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THESE DAYS IN HISTORY
September 28, 1538: The Battle of Preveza
September 28, 1961: A group of Syrian military officers carries out a coup that pulls Syria out of the United Arab Republic, the political union that Syria and Egypt had formed in 1958. In addition to ending the UAR, the coup kicked off about 18 months of political chaos in Syria that finally ended (well, sort of ended) with the March 1963 coup that brought the Baath Party to power.
September 29, 1227: Pope Gregory IX excommunicates Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II for repeatedly breaking promises to go on Crusade. Frederick, who had already engineered his own succession as “King of Jerusalem,” subsequently did go on Crusade, for which Gregory excommunicated him again since he was now acting without permission. Frederick nevertheless led the Sixth Crusade, with the Church advising people not to join him because he was an excommunicate, and wound up negotiating a very tenuous handover of the city of Jerusalem.
INTERNATIONAL
Worldometer’s coronavirus figures for September 29:
33,833,554 confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide (7,681,996 active, +287,906 since yesterday)
1,012,014 reported fatalities (+5853 since yesterday)
The main limitation in terms of tracking the true extent of the pandemic has been and continues to be the limitations of human record keeping. Even in a world where nobody has any incentive to fudge numbers and everyone is scrupulously honest, COVID-19 infections and fatalities would be missed. Needless to say we don’t live in that world, so on top of the honest errors in data collection we have to assume some intentional manipulation, probably in every country though the extent of that manipulation will vary from place to place.
There’s been an ongoing search for ways to get around these limitations. The Economist has published the results of one such effort, relying on known information gleaned from “serosurveys” (which test for the prevalence of SARS-CoV2 antibodies) combined with statistical analysis and assumptions to account, again, for the limitations of such data collection. The results, if accurate, show a pandemic that is far more prevalent than official figures are saying:
The graphic on this page shows such an estimate based on 279 serosurveys in 19 countries. It suggests that infections were already running at over 1m a day by the end of January—when the world at large was only just beginning to hear of the virus’s existence. In May the worldwide rate appears to have been more than 5m a day. The uncertainties in the estimate are large, and become greater as you draw close to the present, but all told it finds that somewhere between 500m and 730m people worldwide have been infected—from 6.4% to 9.3% of the world’s population. The WHO has not yet released serosurvey-based estimates of its own, though such work is under way; but it has set an upper bound at 10% of the global population.
As the upper part of the following data panel shows, serosurvey results which can be directly compared with the diagnosed totals are often a great deal bigger. In Germany, where cases have been low and testing thorough, the seropositivity rate was 4.5 times the diagnosed rate in August. In Minnesota a survey carried out in July found a multiplier of seven. A survey completed on August 23rd found a 6.02% seropositivity rate in England, implying a multiplier of 12. A national serosurvey of India conducted from the middle of May to early June found that 0.73% were infected, suggesting a national total of 10m. The number of registered cases at that time was 226,713, giving a multiplier of 44. Such results suggest that a global multiplier of 20 or so is quite possible.
If there are more infections then that means the virus is a bit less deadly than it seems in the official numbers. But only a bit, because death tolls are also off quite a bit. Another workaround to the vagaries of human error and manipulation estimates the COVID-19 death toll based on the total number of “excess” deaths this year compared with an average year. If those numbers are accurate, then the number of COVID-19 fatalities is probably closer to around 2 million than to the 1 million threshold the world supposedly just crossed.
MIDDLE EAST
YEMEN
2031 confirmed coronavirus cases (+0)
587 reported fatalities (+0)
Several not so great things happened while we were away (we’ll get to that), but let’s start with something that actually seems like good news. The Yemeni government and Houthi rebels agreed on Sunday to a major exchange of 1081 prisoners, their largest since Yemen’s civil war began and the first real movement toward implementing a 2018 deescalation agreement in months. That agreement first established a ceasefire in the Yemeni port city of Hudaydah, which has more or less held, but it mapped out further steps toward peace talks, starting with a prisoner swap, that had hitherto gone nowhere. The swap was the outcome of United Nations brokered negotiations between the parties in Switzerland last week.
