Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! Jack and Robbie here. We laughed, we cried, but mostly, we watched the music die. But amid the tumult, congratulations to the United States: Today, 48 percent of U.S. citizens have a passport, up from just 5 percent in 1990.
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Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: four days in 2023 that shook the world, five 2023 personnel choices that could move and shake Washington, and one British defense secretary who has many identities.
Four Days in 2023
It’s the end of the world as we know it. Do we feel fine? (Author’s note: not really.)
If the last decade saw the tectonic plates of the American-led international system starting to buckle, 2023 might have been the year when the world began to burst at the seams.
The year started with Ukraine optimistic about taking another Kharkiv- and Kherson-like bite out of Russian-occupied territory on its soil with U.S. weapons flowing in. But 2023 is ending with the counteroffensive stalled, Ukraine running out of ammo, and the West openly questioning whether the United States will still support Kyiv at all.
The year began with the Middle East in relative tranquility, with U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan the region quieter than it had been in two decades, and Israel on the verge of normalizing relations with even more Arab states. 2023 is ending with Israel stuck in a bloody, block-by-block siege of the Gaza Strip that has displaced 1.8 million people—80 percent of the enclave’s population—after the militant group Hamas punched through the border and seized hundreds of hostages.
The year started with the U.S. military shooting a Chinese spy balloon out of the sky, and it ended with U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping making nice in California.
Dizzy yet? Yeah, us too. Don’t worry, because we’ve boiled down one of the craziest years on record into four days that changed everything.
Oct. 7. They came in gliders. They came in trucks. They came over fences—and sometimes through them.
With no warning, the militant group Hamas tore apart families in kibbutzim, shot passersby on highways, and killed concertgoers in the desert in a surprise, complex raid on Oct. 7 that shook the Middle East—and the world—to its foundations and sent a newly sleepy region into a war that could sprawl beyond the borders of Israel and the Palestinian enclaves.
By the time Israel had fended off Hamas’s attack, the death toll was roughly 1,200 Israelis and foreign citizens, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had decided on a costly ground invasion of the Gaza Strip to destroy the group.
More than two months later, the Middle East has undergone seismic shifts. Nearly 22,000 Palestinians have died in the Gaza Strip since Israel launched its ground invasion, according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, as Israel has launched thousands of unguided bombs into one of the most densely packed areas in the world. Nearly 2 million people are displaced. And there has been a regional ripple effect, too. The United States is even leading a maritime task force to patrol the Red Sea after repeated attacks on merchant ships by Yemen’s Houthi rebel group, which is linked with Tehran.
The United States is pushing for the fighting to stop, or at least die down significantly, so more aid trucks can get into Gaza. Israel insists it won’t stop until the estimated more than 100 hostages still in Hamas’s custody are freed. And the fighting has taken up all of the oxygen in the room for Ukraine.
June 8. In early June, Ukraine launched its highly anticipated counteroffensive. If you asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, he would have told you that he wanted to start this campaign to roll back Russian forces much sooner—if only he had the bullets.
And by the time the weapons got there and Ukraine’s push began in earnest in mid-June, Russia had built rings of fortifications along the 600-mile front line, including deep trenches, firing stations, dragon’s teeth to stop Western-provided tanks, and layer upon layer of minefields that Russian troops reseated almost every night.
Without the surplus of Western weapons that Kyiv wanted—including long-range precision weapons—the Ukrainian advance only gained ground in fits and starts. And with the losses, the Ukrainians’ ambitions receded, too. First they wanted to advance Melitopol, a midsize Russian-occupied city near the Sea of Azov, where Ukrainian guns could more easily target occupied Crimea. With that goal out of reach, Ukrainian military chief Gen. Valery Zaluzhny honed his sights on Tokmak, a Russian-held rail hub. And by November, with Ukrainian troops only 125 miles further south from where they’d started five months earlier, Zaluzhny publicly concluded that there would most likely “be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.”
