World update: June 25 2019
Stories from North Korea, Ghana, and more
Hey everybody, I’ve got another programming note for you. Starting this weekend (after Friday’s update) Foreign Exchanges will be going on summer break for a couple of weeks. I’ll have a few things set to auto-post while I’m away but our regular updates and other normal content resume the week of July 15. Thanks!
THESE DAYS IN HISTORY
June 24, 1230: Castilian forces besiege the city of Jaén (Jayyan), at the time an independent emirate. They were forced to lift the siege in September so that Castilian King Ferdinand III could claim the throne of León upon the death of his father, Alfonso IX. Jaén was absorbed into the Emirate of Granada and eventually taken by the Castilians in 1246.
June 24, 1812: Napoleon leads his Grande Armée into Russia. I’ll be really excited to see how this works out for him.
June 24, 1948: Soviet authorities blockade West Berlin, setting off one of the most serious crises of the Cold War. Two days later, the US, UK, and others launched the Berlin Airlift to keep the city supplied, and the Soviets lifted the blockade in May 1949.
June 25, 841: Charlemagne’s three surviving grandsons via Louis the Pious duke it out in the Battle of Fontenoy. On one side is Lothar I, fighting to keep Charlemagne’s kingdom united under his rule, and his brothers Louis the German and Charles the Bald, who wanted to carve the kingdom up and each take their own piece. The “divisionists” won, which put them in the driver’s seat in the Carolingian civil war and eventually led to the Treaty of Verdun that divided the kingdom.
June 25, 1950: The Korean War begins with a North Korean invasion of South Korea. I’d like to tell you how it ends but, technically, it hasn’t ended yet.
MIDDLE EAST
YEMEN
Saudi Arabian special forces have reportedly captured the leader of ISIS’s branch in Yemen, who goes by the name Abu Osama al-Muhajer. They grabbed him and several other senior ISIS figures in a June 3 raid on a house that locals say was in Yemen’s Abyan province. It’s not clear why they waited to so long to announce their success.
IRAQ
A bombing in the city of Kirkuk on Tuesday killed at least four Iraqi police officers. No group has claimed responsibility but ISIS seems the likely party.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The US began its Kushner Accords summit in Bahrain on Tuesday pledging $50 billion in investments in Palestinian areas and surrounding Arab states, but without unveiling either the political half of its Israel-Palestine plan or any firm financing for the economic half. Kushner expects the Gulf states and Europe to pick up most of the tab, with private investors filling in gaps so as to leave the US mostly off the hook, but he’s gotten no assurances of any support and the Gulf States (and private investors) will be especially reluctant to stick their necks out supporting a plan that the Palestinians have already denounced.
EGYPT
ISIS militants reportedly attacked several Egyptian police checkpoints in northern Sinai on Tuesday, killing at least six police officers. At least four of the attackers also died in the fighting.
Egyptian authorities have arrested Zyad Elelaimy, a senior figure in the opposition Social Democratic Party and the Civil Democratic Movement coalition. He and several other members of his party are being charged with collusion with the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood to overthrow Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s government. More likely, Sisi’s government is trying to destabilize opposition parties ahead of next year’s parliamentary election.
SAUDI ARABIA
The Houthis say they launched new drone strikes against military facilities at the Abha and Jizan airports in Saudi Arabia. Saudi officials say they intercepted one drone heading toward a residential part of Khamis Mushait, a city near Abha, but so far there’s been no word on any other strikes against the airports.
IRAN
Responding to new US sanctions targeting Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Tuesday described the White House’s actions as, and I apologize for the language here, “mentally retarded” (UPDATE: according to people who heard the Persian audio and actually know Persian, Rouhani did not use that term). Iranian officials apparently use that slur in reference to Trump fairly often, but Rouhani doesn’t typically engage in that sort of thing. It’s unclear whether the sanctions will seriously impact Khamenei—US and Iranian officials make wildly different claims about his wealth (or lack thereof), and at any rate what wealth he does have is probably not sitting in places where it could be easily reached by the US. Trump doesn’t seem to have appreciated Rouhani’s comment:
ASIA
NORTH KOREA
A recent YouGov survey examined US public reactions toward a variety of scenarios involving military conflict between the US and North Korea. The good news is that a majority of respondents would prefer not to have a military conflict with North Korea under any scenario. But the good news kind of ends there:
The first piece of disconcerting news, however, is that a large hawkish minority lurks within the US public; over a third of respondents approve of a US preventive strike across the scenarios and appear insensitive to informational cues that most security experts would expect to reduce such levels of support.