IRAQ
358,290 confirmed cases (+4724)
9122 reported fatalities (+70)
The Trump administration has told Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Khadhimi that it will close the US embassy in Baghdad unless his government puts an end to rocket attacks targeting that and other US-related facilities, likely perpetrated by Iranian-aligned militias. That warning came before word of another rocket attack near Baghdad’s airport on Monday, which killed at least six civilians. It is unusual for these (alleged) militia attacks to target or even risk targeting civilians. The administration said it was “outraged” by that attack.
I have a hard time believing that the administration would actually close the Baghdad embassy, which would likely spark a backlash even among Congressional Republicans and would, as it happens, be giving the militias exactly what they want. But Kadhimi seems to believe it, or at least he’s acting like he believes it . He’s talking about creating a special security force for Baghdad’s Green Zone, where the embassy is located, and appears to be threatening the militias with economic and military retaliation in an attempt to bring them under tighter state control, but whether he can succeed is anybody’s guess.
LEBANON
38,377 confirmed cases (+1105)
361 reported fatalities (+10)
It’s been building for at least a couple of weeks now, but former Lebanese prime minister-designate Mustapha Adib made it official over the weekend and withdrew himself from consideration for the job. Adib ran into a brick wall in the form of Lebanon’s two major Shiʿa parties, Amal and Hezbollah, and their insistence on retaining control over certain offices, most particularly over the finance ministry. Adib sought to divest the cabinet nomination process from the various political factions that have traditionally controlled it, ostensibly to create a “government of experts” but more to respond to Western concerns over the extent of Hezbollah (and therefore, from their perspective, Iranian) influence in Beirut. Clearly his plan didn’t work out.
The fallout from Adib’s withdrawal is still playing out and has been superseded by other stories (like I said, we’re getting there), but it may signal the death knell of a European initiative, spearheaded by French President Emmanuel Macron, to reform Lebanese politics using the carrot and stick of potential European aid as leverage. Macron has already blamed Amal and Hezbollah for Adib’s failure and said he was “ashamed” of Lebanese leaders, because I guess he’s their dad now.
KUWAIT
104,568 confirmed cases (+587)
607 reported fatalities (+2)
So if you’ve been reading along regularly you’ll know that Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah has been convalescing at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester since July, following some unspecified surgery, and that Kuwaiti officials have been at pains to let everybody know that he’s doing just fine—at such pains, in fact, that their claims were starting to sound more like protests than actual updates. Well, Sabah is dead now. His cause of death remains unclear, though at 91 it can’t really be called sudden or surprising.
Sheikh Sabah meeting with Donald Trump back in 2017 (White House photo via Flickr)
As stipulated in Kuwait’s constitution, Sabah has already been succeeded by his brother and former crown prince, Sheikh Nawaf al-Ahmad al-Sabah. Before you start thinking this means an infusion of youth and vitality, please bear in mind that Nawaf is 83 himself. He’ll undoubtedly make appointing a new crown prince his first order of business, for obvious reasons. Overall it’s unlikely he’ll stray too far from Sabah’s policy of maintaining cordial relations with Kuwait’s neighbors, including Iran, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, and making himself available as a mediator when needed. He may find himself under some pressure from Washington to become the next Arab leader to normalize relations with Israel, but the general feeling seems to be that he’ll try to resist that pressure, and anyway Kuwaiti politics may bind his hands on the issue.
SAUDI ARABIA
334,187 confirmed cases (+539)
4739 reported fatalities (+27)
Saudi officials say they broke up a “terror cell” trained by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps last week, though they haven’t gone into much detail about it beyond that claim. You can probably add this to the growing list of dubiously sourced claims about alleged Iranian misdeeds, from their alleged plan to assassinate the US ambassador to South Africa, to their alleged “fissile material” stockpile, to Hezbollah’s alleged weapons caches strewn across Europe, to the allegedly IRGC-trained terror cell that Bahraini authorities say they recently busted. None is well substantiated, but hey, who cares about that kind of thing? For what it’s worth the Iranians are denying this latest Saudi claim.
