World update: June 27 2019
Stories from Iran, Japan, Albania, and more
Just a reminder that Foreign Exchanges is going on a summer break and tonight’s update will be our last publicly available one until July 15. Subscribers will get one more update tomorrow night before things shut down completely. See you in a couple of weeks!
THESE DAYS IN HISTORY
June 26, 1243: The Battle of Köse Dağ
June 26, 1794: The French Republican army defeats the Coalition army at the Battle of Fleurus, in the Austrian Netherlands (nowadays Fleurus is in Belgium. The victory opened the Netherlands to French forces and involved the first successful use of aircraft (a French reconnaissance balloon) in a military context.
June 26, 1995: Qatari Crown Prince Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani overthrows his father, Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani, in a bloodless coup while Sheikh Khalifa is away in Switzerland. Sheikh Hamad ruled as emir until 2013, when he abdicated in favor of his son and heir apparent, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.
June 27, 1950: The Truman administration decides to send forces to South Korea to counter the North Korean invasion that had begun two days earlier. The administration chose to intervene after receiving information that the Soviets would not get involved and that the North Korean invasion wasn’t a diversion meant to set up a Soviet invasion of Yugoslavia, Greece, or another European country.
June 27, 1991: The Ten Day War begins when a Yugoslav army invades Slovenia in response to that republic’s declaration of independence two days earlier. It ended on July 7 with the signing of the Brioni Agreement in which Slovenia and Croatia agreed to delay their independence movements for three months. For Slovenia this meant an end to the fighting, but the Croatian War of Independence continued until 1995.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights at least nine people were killed in airstrikes in pro-government airstrikes in northwestern Syria on Wednesday. Two of those were civil defense (AKA “White Helmet”) workers killed in what may have been a double tap airstrike in Khan Shaykhun. One person in Hama province was killed by rebel artillery fire. Elsewhere, the wife and son of a pro-government political analyst were wounded in a car bombing in Damascus on Thursday. It’s unclear who was behind that attack. And at least one Turkish soldier was killed and three wounded in an artillery attack against their observation post in Idlib province. The Turks say the attack came from government-held territory and was intentional.
IRAQ
Two public buses were bombed in Kirkuk city on Thursday, killing at least one person and wounding 24 more. There’s been no claim of responsibility but ISIS is presumably the culprit. Further north, Turkish airstrikes targeting the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in northern Iraq’s Qandil region reportedly killed at least four civilians, including two children.
In Baghdad, a couple hundred protesters burst into the Bahraini embassy and took down its national flag. The protesters appear to have been Shiʿa militia members who were angry over this week’s Kushner Accords conference in Manama. The Bahraini government subsequently recalled its ambassador to Iraq.
LEBANON
Hundreds of Lebanese military veterans protested across the country on Thursday over austerity measures in the Lebanese government’s 2019 budget. They blocked highways around several major cities with burning tires. Lebanon’s budget is in the deep red and its debt stands at around 150 percent of GDP, so the government has decided to cut its way to prosperity and to do so in part by going after military pensions with benefit cuts and tax increases.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Israeli police shot and killed a Palestinian man in East Jerusalem on Thursday after the man threw firecrackers at them. I’d say this is a metaphor for the entire Israel-Palestine conflict but I’m afraid it’s too on the nose.
EGYPT
Analysts seem to think it’s unlikely that the Egyptian government will accept its $9 billion share of the Kushner Accords promised $50 billion pot of gold, even though it could desperately use the funds for much needed development projects in Sinai. Why? Mostly because the Palestinians have already rejected the whole Kushner Israel-Palestine plan, which would make it politically difficult, to say the least, for Cairo to participate in it. I mention this because Egypt is probably the easiest sales job Kushner would have here—certainly much easier than with Lebanon, Jordan, or the Palestinians themselves. If he can’t close that deal then he’s not going to be able to close any of them.
PERSIAN GULF
Speaking of people who aren’t closing the deal, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appears to be struggling to get US allies to sign on to his plan, dubbed “Sentinel,” to protect shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf. The idea is to get US allies and even some frenemies like China to contribute ships and manpower to the project in order to secure oil traffic, but with the Gulf states incapable of doing much and most other possible partners either too focused on their own interests or too squeamish about US policy toward Iran, the project hasn’t been very well-received. European leaders, for example, seem to have told acting US Defense Secretary Mark Esper to pound sand on the issue at a NATO alliance meeting on Thursday. Esper went to Brussels to convince NATO members of the seriousness of the supposed Iranian threat and the need for something like the Sentinel effort, but Europe has been rejecting the Trump administration’s Iran policy all along and doesn’t have any appetite to get drawn into a potential conflict.
