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What will Israel's invasion of Rafah look like?
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.
How will Iran respond to the attack on their consulate in Syria?
An Israeli strike that killed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leader of Iran in Syria. So on the one hand, Iranian citizen, high-level military official. On the other hand, not in Iran itself, in Syria supporting proxy attacks. Clearly the Iranians have been willing to push hard using the leverage they have in the so-called acts of resistance to engage in strikes against civilian shipping, against Western military capabilities, and against Israel.
The Israelis are showing that they will attack wherever they think fit against them, but Iran has been reluctant to allow this to potentially lead to escalation in a direct war against Iran, which is why it's hard to imagine the Iranians engaging in direct strikes against Israel itself. Ballistic missile strikes from Iran into Israel. So in other words, if you're going to hit Israel, you try to use proxies or you try to hit Israelis outside of Israel itself. Israeli diplomatic facilities, for example, that's where I think you're more likely to see escalation. Escalation seems almost certain from the Iranians, but containing it also is something the Americans and Israel are trying very, very hard to do and that continues to be the case like when we saw the American servicemen killed in Jordan a couple months ago.
What will Israel's invasion of Rafah look like?
Assuming it happens, remember Netanyahu was saying that he has a date now for the strike, but he said that strikes were going to start once Ramadan began if there had not been an agreement on this six-week, hostages for temporary ceasefire deal. There wasn't such a deal, Netanyahu backed off, he could back off again. Also, the ultimatum from the United States is not about a war in Rafah. It is about a large-scale ground war without providing the ability for the Palestinians to evacuate and get humanitarian aid.
Between those two positions there's a lot of wiggle room and one expects that the Israeli government, as they are thinking about those strikes, which I do believe will come, will try to claim domestically that they're doing what they need to clear up Hamas and claim to the Americans that it is at a reduced cost of civilians and it is engaged in the spirit of working with the Americans and not requiring Biden to shut down offensive support for Israel. That's where we are.
What's the fallout from Ecuador's raid of a Mexican embassy?
Well, the first thing is President Noboa of Ecuador, this is political. This is a former vice president who was taking, was sheltering in the Mexican embassy. You raid it, that is a breach of international law, but there is a security, largely security referendum, nationwide referendum coming up in just a couple of weeks in Ecuador that Noboa wants to win. He is ahead, it looks like he will win it now, and this is going to be very popular on the ground.
Guy had been sort of on their wanted list for a long time, but they decided to take that action now because of the domestic politics. So it helps him. Probably doesn't kill the IMF deal that is presently being negotiated, but certainly suspends diplomatic relations between the two countries and it's probably going to affect trade too. So you've alienated the Mexicans, but given the near-term political benefit for the Ecuadorian president, he thought that was a risk worth taking. Lots of impunity in this environment. It's one consistency that we see in our geopolitical recession, our GZERO world.
That's it for me. I'll talk to you all real soon.
- Ecuador’s anti-corruption candidate assassinated ›
- Who will Iran blame for deadly explosions near Soleimani’s grave? ›
- Egypt braces for Israel’s ground invasion of Rafah ›
- Bibi sets date for Rafah invasion ›
- Turkish voters punish Erdogan in local elections ›
- How Netanyahu used Hamas to avoid talks of a two-state solution ›
- Yuval Noah Harari: Netanyahu's 'Deep State' fears enabled Oct 7 attack ›
- Netanyahu’s failed Gaza strategy ›
Banknotes of the new national currency Zimbabwe Gold, ZiG for short, are presented at a press conference of the Central Bank of Zimbabwe. Due to high inflation, Zimbabwe's central bank has introduced a new currency that is primarily linked to gold, but also to a number of other precious metals and foreign currencies.
Hard numbers: Zimbabwe’s new bills, Ecuador in hot water, Russian dam failure, Ukraine’s air defense, Island-sized lottery.
70: Zimbabwe is rolling out the ZiG, a new currency pegged to gold and foreign cash. The government hopes to curb the freefall of its erstwhile dollar, whose value has declined by over 70% since January. People have three weeks to exchange the old notes for the new currency.
2: Two countries, Mexico and Nicaragua, have cut ties with Ecuador following a police raid Friday on Mexico’s Quito embassy that resulted in the arrest of Ecuador’s former vice president, Jorge Glas. Glas had been staying in the embassy seeking asylum since December, when a warrant was issued for his arrest. President Lopez Obrador responded angrily, calling the raid a “flagrant violation of international law,” and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega followed suit, referring to it as “reprehensible."
