Ottoman,” this is the perspective of many Arabs, including those who govern Egypt as well as Sissi’s patrons in the Gulf: the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
Libya’s Government of National Accord, the Turkish proxy in this fight, may have taken a step toward forcing Egypt and other supporters of Khalifa Haftar’s “Libyan National Army” to back off. GNA leaders have reportedly reached an agreement with US Africa Command to collaborate on counter-terrorism issues. The US government has been quietly supportive of Haftar because, as a would-be secular dictator, it views him as a more reliable ally against Islamic extremism. If the GNA has convinced the US that it can play that role without Haftar’s military dictator baggage, it might convince Washington to back the GNA, in which case US allies like Egypt and the UAE might reconsider the extent of their support for Haftar.
BURKINA FASO
907 confirmed cases (+4)
53 reported fatalities (unchanged)
While he should probably be considered the favorite if for no other reason than incumbency, Alex Thurston says that Burkinabé President Roch Kaboré’s chances of being reelected in November are not looking particularly firm:
In the national Présimètre poll, whose most recent iteration just came out, clear and sometimes dramatic majorities of respondents voice dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of key issues. On Slide 24, for example, 79.7% of respondents express dissatisfaction with the security situation in the country, and 83% are dissatisfied with the cost of living. Not everything is bad news for the government – on Slide 30, you can see that respondents’ confidence in key institutions is ticking upward after hitting a low in the June 2019 poll. But confidence is still under 40% for the government, the parliament, and the political parties. Furthermore, 73% of respondents plan to vote in the next election (Slide 32), but over 65% of respondents have not yet decided whom to vote for (Slide 34). 63% of respondents are dissatisfied with Kaboré’s performance (Slide 40), compared with 66% who were dissatisfied a year ago. Although respondents acknowledge that Kaboré inherited a tough situation, they also feel he “lacks the firmness that is required.” The average score that respondents gave his overall performance, on a 10-point scale, was 4.53 – his lowest score yet, in iterations of the Présimètre poll, since 2017.
SOMALIA
2812 confirmed cases (unchanged)
90 reported fatalities (unchanged)
A suicide bombing, which appears to have been claimed by al-Shabab, killed at least two people outside the Turkish military base in Mogadishu, Camp Turksom, on Tuesday. The attacker apparently posed as a Somali trainee so the target seems to have been intentional. Camp Turksom primarily operates as a training facility for the Somali military but it’s also Turkey’s largest overseas military facility and is the cornerstone of a Turkish project to expand its presence in the Red Sea region.
EUROPE
EUROPEAN UNION
The European Union is gearing up to reopen its external borders in an effort to boost revenues and generate economic activity. But not everybody is going to be welcome:
European Union countries rushing to revive their economies and reopen their borders after months of coronavirus restrictions are prepared to block Americans from entering because the United States has failed to control the scourge, according to draft lists of acceptable travelers reviewed by The New York Times.
That prospect, which would lump American visitors in with Russians and Brazilians as unwelcome, is a stinging blow to American prestige in the world and a repudiation of President Trump’s handling of the virus in the United States, which has more than 2.3 million cases and upward of 120,000 deaths, more than any other country.
European nations are currently haggling over two potential lists of acceptable visitors based on how countries are faring with the coronavirus pandemic. Both lists include China, as well as developing nations like Uganda, Cuba and Vietnam. Both also exclude the United States and other countries that were deemed too risky because of the spread of the virus.
Excluding Americans just because we’ve turned the United States into a giant petri dish. The bigotry is sahameful.
RUSSIA
599,705 confirmed cases (+7425)
8359 reported fatalities (+153)
Vladimir Putin raised taxes on the wealthy on Tuesday in order to finance new welfare programs for families and children. Ostensibly this is meant to help those at the lower end of the income scale recover from the pandemic. In reality it’s a populist appeal for votes ahead of the start of Russia’s constitutional referendum on Thursday. The outcome of the referendum is largely superfluous, as Russian democracy has evolved beyond the need for voters, but high turnout and a comfortable margin of victory would give legitimacy to what is basically just Putin’s bid for two more presidential terms.
Elsewhere, US and Russian negotiators finished their talks over nuclear arms control in general and New START in particular late Monday. It’s unclear whether they made any progress, but they did agree to meet again either late next month or in early August, which is at least better than the alternative. These discussions aren’t expected to go anywhere, since the Trump administration seems to be refusing to renew New START (which expires in February) unless the discussions incorporate non-strategic nuclear weapons and include China. The administration may just be intentionally throwing up roadblocks to justify letting New START expire, but even if it’s sincere it has no plan to entice Beijing to participate.
AMERICAS
A massive Saharan dust storm is now blanketing the Caribbean and may hit the southern US later this week. 2020 just keeps on giving.
BRAZIL
1,151,479 confirmed cases (+40,131)
52,771 reported fatalities (+1364)
On Monday, a Brazilian federal judge ordered President Jair Bolsonaro to start wearing a mask in public or face the same fines anybody else in Brazil’s federal district would face. District leaders made mask wearing mandatory in April, but Bolsonaro refuses to wear one because he refuses to acknowledge that the coronavirus is dangerous. I’m sure he’ll accept the ruling with his customary grace and tact.
UNITED STATES
2,424,168 confirmed cases (+36,015)
123,473 reported fatalities (+863)
Finally, with the Trump administration attacking the International Criminal Court over Afghanistan, and managing to rally dozens of its member states to its defense in the process, Adam Weinstein looks at the culture of impunity that underlies not just the Trump administration but the US national security community in general:
Earlier this month, President Trump signed an executive order authorizing sanctions — a tool purportedly intended to punish bad actors — against International Criminal Court investigators, (and their immediate family members) involved in a probe into U.S. war crimes. Having dismantled any remaining good will towards what Secretary of State Mike Pompeo refers to as a “kangaroo court,” and unable to find refuge in the contrived legal defenses concocted by the Bush administration, President Trump opted for coercive sanctions.
The shock of America’s use of torture had already subsided by the 2014 release of the U.S. Senate Report on the CIA’s detention program. But the legacy of torture still represents the clearest example of the consequences of granting unfettered discretion to the president and a select few technocrats. More importantly, it offers a stark warning about the danger of a national security discourse that fetishizes technicalities and ignores reality.