IRAN
453,637 confirmed cases (+3677)
25,986 reported fatalities (+207)
Iranian state media is reporting that three IRGC soldiers were killed Tuesday in a drive-by shooting in Sistan-Baluchistan province. Given the location it seems likely that Jaysh al-Adl, whose ideology combines Sunni Islamism and Baluch nationalism (maybe more the former than the latter) was responsible.
ASIA
AZERBAIJAN
40,119 confirmed cases (+58)
590 reported fatalities (+2)
OK, so I said we would get to the bad stuff, and here we are. The most troubling thing that happened during FX’s long weekend was undoubtedly the outbreak of new and possibly sustained fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region and surrounding Azerbaijani territories occupied by Armenia during their 1988-1994 war. If you haven’t had a chance to listen, I interviewed Eurasianet’s Joshua Kucera earlier today about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and about this flare-up. As he pointed out in that interview, keeping track of clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan can be difficult because of the divergent characterizations of events that emerge from both governments and the difficulty of independently verifying those characterizations.
That said, here’s what we know. The fighting began Sunday with exchanges of artillery fire between the Azerbaijani military and the forces of the internationally unrecognized Karabakh regional government. Each side naturally accused the other of firing the first shot, claims that as usual have proven impossible to definitively verify or disprove. But with Karabakh officials saying that the Azerbaijanis shelled them first and Azerbaijani officials countering that they were responding to “provocation” that they won’t detail, it seems reasonable to conclude that the Azerbaijanis initiated this exchange. A fuller picture has emerged in the two days since, as both sides have acknowledged that the Azerbaijanis are on the offensive and the fighting has begun to spill out of the Nagorno-Karabakh area. Both the Armenian and Azerbaijani governments have declared martial law as reports of the overall death toll reached as high as 95 on Monday, a figure that undoubtedly continued to rise on Tuesday though, as I’ve been saying, reliable specific information is only emerging slowly.
The obvious questions surrounding this outbreak are 1) why now? and 2) what next? Neither has a very clear answer right now, but we can make some educated guesses. To the former, the Armenian-Azerbaijani border clash back in July, which notably did not involve Nagorno-Karabakh, seems to have primed large segments of the public in both countries for more conflict, especially on Azerbaijan’s side. When a public is actually out in front of its own government in calling for war that creates a very dangerous situation. Baku also may be emboldened by the fact that the Turkish government, apparently not satisfied with intervening in Libya and Syria while trying to seize control over the eastern Mediterranean, has now decided to intervene in the Caucasus as well. Initially that intervention seemed limited to rhetoric, but the Armenian government has begun accusing Ankara of sending weapons, military advisers, and possibly even Syrian mercenaries (in other words, the full Libya package) to Azerbaijan. The Azerbaijanis have denied those claims, but on Tuesday this part of the story took another turn when Armenian officials accused the Turkish air force of shooting down an Armenian fighter jet. Again Azerbaijan (and Turkey) have denied this claim, but the “where there’s smoke there’s fire” principle is beginning to take hold here.
As to the question of what happens next, that too is murky in large part because Azerbaijan’s aims aren’t entirely clear. Ultimately there’s no question the Azerbaijanis would like to take back all the territory they lost during the 1990s war, and with a military empowered by oil and gas wealth and now (possibly) by Turkish assistance, they may feel they’re in a position to make that happen. However, Kucera in his latest piece for Eurasianet suggests that their immediate goal is not that comprehensive and is instead oriented around the more limited aim of recovering one or two of the territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh. The Armenians would likely be willing to part with those areas, which were majority Azerbaijani before the war and have been largely depopulated since, if push came to shove, and geographically they’re easier for the Azerbaijani military to seize. One thing that does not seem to be in the cards is peace talks, as both sides have rejected the possibility. Though to be fair, we’re only on day three of fighting and at this point this flare-up hasn’t been as serious as the previous major flare-up in April 2016—though the potential for it to escalate beyond that is certainly there.
