WORLD ROUNDUPNorth Korea’s New Satellite: A Threat? | Battling the Cartels Requires a Refocus | Javier Milei Is the World’s Latest Wannabe Fascist, and more
· What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane
Five years ago, the flight vanished into the Indian Ocean. Officials on land know more about why than they dare to say.
· Buying Quiet’: Inside the Israeli Plan That Propped Up Hamas
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gambled that a strong Hamas (but not too strong) would keep the peace and reduce pressure for a Palestinian state.
· · Javier Milei Is the World’s Latest Wannabe Fascist
Argentina’s new populist president takes after Trump and Bolsonaro by seeking to destroy democracy from within
· What’s Wrong with Biden’s Venezuela Policy
Maduro, newly emboldened, is now manufacturing a regional crisis.
· Why Gaza Won’t End Up Like East Timor or Kosovo
History shows that international administration without a political endgame always fails
· North Korea’s New Satellite: A Threat?
North Korea’s recent satellite launch probably won’t add to the regime’s capabilities—at least for now.
· Battling the Cartels Requires a Refocus
Cutting all maritime smuggling routes is the best way to defeat the cartels, their Chinese enablers, and the Fentanyl overdose epidemic
What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane (William Langewiesche, The Atlantic)
The important answers probably don’t lie in the ocean but on land, in Malaysia. That should be the focus moving forward. Unless they are as incompetent as the air force and air traffic control, the Malaysian police know more than they have dared to say. The riddle may not be deep. That is the frustration here. The answers may well lie close at hand, but they are more difficult to retrieve than any black box. If Blaine Gibson wants a real adventure, he might spend a year poking around Kuala Lumpur.
Buying Quiet’: Inside the Israeli Plan That Propped Up Hamas (Mark Mazzetti and Ronen Bergman, New York Times)
Just weeks before Hamas launched the deadly Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the head of Mossad arrived in Doha, Qatar, for a meeting with Qatari officials.
For years, the Qatari government had been sending millions of dollars a month into the Gaza Strip — money that helped prop up the Hamas government there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel not only tolerated those payments, he had encouraged them.
During his meetings in September with the Qatari officials, according to several people familiar with the secret discussions, the Mossad chief, David Barnea, was asked a question that had not been on the agenda: Did Israel want the payments to continue?
Mr. Netanyahu’s government had recently decided to continue the policy, so Mr. Barnea said yes. The Israeli government still welcomed the money from Doha.
Allowing the payments — billions of dollars over roughly a decade — was a gamble by Mr. Netanyahu that a steady flow of money would maintain peace in Gaza, the eventual launching point of the Oct. 7 attacks, and keep Hamas focused on governing, not fighting.
The Qatari payments, while ostensibly a secret, have been widely known and discussed in the Israeli news media for years. Mr. Netanyahu’s critics disparage them as part of a strategy of “buying quiet,” and the policy is in the middle of a ruthless reassessment following the attacks. Mr. Netanyahu has lashed back at that criticism, calling the suggestion that he tried to empower Hamas “ridiculous.”