IRAN
The International Atomic Energy Agency says it’s possible that by this weekend Iran will breach the 2015 nuclear deal’s limit on the amount of low enriched uranium it’s allowed to stockpile. The Iranians were supposedly going to breach that limit on Thursday, though, and it’s not inevitable that it will surpass it this weekend. It’s unclear what the Iranians are doing here but it’s possible they’re trying to give European leaders more time to act to protect Iranian commerce from US sanctions before they bring the situation potentially to a new mini-crisis.
Assuming the Iranians do eventually go over their LEU limit, what does that mean? It’s a relatively minor violation of the accord but it is still a violation, albeit one the Iranians announced they would make last month in response to the complete US withdrawal from the deal last year. The Trump administration’s decision to bar Iran from selling its excess LEU immediately precipitated Tehran’s decision to transgress the cap. The US envoy for Iran, Brian Hook actually uttered these words out loud to reporters in Paris regarding Iran’s anticipated breach:
“Our sanctions do not give Iran the right to accelerate its nuclear program. It can never get near a nuclear bomb. We are looking very closely at that so it doesn’t get below the one year nuclear break-out time.”
This is a conflation of Iran’s civilian nuclear program and the “nuclear bomb” bogeyman, which is annoying but expected. More astonishingly, what he’s saying in that first sentence is that it doesn’t matter that the Trump administration has completely destroyed the nuclear deal, or that its reimposition of sanctions has made it impossible for Iran to see any of its promised benefits under that deal. The Iranians are obligated to adhere to it anyway. Seems fair to me. It remains to be seen whether the administration intends to tap into the nuclear deal’s “snapback” enforcement mechanism to try to punish Iran with additional sanctions when it does exceed the LEU limit. The US has no right to invoke that provision of the deal because, at the risk of beating a dead horse, it’s not party to the agreement anymore, but that kind of pesky detail apparently isn’t relevant to Washington’s thinking.
The Trump administration is likely at some point to end waivers protecting the work that other countries are doing to develop Iran’s nuclear program and reduce its proliferation risk, which is basically the only aspect of the nuclear deal that’s still standing. Once they’re gone there’s literally nothing compelling Iran to remain in any compliance with the nuclear deal apart from the threat of a military conflict. European countries are now working to slap together a line of credit for Iranian commerce, which is mostly a symbolic statement that Europe is still working on ways to ensure Iran benefits from the deal despite US sanctions. The gesture is probably too little, too late. Once the Iranians have violated the accord the Europeans could invoke its “snapback” provision, but that’s a perilous step to take over something that’s not a serious transgression. The Iranians have made it more perilous by threatening to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would drastically escalate the situation and is a step they should not take.
At LobeLog, Ryan Costello uses the unfortunate example of Cory Booker’s Wednesday night debate performance to explain one big reason why a Democratic president, should we get one in 2021, will want to reenter the nuclear deal as quickly as possible after taking office:
If someone new enters the White House in January 2021, this president will have to contend with an incredibly short political timeline. Iran holds critical presidential elections in May or June 2021, meaning that Iran is unlikely to engage in substantive negotiations under a lame-duck Rouhani administration. Rather than hold firm and risk the election of a hardliner opposed to any accommodation with the West, a future president should immediately take steps to bring the United States into compliance with the accord.
And Paul Pillar argues that Donald Trump has put himself in a “box” by leaving the nuclear deal and going with his “maximum pressure” campaign:
The current imbroglio results from a Trumpian foreign policy that is largely about domestic politics and the rhetoric of domestic politics, without any serious thinking at the presidential level that could be called a plan or strategy. Trump got on his current course regarding Iran for two reasons. One was to oppose whatever Barack Obama did. Because the JCPOA was perhaps Obama’s most significant foreign policy achievement, it was automatically a target for destruction. The second reason was that Trump, as Fareed Zakaria has observed, has subcontracted U.S. Middle East policy to Israel and Saudi Arabia, to which one could add the United Arab Emirates. The subcontractors have their own reasons for wanting to keep Iran permanently ostracized, sanctioned, weakened, and loathed, and to prevent the United States from doing any sort of business with Tehran. Both of these drivers of the policy ultimately revolve, certainly for Trump, around domestic politics. Excoriating the JCPOA is the foreign policy equivalent of excoriating the Affordable Care Act in domestic policy. The subcontracting of regional policy to Iran’s regional rivals is intimately related to the money dimension and other dimensions of domestic politics.
Now Trump is in a box. He doesn’t seek a war, but he is where supporters and subordinates who do seek one want him to be. And he doesn’t know how to get out of the box.