If there are to be any negotiations they will likely have to be brokered by Russia, the only country with the regional power, interest, and credibility with both combatants to make something like that happen. Russian officials have called on Turkey to support a peace process. There are understandably some concerns about regional escalation, though in our interview Kucera noted that the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict has lost some of its international potency and likely isn’t a major potential flash point. The one wild card here is Turkey, whose erratic and aggressive foreign policy has put it on the opposite side of Russia in now three separate conflicts, even as Ankara and Moscow keep trying to strengthen their bilateral relationship. Struggling to deal with a weak economy, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has come to depend on feeding the Turkish public a steady supply of Public Enemies—Cyprus, Egypt, France, Greece, the UAE, the United States, now Armenia—but at some point it seems likely he’s going to press his luck and start something he’s not capable of finishing.
AFGHANISTAN
39,254 confirmed cases (+21)
1458 reported fatalities (+3)
A roadside bomb in Afghanistan’s Daikundi province killed at least 14 civilians on Tuesday. Given the location and the choice of weapon it seems like the the Taliban was responsible.
PAKISTAN
311,516 confirmed cases (+675)
6474 reported fatalities (+8)
According to the Pakistani military, Indian artillery fire across the Line of Control in Kashmir killed one soldier and a 15 year old boy late Monday. Indian authorities have not commented as far as I know.
INDIA
6,223,519 confirmed cases (+80,500)
97,529 reported fatalities (+1178)
The Indian and Chinese militaries may have agreed to stand their border guards down along their hotly disputed (of late, anyway) Ladakh-Aksai Chin border, but according to Al Jazeera Indian officials are ramping up infrastructure projects in that region. There are several projects in the works, but the main one is an effort to build a new highway into Ladakh that won’t need to be closed during the winter, as Ladakh’s two current major highways are. The goal is to facilitate Indian military deployments should the situation warrant. Chinese officials have criticized the projects, which is neat because they’ve already built similar infrastructure on their side of the border.
CHINA
85,384 confirmed cases (+12) on the mainland, 5080 confirmed cases (+4) in Hong Kong
4634 reported fatalities (+0) on the mainland, 105 reported fatalities (+0) in Hong Kong
The Wall Street Journal (paywalled, I know) looks at how the Chinese government is using international organizations to win its soft power competition with the United States:
When China curtailed political freedoms in Hong Kong this summer, two rival declarations circulated at the United Nations Human Rights Council. One, drafted by Cuba and commending Beijing’s move, won the backing of 53 nations. Another, issued by the U.K. and expressing concern, secured 27 supporters.
China’s show of strength was just the latest diplomatic triumph in Beijing’s drive to sway the system of international organizations in its direction. As the Trump administration stepped back from many parts of the multilateral order established after World War II, China has emerged a chief beneficiary, intensifying a methodical, decadelong campaign.
Beijing is pushing its civil servants, or those of clients and partners, to the helm of U.N. institutions that set global standards for air travel, telecommunications and agriculture. Gaining influence at the U.N. permits China to stifle international scrutiny of its behavior at home and abroad. In March, Beijing won a seat on a five-member panel that selects U.N. rapporteurs on human-rights abuses—officials who used to target Beijing for imprisoning more than a million Uighurs at so-called re-education camps in Xinjiang.
Washington has recently attempted to counter this effort at the U.N., cajoling and wooing countries around the world. Those efforts, hamstrung by damaged relationships with partners and allies, have had a limited impact so far.
AFRICA
LIBYA
34,014 confirmed cases (+801)
540 reported fatalities (+13)
A new UN report finds that the UAE has been violating the international arms embargo against Libya to ship weapons to its ally, eastern Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar. This isn’t exactly breaking news, I grant you, but at least now we can be sure that the Emiratis will face repercussions for their actions. Oh, that’s not going to happen? Ah, well, nevertheless.