11,000: The failure of a dam in Orsk, Russia, has forced the evacuation of 11,000 residents and left over 4,000 buildings teetering on the brink. Several regional provinces in the area, near the Kazakhstan border, have suffered from flooding in recent days.
25: In a television interview that aired on Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked allies for 25 US Patriot systems, saying they are vital to repelling Russian ballistic and hypersonic missiles that can hit targets within minutes. As Russia’s relentless bombing continues, the Ukrainian president warns that his country is running out of air-defense missiles.
1.3 billion: An Oregon lottery player snagged a Powerball prize north of $1.3 billion after no other player hit the jackpot for three months. For context, that’s roughly the equivalent of Grenada’s GDP, minus the taxman's cut, of course.US House Speaker Mike Johnson is speaking about the DHS deal and the plan to avert a shutdown during a press conference in Washington DC, USA, on March 20, 2024.
Hard Numbers: US government shutdown averted, Nigerian schoolkids rescued, Israel’s hospital raid proves deadly, Search for Mexican kidnap victims continues
1.2 trillion: The Senate passed the $1.2 trillion spending bill on Saturday in a 74-24 vote, enabling President Joe Biden to sign it into law and avert a partial government shutdown. This will keep the lights on for roughly three-quarters of the federal government until October, raising military pay and increasing funds for US-Mexico border patrol.
137: Nigerian authorities on Sunday rescued 137 schoolkids who were kidnapped two weeks ago in the northern state of Kaduna, with 76 girls and 61 boys found in the neighboring Zamfara state. Earlier reports suggested that 287 children had been kidnapped, but that number was an estimate, and authorities say all of the kidnap victims have been found and will soon return home.
170: Israel says its raid on Gaza’s largest health facility, Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital, has killed 170 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants, with more than 800 detained. Israeli special forces and tanks encircled the hospital early last week, forcing thousands of Palestinians who had been sheltering there to evacuate. On Sunday, Israel reportedly surrounded two more hospitals in Gaza.
42: After 66 people were kidnapped Friday in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa – home to the infamous Sinaloa Cartel – authorities have worked over the weekend to rescue 42 of the hostages, including 18 children. The search continues for the remaining 24.A man walks his dog on the Mexican side of a section of the U.S.-Mexican Border wall on Wednesday morning, September 7th, 2022, as seen from Cameron County, Texas
Can Texas write its own border laws?
Federal courts played a game of injunction ping-pong this week with Texas’ controversial new immigration law known as SB4, which would dramatically expand the Lone Star State’s power at the border. The law would allow Texas police to detain people suspected of entering the US illegally and enable Texas judges to deport them – powers that have traditionally fallen under federal jurisdiction.
The law briefly came into effect Tuesday after the US Supreme Court declined an emergency application from the Biden administration arguing it violated federal authority. Within hours, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated an injunction on enforcement, and on Wednesday that court heard arguments on the constitutionality of the law – one step in a process that could take the case back to SCOTUS.
The key question is whether states may write their own immigration laws even if they conflict with existing federal law, according to Eurasia Group analyst Noah Daponte-Smith.
“If the court ruled the entire law constitutional, that may open the door to conflictual federal and state immigration policies and would raise big questions about enforcement,” he says.
And Texas is finding it takes two to tango in foreign relations. Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs made clear it does not recognize Texas’ own border policy and will not accept any attempted repatriations from state authorities.Graphic Truth: US trade deficit with Canada & Mexico
The US trade deficit in goods with Canada and Mexico reached an all-time high in 2023 of over $220 billion — and despite what you may hear from certain former US presidents, that’s a good thing. Yes, more money than ever is leaving the US and going to the neighbors. And in exchange, American consumers get more stuff from their neighbors than ever before and for better prices than they can find at home.
Claudia Sheinbaum (c), candidate for the presidency of Mexico from the MORENA party, is visiting the facilities of the Tlatelolco Cultural Center in Mexico City to sign the National Commitment for Peace, organized by the Society of Jesus in Mexico and the Mexican Episcopate Conference, on March 11, 2024.
Mexico’s presidential front-runner and the politics of violent crime
In June 2022, a man fleeing a drug gang took refuge inside a church in a remote region of northern Mexico. Armed men followed him into the church, killed him, and murdered two Jesuit priests who tried to intervene.
That event has since strained relations between the Catholic Church and President Andres Manuel López Obrador, whom church leaders blame for failing to contain the country’s still-high rates of violent crime.
López Obrador’s presidency will end – he’s term-limited – later this year following an election to choose his successor. The popular leader has endorsed former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum of his Morena party, and she is the heavy favorite in June’s election.