And if Ukrainians feared they weren’t getting the support that they needed at the start of the counteroffensive, they’d be really in trouble by the end of it. That all came to a head in October, when the Biden administration floated a new $60 billion military aid package for Ukraine, with U.S. support just months from running out—but the aid package has yet to pass Congress due to a major impasse over security funding for the U.S. southern border.
Will we look at the counteroffensive as a mere stumble on Ukraine’s path to victory or the moment that sealed Kyiv’s defeat? Time will tell.
Did anything else happen in this part of the world? The European Union fell far short of its goal of producing 1 million 155mm artillery shells in 2023. Russian President Vladimir Putin left the New START nuclear arms reduction deal in February. Finland joined NATO, while Sweden got a promise it could join from Turkey, which still hasn’t come through.
Oh yeah, and Wagner Group honcho Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plane was shot down on the way back to Russia after he launched a putsch against Putin.
Feb. 4. And Prigozhin’s plane wasn’t the only newsworthy thing to be shot out of the sky this year. For a week at the end of January, everyone stopped what they were doing to watch a mysterious big white object move across the skies of North America.
At first, no one knew what it was. Then the Biden administration confirmed that it was one of a fleet of Chinese spy balloons, and it had been hovering suspiciously near many of the United States’ most sensitive nuclear missile sites.
It stayed over the United States until Feb. 4, when it was safely away from populated areas and F-22 fighter jets could shoot it down just off the coast of North Carolina, giving beachgoers a Saturday to remember.
In the wake of the great balloon incident, the United States and China did very little talking—that is, until November, when Biden and Xi met in Woodside, California, just south of San Francisco. Now there is renewed hope that diplomatic and military hotlines between Washington and Beijing that have been dormant for months can come back online.
July 26. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
An almost perfectly straight geographic line of coups started snaking across Africa about three years ago with a 2020 mutiny in Mali that forced the president to cede power. Chad, Guinea, and Sudan followed suit in 2021, Burkina Faso in 2022, and by April 2023, the two rival generals in Sudan who had promised a transition to peace were again at war, forcing a Delta Force-led evacuation of U.S. diplomats in the dead of night.
The U.S. counterterror footprint in Africa was now heavily dependent on Niger, a major U.S. drone base and a nerve center for intelligence networks in the heart of the continent. But by late July, Niger’s presidential guard had other plans.
The Biden administration hoped for a democratic transition that would bring Nigerien President Mohamed Bazoum back into power, but those hopes would soon fade. In September, French President Emmanuel Macron—who was backstopping the Pentagon’s “mowing the grass” strategy with military muscle on the ground—said that French troops would leave.
The Pentagon has consolidated 1,100 U.S. troops away from the capital and started drone strikes again from Agadez, a city about 500 miles away. U.S. diplomatic engagement is now muted. And without the help of the French, can they hold out forever on lily pads in the desert?
We Got Personnel
Some of the more impactful personnel changes this year.
Hold up. The biggest personnel story in Washington in 2023 was actually about people not getting promoted. That was after Sen. Tommy Tuberville decided in March to put holds on more than 450 top Defense Department military nominees, including the would-be leaders of the military’s seven uniformed services, over a Pentagon policy giving servicemembers money to travel out of state to seek abortions.
But the pressure on Tuberville, a former Auburn football coach who prefers being called “coach” to “senator,” began to mount, including from within the Republican Party. By early December, Tuberville released about 425 of his remaining holds. (However, roughly 10 three- and four-star promotions are still on hold).
Disorder in the house. It took Rep. Kevin McCarthy 15 different ballots to become the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in January, the most votes to choose the top member of the lower house since the Civil War. It took far less than that for a group of far-right Republicans—led by Rep. Matt Gaetz, an ally of former President Donald Trump, to get rid of McCarthy—with the help of the Democrats in the lower chamber, sealing one of the shortest tenures in the job in U.S. history after McCarthy accepted a controversial deal to avoid a government shutdown.
It took House Republicans three more weeks to find a new leader. Rep. Steve Scalise couldn’t get through. Neither could Rep. Jim Jordan. Eventually, they settled on Rep. Mike Johnson, who was in the middle of only his fourth term in office, to be the new speaker. The job had been vacant for 22 days.