MALI
3101 confirmed cases (+11)
131 reported fatalities (+1)
Mali’s junta took another step toward installing a civilian-led interim government on Friday, naming former foreign minister Moctar Ouane as prime minister. With the junta having already appointed former defense minister Bah Ndaw as president, with junta leader Assimi Goïta as his vice president, the top leadership of an interim government is now in place. The junta (also known as the National Committee for the Salvation of the People or CNSP) has also come down from its initial insistence on a three year transition and appears to have settled on an 18 month process instead. Will this all be enough to convince the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to lift the sanctions it’s had in place against Mali since last month’s coup? Maybe. The CNSP still hasn’t met several ECOWAS demands, including that it dissolve itself and release prisoners taken during the coup and its aftermath.
SOUTH SUDAN
2700 confirmed cases (+8)
49 reported fatalities (+0)
The head of the UN Mission in South Sudan, David Shearer, told reporters on Tuesday that efforts to implement the 2018 peace deal between the South Sudanese government and rebels have stalled due to a failure to incorporate rebel fighters into the South Sudanese military. He said that rebel fighters are deserting the training facilties where that process is supposed to be happening, because those facilities haven’t been supplied with food and other basic provisions.
EUROPE
BELARUS
78,260 confirmed cases (+314)
828 reported fatalities (+6)
The British and Canadian governments on Tuesday announced sanctions against Belarusian President (well, it’s complicated) Alexander Lukashenko, his son, and several senior Belarusian officials. In doing so they appear to have scooped the Trump administration, which had reportedly been coordinating an announcement with them but has also been waiting to do a joint announcement with the European Union. The EU’s Belarusian sanctions package is still on ice as the government of Cyprus is trying to force the bloc to take stronger action against Turkish activities in the eastern Mediterranean.
UNITED KINGDOM
446,156 confirmed cases (+7143)
42,072 reported fatalities (+71)
Despite some residual grumbling even within his own Conservative Party, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Tuesday secured final passage of his controversial “Internal Market Bill,” which includes a threat to violate the UK’s Brexit withdrawal agreement with respect to Northern Ireland. This was something of a foregone conclusion, since the bill passed its first reading by a pretty wide margin, but Johnson made some concessions to Tory skeptics in the final version—in particular, he agreed to give parliament final say on whether to invoke the Northern Ireland provisions.
AMERICAS
BOLIVIA
134,223 confirmed cases (+322)
7900 reported fatalities (+42)
Three Bolivian cabinet ministers quit junta leader Jeanine Áñez’s government on Monday, led by now former Economy Minister Óscar Ortiz, who claimed he quit before he could be fired. Ortiz has apparently objected to Áñez’s recently announced plan to re-privatize the electricity company ELFEC, which former President Evo Morales nationalized, on the grounds that, well, Áñez has no legitimate authority to undertake such a step. Having now decided to stand aside rather than run in next month’s (unless she postpones it again) presidential election, Áñez is apparently looking to loot as much as she can on her way out the door.
VENEZUELA
74,363 confirmed cases (+835)
621 reported fatalities (+7)
Three more Iranian tankers loaded with fuel are reportedly heading for Venezuela in violation of US sanctions. One is already in Venezuelan waters and the other two appear to be a week or two behind, so it would presumably be difficult at this point for the Trump administration to make a move to seize them or their cargo.
UNITED STATES
7,406,146 confirmed cases (+44,227)
210,785 reported fatalities (+977)
Finally, at his Informed Comment website, Juan Cole looks at recent revelations about Donald Trump’s finances and what they could mean with respect to his conduct of foreign policy:
The New York Times reported, in the scoop of the decade, that Trump has $420 million in loans and other obligations coming due in the next four years, and that most of his core businesses hemorrhage money, so that he has no way to pay them back.
In the past decade, Trump has been money-hungry, which may have impelled his bid for the presidency. In 2012 he mortgaged some of Trump Tower for $100 million. He also sold off many of his securities, and may have less than $1 million left.
One of the few bright spots in his portfolio is overseas investments. In 2017-2018, the first two years of his presidency, he earned $73 million from projects abroad, especially resorts and other properties in Scotland and Ireland. But he also took in $3 million from the Philippines, $2.3 million from India and $1 million from Turkey.
Given how much in the hole Trump is, even $6 million every four years from the Philippines or $2 million from Turkey could be a substantial incentive for Trump to please the rulers of those countries.