This week, all three presidential candidates signed a document entitled “Commitment for Peace,” drafted by Mexico’s Roman Catholic leadership, that calls for new efforts to lower the country’s violent crime rate. But Sheinbaum, beating back implicit criticism of López Obrador’s failure on the issue, noted that she disagreed with the church’s claim that Mexico suffers a “profound crisis of violence.”
López Obrador’s security minister reported in January that the country’s homicide rate fell 10.8% in 2023, but Mexico's 29,675 murders last year still averaged 81 per day. The challenge of violent crime, and the delicate political dance around it, will continue.Windmills generate electricity in the windy rolling foothills of the Rocky Mountains near the town of Pincher Creek, Alberta, September 27, 2010.
Hard Numbers: Alberta renewables ban, ‘Dirty Harry’ smuggler arrested, Three Amigos at risk, China keeps digging into Canadian mines
0: New regulations from the Alberta government will permitzero new renewable energy projects to be built on private property that has high value for irrigation, specialty crops, or other farming importance, as well as areas where projects would interfere with “pristine viewscapes.” Alberta, which leads Canada in renewables development, has drawn nearly $5 billion into the sector in recent years, stoking concerns about the balance of farmland vs. alternative energy.
25,000: A man has been arrested in Chicago and charged with human trafficking in connection with the death of an Indian family of four that froze to death while trying to cross illegally from Canada into the US in 2022. The 28-year old man, nicknamed “Dirty Harry,” is accused of paying $25,000 to the driver who smuggled the family. With so much attention on the migration situation at the US southern border, the number of migrants seeking to enter the US from Canada has soared in recent years.
2: The so-called “Three Amigos Summit” could wind up with only two amigos this year, after Mexican President Andrés Manual Lopez Obradorthreatened to ditch the North American Leaders meeting. AMLO, as the left-populist leader is known, said that he wouldn’t show up unless his country got “respectful treatment.” The remark comes as AMLO’s administration blasts possible new US and Canadian tariffs on Mexican steel, but it probably doesn’t help that last week it emerged that the US had spent “years” investigating ties between AMLO and drug cartels.
2.2 billion: Tighter restrictions on Chinese investment in Canada’s critical minerals industry appear not to have had much deterrent effect, according to a new study which shows that Chinese firms plowed at least C$2.2 billion into the sector last year. That came even after Ottawa forced three Chinese companies to sell their stakes in Canadian businesses in 2022. Copper miners were a particular focus, according to the report.
Leftist front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA)
Hard Numbers: Election violence in Mexico, Baby deficit in Korea, tactical nuke leak in Russia, A gigantic disappearance in the Pacific, Gaza's bleak milestone
2: Two mayoral candidates in the central Mexican farming town of Maravatío were shot dead within hours of each other earlier this week. One of the candidates was from President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador’s Morena party, the other from the opposition National Action Party. Maravatío is in Michoacán state, where cartel wars have raged recently, spotlighting broader concerns about narco-fueled political violence across the country ahead of nationwide elections in June.
29: A cache of 29 secret Russian military documents from a decade ago appears to lay out the Kremlin’s threshold for using tactical nuclear weapons. The slides, leaked to the Financial Times by Western spooks, say Moscow would use the weapons – which are far smaller and more targeted than the intercontinental ballistic missiles that target the US – if Russia suffered an otherwise unstoppable conventional incursion, or sustained significant damage to its submarine fleets, airfields, or command centers.
0.72: South Korea’s birth rate, the world’s lowest, dipped further in 2023, according to new data which show that the average South Korean woman will have just 0.72 babies. That was down from an already dismally infertile 0.76 in 2022, and it’s far below the “replacement” rate of 2.1 children per woman. Experts say the high costs of child-rearing – as well as gender pay gaps and difficulties of balancing career and motherhood – are causing the fertility collapse.
7,000: What could have caused 7,000 of the world’s largest creatures to disappear? Scientists think that unusually high sea temperatures in the North Pacific led to the starvation of that many Humpback whales in the decade or so after 2013, as the hotter waters reduced the prevalence of their main source of food - tiny phytoplankton. The big bump in humpback deaths put a dent in what had been several decades of remarkable recovery for a species driven to the brink of extinction by hunters in the 1970s.
30,000: Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed amid the devastating Israel-Hamas war in Gaza that began on Oct. 7, health officials in the enclave said on Thursday. It's likely that the official death toll is an undercount, given the challenges of tracking deaths in a warzone and the fact that many bodies are still under rubble. The Gaza health ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count, but Israel estimates it's killed roughly 10,000 Palestinian militants so far.