ASIA
KYRGYZSTAN
There’s a budding political crisis happening in Kyrgyzstan, as parliament voted on Thursday to strip former President Almazbek Atambayev of his legal immunity as an ex-president. Atambayev’s chosen successor, Sooronbay Jeenbekov, has gone after his former patron’s administration with a vengeance, targeting multiple former Atambayev aides with corruption charges, and he now appears to be taking aim at Atambayev himself. Jeenbekov likely has some political reasons for doing this, though there’s no question that Atambayev’s administration was corrupt—so is Jeenbekov’s, it’s just how things roll in Kyrgyzstan. Previous Kyrgyz ex-presidents have fled the country rather than face their own corruption charges, but Atambayev seems intent to stick around and fight back. And given how his supporters are beginning to congregate around his home outside of Bishkek, that may involve a literal fight.
Sooronbay Jeenbekov (left) and Almazbek Atambayev back before they hated each other, or at least before they publicly hated each other
INDIA
If you were hoping for a second trade war to bookend the one with China, you may be in luck:
It’s a little weird that Trump tweeted this, since he just sent Pompeo to India this week to try to relax tensions and since his administration views good relations with New Delhi as one of the keys to its ability to counter Chinese influence across Asia. As far as the details are concerned, Trump’s frustration with Indian trade policy has been stewing for a while, at least since Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi raised tariffs last year. Last month Trump eliminated a program under which India was able to export duty-free goods to the US, and Modi retaliated with more tariff hikes. Neither one is really inclined to back down and since the overall amount of goods involved here is relatively low there’s not much compelling them to back down either.
INDONESIA
Indonesia’s Constitutional Court has rejected a challenge brought by the loser in April’s presidential election, Prabowo Subianto, over the results of the vote. That confirms the reelection of incumbent Joko Widodo. Prabowo has already said he will accept the court’s decision.
CHINA
Protesters hit the streets of Hong Kong again on Thursday to demand that the regional government completely do away with the controversial extradition bill that has generated so much popular outrage in recent weeks. The government has said the bill is suspended, perhaps indefinitely, but many protesters have viewed that as a much too easily reversible outcome. They’re also protesting against police brutality in their response to the protests as well as the release of protesters who have been detained, not to mention the resignation of Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam. She’s refused to budge on resigning and may be feeling some pressure from the Chinese government to remain in her post.
JAPAN
The Japanese government is looking to use this week’s G20 summit in Osaka to advance an environmental agenda. In particular, it wants to take ownership of the world’s massive plastic waste problem, which is interesting given that Japan is a huge contributor to that problem and has resisted international plastic waste reduction efforts in the past. But now that the Asian countries that have heretofore served as Japan’s plastic dumping ground—Malaysia and the Philippines chief among them—have started rejecting that waste, Tokyo really needs to get a handle on its trash. It really needs to get a handle on something else as well:
Japan is hooked on coal, and it can’t kick the habit, environmentalists say. It is even helping to keep its Asian neighbors burning coal, too.
Since 2012, Japan has embarked on a major spending spree to modernize its coal industry, which it boasts as one of the cleanest in the world. Japan has 12 new plants already up and running, 15 being built and 10 in the planning stage.
Among the G-20 nations, Japan is the second-biggest source of public funding for new coal plants after China. Japan has had eight new overseas coal plants approved since the signing of the Paris climate accord in 2015. Three Japanese banks are among the top four private lenders to the coal industry around the world, according to Bank Track, a nonprofit group monitoring global finance.
“The climate emergency demands an urgent response from governments across the world,” Greenpeace Japan said in a statement. “To show real climate leadership, the Japanese government needs to stop bankrolling the destruction of the climate.”
AFRICA
SUDAN
Sudanese authorities used tear gas to break up a student protest in downtown Khartoum on Thursday. The protesters were, of course, expressing opposition to the country’s ruling military junta. Opposition leaders are calling for mass demonstrations on Sunday to pressure the junta into handing day-to-day responsibilities to a civilian transitional government and agreeing to share sovereign authority with civilian leaders.
Meanwhile, the United Nations Security Council voted on Thursday to delay the withdrawal of UN-African Union peacekeepers from Darfur in light of the ongoing political crisis. The council opted to leave forces in place for another four months, until the end of October. The UN is planning to end its peacekeeping mission in Darfur altogether by the end of June 2020, but the instability in Khartoum may threaten to upend those plans.
LIBYA
The Pentagon says it’s seen a “small resurgence” of ISIS in central Libya since the “Libyan National Army” began its offensive against Tripoli back in April. ISIS scattered into the Libyan countryside after the Government of National Accord and its allies took the city of Sirte from it in late 2016. Since then, both the GNA and the LNA have worked to prevent ISIS from rebuilding, but lately everybody’s attention is on Tripoli and other priorities are falling by the wayside.
