Daily News Brief

September 17, 2024

Top of the Agenda

The announcement today by Israel’s security cabinet comes after months of cross-border bouts of fire between Israeli forces and Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israeli residents displaced by those clashes should be able to return to their homes, the cabinet added. Israel’s defense minister told senior White House official Amos Hochstein yesterday that “military action” was “the only way” to allow such a return for residents of northern Israel, underscoring the challenges ahead as U.S. and other international envoys continue efforts to prevent a more intense Israel-Hezbollah conflict from spilling out. 

While Hochstein is pushing for a diplomatic solution to the tensions, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is returning to Egypt today in continued pursuit of a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It is Blinken’s tenth trip to the Middle East since Hamas attacked Israel nearly a year ago, kicking off the current war. (AP, NYT, WSJ)

Analysis

“It is precisely because [Hezbollah]’s fighters are so close to Israel’s border and because it can threaten Israel’s population centers, airports, and military bases that Israel is more likely to escalate,” CFR Senior Fellow Steven A. Cook writes in Foreign Policy. “The Israelis have been clear: If the matter can be resolved diplomatically and in an enforceable way, they are on board.”

“A full-scale regional war would add new pressures and even higher costs. To prepare for that, Israel needs to undertake a larger rethinking of its security strategy, one that in some ways revives the approach it followed in the early decades of its existence,” the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Assaf Orion writes for Foreign Affairs.  

Read the full suite of Foreign Affairs and CFR.org resources on Israel and the current conflict.

Pacific Rim

Representatives of TikTok and the U.S. government each laid bare their arguments yesterday in a case over whether to halt a January 19 deadline for the app to divest from its Chinese owners or face a ban. TikTok cited freedom of expression principles and said its parent firm was a private company, while the Justice Department likened it to foreign propaganda. (WaPo)

For the Net Politics blog, CFR’s Catherine Powell and Alexandra Dent unpack the TikTok trap.

U.S./China: Washington worked privately for “some time” to secure the release of pastor David Lin from Beijing this weekend, a U.S. State Department official said yesterday. Lin had been detained since 2006 in what his advocates say has been a crackdown on religion in China. U.S. officials are still working to “push for the release of other Americans.” (VOA)  

This Expert Brief by Ian Johnson explains China’s reversal on some of its religious crackdowns—but not all.

South and Central Asia

New Delhi’s renewables minister rolled out the new total, coming from banks and financial institutions, at a conference in Gujarat yesterday, saying that it would help the country reach its goal of doubling clean energy capacity by 2030. Fossil fuels still claim around 77 percent of India’s electricity generation, but the country has upped its renewables in the last few years. (Times of India)

This tracker by CFR expert Benn Steil monitors the status of global energy. 

Azerbaijan: With less than two months to go, Baku has laid out its goals for hosting this year’s UN climate change summit, COP29. Among them are aims to push for a new, higher annual target for wealthy countries to pay poorer ones to cope with climate effects, officials said. They also seek to garner support for a pledge to increase worldwide energy storage capacity six times above 2022 levels. (Reuters)

Middle East and North Africa

Relations have remained fairly brittle between the two countries, despite Chinese efforts in facilitating a deal last year to restore ties after a seven-year row. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian called the countries “brothers” in a press conference yesterday and said he planned to visit Riyadh when he had an opportunity. (Al-Monitor)

Sub-Saharan Africa

U.S. troops have officially left the country, the Pentagon said yesterday, though a small number of personnel guarding the U.S. Embassy will stay. Niger had previously been one of the last footholds in the Sahel hosting U.S. counterinsurgency forces, but its stance on hosting U.S. troops sharply changed following its military coup last July. (AP)

Mali: The military reported that “some sensitive points of the capital” including a school for security forces came under attack today, but that authorities had since regained control. The identity of the attacker was not immediately clear. (Reuters)

Europe

The biggest economic policy jobs went to the countries that have advocated for more robust industrial policy in the bloc: France, Italy, and Spain. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also doled out a prominent new post as defense minister to Lithuania’s Andrius Kubilius, an eastern European politician known to be tough on Russia. Spain’s Ecological Transformation Minister Teresa Ribera Rodríguez, a climate campaigner, will become executive vice president, second-in-command to von der Leyen. (FT, Le Monde)

Russia/Ukraine: Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an increase in the size of Russia’s army for the third time since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, saying it should have 1.5 million active troops starting in December. (CNN)

Americas

Authorities reported the toll yesterday, in addition to more than seven thousand acres rendered completely torched. Peru, like many South American countries, has been hit by a severe drought in recent months. Its national forest and wildlife service said that climate change had exacerbated the conditions that enabled such fires. (AP, Reuters)

Ecuador: President Daniel Noboa Azín will seek a constitutional amendment allowing foreign military bases in the country, he said on social media. Ecuador’s constitution has prohibited them since 2008, but Noboa said an increase in the country’s insecurity now requires that to change. (Reuters)

U.S. Campaign 2024

The man arrested near former President Donald Trump’s golf course Sunday was charged with possessing a firearm as a felon and possessing a firearm with an obliterated serial number. While he first arrived near the course some twelve hours before Trump, security agents fired at him before he had the former president in his sights, acting Secret Service Director Ronald L. Rowe Jr, said. (NYT)

This memorandum by CFR expert Jacob Ware takes on preventing election violence in 2024’s vote.

Social media firm Meta announced it is banning Russian state media outlets such as RT from its platforms for “foreign interference activity.” Last Friday, Secretary of State Blinken said new information revealed that RT and its parent entities “are no longer merely fire hoses of Russian propaganda and disinformation,” but are “engaged in covert influence activities aimed at undermining American elections.” (WaPo)

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