Johnson’s election, and the turmoil surrounding it, leave U.S. military aid to Ukraine in doubt. Though nominally pro-Kyiv, Johnson, who drew controversy for suggesting that his new job was ordained by God, has held up the prospect of more U.S. support to Ukraine over more funding for border security.
The job nobody wants. With a very short list of also-rans to choose from, NATO extended the mandate of Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg by a year in early July, putting the former Norwegian prime minister at more than a decade in the alliance’s top job. But that was only after everyone else was either ruled ineligible or said no. Then-Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte didn’t seem to want it, and neither did Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister (Stoltenberg’s immediate predecessor, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was also a Dane).
Stoltenberg is unlikely to get his tenure extended a fifth time, and Rutte, who has since been voted out of office, has expressed newfound interest in the job.
On the Button
Here’s a rundown of some of our favorite stories of the year.
Can ChatGPT explain geopolitics? We asked the latest generative artificial intelligence system to analyze Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea. Here’s how it fared against a college student.
Are U.S. gun-makers responsible for violence in Mexico? There’s much talk of border security swirling around Washington these days. Almost none of it acknowledges a grim truth: Mexico’s sweeping cartel violence is made in America, in more ways than one. Cartels are arming themselves with weapons in the United States thanks to the unique U.S. approach to gun control (or lack thereof) and easy access to U.S. weapons. Read more here on how Mexican citizens are paying the price for America’s gun policies.
How the U.S. fumbled Sudan’s hopes for democracy. Sudan overthrew its dictator and began a precarious path to democracy … until it all went awry. The conflict in Sudan is growing grimmer by the day, even if it doesn’t garner nearly as much attention as Ukraine or the Israel-Hamas war. Many lay at least partial blame at the feet of the United States and other Western powers. Here’s why.
The Somali underdogs taking on terrorists. Jack got a rare firsthand look at U.S. counterterrorism operations during a visit to Somalia with top U.S. defense officials earlier this year and examined how the forever war against the deadly al-Shabab terrorist group in the Horn of Africa is evolving.
The witness. Our colleague Amy MacKinnon sat down with one of the world’s most prominent Uyghur human rights activists, Nury Turkel, to discuss China’s sweeping crackdown on its ethnic Uyghur Muslim population—a crackdown that the U.S. government has labeled a genocide. In Turkel’s view, one of the most chilling dimensions of Beijing’s campaign against Uyghurs is how the world has been unable—and in many instances, unwilling—to stop it. This is a cautionary tale for other humanitarian crises and conflict zones around the world.
The panda party’s almost over. Our global tech reporter Rishi Iyengar took a quick break from writing about AI and the global semiconductor race to focus on something closer to home for Washingtonians: pandas. More specifically, the beloved pandas at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo being returned to China, and how that sheds light on the grim relationship between the United States and China these days. (China controls the global panda population and distributes them to zoos around the world solely on loan.) Here’s to hoping this Cold War 2.0 thing gets resolved soon so we can get back to exchanging pandas.
Snapshot
Smoky haze from wildfires in Canada diminishes the visibility of the Chrysler Building on June 7 in New York City. New York topped the list of most polluted major cities in the world the night before as smoke from the fires continued to blanket the East Coast. David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
Quote of the Year
“I don’t work here. I’m doing the news.”
—Traffic jacket-clad BBC presenter Ben Boulos had a quick retort after being mistaken for a factory employee in Birmingham, England, on Wednesday. We feel you, Ben.
This Week’s Most Read
- Why China Is Stepping Up Its Maritime Attacks on the Philippines by Elisabeth Braw
- The Return of the Monroe Doctrine by Tom Long and Carsten-Andreas Schulz
- The Relentless Growth of Degrowth Economics by Jessi Jezewska Stevens
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Two lives. If new British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps has nine lives, he’s used at least two of them up. The former Tory party chairman fessed up—a long time ago—to taking a second job under the fake name Michael Green, dubbing himself a “multimillion-dollar web marketer” before he ran for office. He’s also posed under the business aliases Corinne Stockheath and Sebastian Fox.