TUNISIA
Two suicide bombings targeting police and the national guard rocked Tunis on Thursday, leaving at least one police officer dead and five other people wounded. ISIS later claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Separately, Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi was rushed to a military hospital on Thursday with what is being called a “severe health crisis.” The nature of the crisis is unknown, but Essebsi is 92 so there are lots of possibilities. By evening Tunisian officials were saying that Essebsi’s condition had improved, but they’re still being pretty light on the details. Essebsi has expressed his disinterest in standing for reelection in October, and while that may have been a political ploy this health scare might ensure that he does indeed stay out of the race.
ETHIOPIA
Ethiopian authorities in Addis Ababa have arrested at least 56 members of the National Movement of Amhara, an Amhara nationalist party, and authorities in Ethiopia’s Oromia region have reportedly arrested “dozens” more. Presumably the arrests are related to last weekend’s attempted coup in the Amhara region, but the Ethiopian government hasn’t linked the party with the coup attempt and party leaders are calling the arrests “identity-based.” Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has so far brought Ethiopia out of the days when political opponents of the government were in danger of being rounded up and jailed, but if his government’s response to the Amhara coup becomes too overzealous Ethiopia could find itself slipping back into old habits.
CAMEROON
Cameroon’s secession crisis appears to be heading to mediation, courtesy of the government of Switzerland. Anglophone separatists in the country’s English-speaking region, which they’ve dubbed “Ambazonia,” have been engaged in an insurrection since 2017. The Swiss government says “a majority of the parties” involved in the conflict chose it as mediator, but hasn’t really specified who “the parties” are, and neither the Cameroonian government nor the separatists seem to be talking about it.
EUROPE
ALBANIA
Albania looks like it’s careening toward a good old fashioned political crisis this weekend. President Ilir Meta has rescheduled local elections that were supposed to happen on Sunday for October 13, because of a planned opposition party boycott (potentially involving acts of civil disobedience) over allegations of political fraud and corruption by the ruling Socialist Party. But Prime Minister Edi Rama says that Sunday is still election day. The Albanian presidency is a mostly ceremonial office but it does have the responsibility for scheduling elections, so Rama isn’t on terribly solid ground here. He’s apparently begun procedures to remove Meta from office but it seems unlikely that he could get that accomplished in the next couple of days.
CZECH REPUBLIC
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš’s government won a no-confidence vote on Thursday. Opposition leaders brought the confidence motion after weeks of protests, at times large ones, over allegations that Babiš engaged in fraudulent behavior during his business career and has continued to benefit from European Union funds diverted to companies in his business empire since becoming PM. Despite his struggles, both the Social Democrats, who are in a coalition with Babiš’s ANO party, and the Communist Party, which supports the coalition, declined to back the no-confidence bid. Still relations between ANO and the Social Democrats have been fraying of late so there’s probably more Czech political drama on the horizon.
FRANCE
A gunman opened fire on a crowd of people leaving a mosque in the French city of Brest on Thursday, wounding two people including the imam. He then apparently killed himself.
AMERICAS
URUGUAY
Uruguay’s delegation to the Organization of American States walked out of an OAS meeting in Colombia on Thursday due to the presence of a Venezuelan delegation affiliated with Juan Guaidó’s opposition movement rather than Nicolás Maduro’s government. OAS members seemed to be split over whether or not to accept the delegation, though none of the other opponents went as far as Uruguay’s decision to quit the meeting.
UNITED STATES
Finally, political scientists Charli Carpenter and Alexander Montgomery argue that a story we’ve covered previously on Americans’ willingness to bomb North Korea was based on a flawed survey:
This week, the Washington Post reported on a paper by Stanford University and Dartmouth College researchers showing that “One-third of Americans would support a preemptive nuclear strike on North Korea.” The Post emphasized in particular the finding, based in part on an earlier study on Iran, that “the U.S. public exhibits … a shocking willingness to support the killing of enemy civilians.” Other news sources are already picking up on this “terrifying” story.
Here’s the thing, though: It’s not actually true. By replicating the earlier Iran study, we’ve found that most Americans do not approve of killing enemy civilians. In fact, Americans care deeply about the protection of civilians, as other studies have also shown. Although a few supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump and others are sanguine about war crimes, the U.S. public is generally not.
Highlighting supposed American readiness to bomb civilians is not just misleading, it’s potentially dangerous. For the laws of war to have power, it matters whether policymakers think Americans believe in these rules. And at a time of unprecedented U.S. brinkmanship with North Korea and Iran, these norms are more important than ever.