Syria

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Tehran last week brought attention to a growing partnership between Russia and Iran. The Russian shook hands with Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, a rare gesture since both men are notorious coronaphobes. The old cleric expressed support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, while the old KGB man offered Iran supplies of grain. US intelligence even claims Iran will open its drone arsenals to Russia. This strange friendship has its limits, but its growth could spell trouble. History does not suggest this is a natural partnership. The list of grievances between Iran and Russia is long. Great powers are often rough with middle-power neighbors.

Almost every night in Russia, it seems, a government building bursts into an unexplained fire. Fuel depots, office buildings, infrastructure hubs — and once a bridge. No doubt people have their theories. Insinuation abounds. "Karma is a cruel thing," one Ukrainian official has said on Telegram. But in the main, both the Russian government and Ukraine maintain an eloquent silence. The metaphor is apt. The fires are an unexpected consequence of Russia’s war in Ukraine, an eventuality, no doubt, that no one in the Kremlin inner circle anticipated, or planned for. And yet they burn merrily nonetheless.

Visibly, and with very little pretense, Tunisia is sliding into tyranny. In the last two years, its president, Kais Saied, has frozen and dissolved the country’s parliament and threatened its former members with prosecution. He has dismissed an errant prime minister. He has ruled by decree. He has quashed the high judicial body attempting to scrutinize his changes to the constitution and replaced it with a new organization filled with hand-picked appointees. Accusing his opponents of planning their own coup attempt, Saied has faced down months of protests over each of these individual changes with uncommon steeliness. Saied’s hold over the instruments of government and his comradery with the brass of the army appears near total.

The Russian Defense Ministry held a briefing last week claiming that they have discovered US-led biological laboratories in Ukraine. Moscow stated that a rapid halt was brought to the facilities’ activities, adding that Kyiv and Washington had violated the Convention on the Prohibition of Biological and Toxin Weapons. The Kremlin did not feel the need to provide evidence of its claims, par for the course in Putin’s Russia.

When President Donald Trump in 2020 signed a trade deal with China after years of escalatory tariffs, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden blasted the agreement. 'China is the big winner of Trump’s "phase-one" trade deal with Beijing,' Biden said after the agreement was finalized. He wasn’t alone. Many trade experts at the time believed the purchasing targets Beijing was required to meet were highly unrealistic. Sure enough, China’s compliance has been less than ideal. According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, China is roughly 70 percent of the way there with two months left to go. Yet despite Biden’s past comments about the accord, not to mention the tariffs that set the stage for the deal, the White House isn’t fully breaking with the pact.

President Joe Biden walked into the grand UN General Assembly chamber this morning with a list of asks, an appeal for greater cooperation among the world’s great powers and a bit of controversy trailing behind him. Biden’s first UN address came at a difficult time in American diplomacy. The European Union, led by an irate France, is livid over a $60 billion US-Australian nuclear submarine deal that European leaders view as skeevy and duplicitous. And last month’s American troop exit from Afghanistan remains a sore point for contributing nations in the Nato coalition, some of which wanted more time to evacuate their own nationals. Biden, however, sidestepped all of these disputes.