Second, preference for the strike does not significantly decrease when the story says that the United States would use nuclear weapons in its attack; 33 percent preferred a preventive nuclear first-strike. Even more disturbing: There is no significant change in the percentage who would prefer or approve of a US nuclear strike when the number of estimated North Korean fatalities increases from 15,000 to 1.1 million, including 1 million civilians. As we have previously found, the US public exhibits only limited aversion to nuclear weapons use and a shocking willingness to support the killing of enemy civilians.
There even appears to be a subset of Americans, those who support the death penalty, whose support for a nuclear strike on North Korea increases if the estimate of North Korean casualties goes up, though the sample wasn’t large enough for the difference to be considered statistically significant. One problem here aside from the frightening bloodlust is that Americans seem to be way too confident in the US military’s ability to 1) destroy all of North Korea’s nukes in a first strike and 2) shoot down any North Korean missiles that manage to survive the first strike. The strong likelihood is that neither of these things is true. Shockingly it appears to be Trump supporters who are most likely to hold these beliefs, probably because Trump himself holds them.
JAPAN
Bloomberg reported Monday evening that Donald Trump “has recently mused to confidants” that the US maybe ought to think about withdrawing from the defense pact it made with Japan after World War II. Which is awkward, because Trump is going to Japan tomorrow for this week’s G20 summit. He’s already reportedly told the Japanese government that there’s nothing to the story.
AFRICA
GHANA
The uptick in violence in Burkina Faso has begun to spill out to neighboring countries like Ghana, which has taken in hundreds of Burkinabe asylum seekers and is now starting to experience some violence of its own:
Insecurity is stirring unease in neighbouring countries, and concerns deepened earlier this month when a Burkinabe man, allegedly armed, was arrested in a Ghanaian church near the border.
Local media in Ghana reported the arrest of another Burkinabe man, also believed to have been armed, days later in a border town.
And earlier, in May, Ghana's port and harbour authority confirmed that two Ghanaian truck drivers transporting goods were shot near the Mali-Burkina Faso border.
EUROPE
UKRAINE
The Ukrainian government has recalled its representative at the Council of Europe over the council’s decision on Monday to readmit Russia as a full member. The council, Europe’s largest human rights body, stripped Russia’s voting powers in 2014 over the annexation of Crimea. Which, as you may have noticed, remains annexed.
DENMARK
Denmark’s Social Democratic party has reached a deal that will allow it to form a single party minority government and make party leader Mette Frederiksen Denmark’s new prime minister. The Social Democrats emerged as the largest party in parliament in this month’s election but Frederiksen resisted forming a coalition government with the country’s other center-left/left parties. Instead they’ll support her government without taking a role in it. This is the third Social Democratic government formed in Scandinavia this year, following Finland and Sweden.
SPAIN
On the other hand, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s hopes of forming his own one party minority government may be about to go up in smoke. He hasn’t been able to negotiate a deal with the leftist Podemos party, which wants to be part of a coalition rather than just supporting Sánchez’s Socialist Party. Without Podemos Sánchez can’t form a government, coalition or otherwise, and if they can’t come to a deal Sánchez will have to look to more conservative parties for support or, failing that, Spain may be headed for another election.
AMERICAS
BRAZIL
Brazil’s Supreme Court on Tuesday heard an appeal by lawyers for former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva based on a recent leak of private messages between his prosecutors and the judge presiding over his corruption case, Sérgio Moro. We dug into that leak with the Intercept’s Andrew Fishman on last week’s podcast, if you’re interested. The evidence shows Moro colluding with prosecutors in a politically motivated effort to keep Lula from running in last year’s presidential election, which polling showed he would have won easily. The court, presented with the opportunity to right what appears to be an egregious wrong, opted instead to punt their decision until August while rejecting a defense request that Lula be released from prison until then.
MEXICO
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is already getting heat over migration, after photos emerged of Mexican National Guard forces chasing and detaining migrant women near the US border. López Obrador suggested that a few guardsmen had gotten carried away but insists that they were not following any official policy.
UNITED STATES
Finally, a new report highlights the ways in which climate change is going to increase global inequality:
A UN expert has warned of a possible "climate apartheid", where the rich pay to escape from hunger, "while the rest of the world is left to suffer".
Even if current targets are met, "millions will be impoverished", said Philip Alston, the UN's special rapporteur on extreme poverty.
He also criticised steps taken by UN bodies as "patently inadequate".
"Ticking boxes will not save humanity or the planet from impending disaster," Mr Alston warned.
The Australian native is part of the UN's panel of independent experts, and submitted his report – which is based on existing research – to the UN Human Rights Council on Monday.
Have a good vacation, Derek!
enjoy your time off!