Fdd's overnight brief

Iran

Iranian opposition groups are demanding that the government release more information about a teenage girl’s collapse in a Tehran subway, as suspicion grows she was attacked for not covering her hair—a year after nationwide protests over a young woman fatally attacked over alleged dress-code violations. – Wall Street Journal

Narges Mohammadi, a jailed Iranian women’s rights advocate, won the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. One of Iran’s leading human rights activists, Mohammadi has campaigned for women’s rights and the abolition of the death penalty. Hailing Mohammadi as a “freedom fighter”, the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee started her speech by saying, in Farsi, the words for “woman, life, freedom” – one of the slogans of the peaceful protests against the Iranian government. – Reuters

An Iranian rights group said that security forces on Thursday arrested the mother of a teenage girl who was in a coma in hospital following a confrontation with agents in the Tehran metro for not wearing the hijab. – Reuters

Iran lashed out Thursday at “biased remarks” from Western countries after allegations that a teenage girl was critically wounded in a confrontation with security agents on Tehran’s subway. – Agence France-Presse

James Stavridis writes: As always, however, there must be a balance between idealism and realism in American foreign policy. While we need to criticize and pressure states on democratic ideals, we must also think strategically — the idea that the US could abandon the Middle East and fully “pivot” to China was always doomed. Given that reality, the fact that Arab and Israeli partners finally seem ready and willing to explore the idea of more formal ties and mutual recognition needs to be seen as a fantastic opportunity for the US. – Bloomberg

Ben Dubow writes: However, while Iran has become a world leader in quashing protests, it still falls behind other authoritarian regimes when it comes to preventing protests from erupting in the first place. Even the most credulous regime supporter must soon realize that these supposedly foreign conspiracies involve close to a majority of Iranians. – Center for European Policy Analysis

Israel

Two Palestinian gunmen were killed and five Israeli soldiers were wounded in occupied West Bank clashes on Thursday and Israeli troops killed the suspect in a later shooting attack on Israeli motorists. – Reuters

A 19-year-old Palestinian was killed on Friday, Palestinian authorities said, in violence with Israeli settlers who converged on the occupied West Bank town of Huwara after an Israeli family was fired upon in their car there. – Reuters

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered top defense officials on Thursday to step up anti-terror efforts in the West Bank, zeroing in on the Palestinian city of Huwara where a gunman opened fire on an Israeli family Thursday evening. – Times of Israel

Over 500 former high-ranking officials from the IDF, Mossad, Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), Foreign Ministry and others on Thursday endorsed a call by 20 US Senators for any normalization between Israel and the Saudis to be conditioned on progress with the Palestinians. – Jerusalem Post

Haviv Rettig Gur writes: It’s too early to declare the alliance established or successful, too soon to know how far Saudi Arabia or Israel are willing to go on Saudi nuclearization, or how this new alliance will affect the rest of the region, especially Iran. Israeli and Saudi officials themselves don’t yet have answers to these questions. But the new Middle East is already here, a testing ground for what comes after the post-Cold War Pax Americana. – Times of Israel

Amos Harel writes: The Palestinians are waging the struggle against Israel without any connection to the hopes for peace that are being floated via the Israeli-Saudi channel. But a positive development in the normalization talks with Riyadh could also have implications both for the territories and the Lebanese border. On one hand, Israel hopes that the PA will make do with measures and easements that will be agreed upon in talks, and that it will work to calm the situation on the ground; on the other hand, the rejectionist camp, from Iran to Hamas, will have good reasons to try to counter the success of the agreement by igniting a conflagration in the territories. – Haaretz

Turkey

Turkish Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar said on Thursday he planned to visit Israel in November to discuss the shipment of natural gas to Europe through Turkey as well as domestic consumption. – Reuters

Turkey will assume command of the NATO-led force in Kosovo at a critical time as tensions flare between the Balkan nation and neighboring Serbia. – Bloomberg

Seth J. Frantzman writes: It is not clear if Ankara saw Azerbaijan’s success against the Armenians in Nagorna-Karabkah as an opportunity to begin operations in eastern Syria. The difference is that it is likely that not all the other countries involved, such as Iran, Russia, or the US would want a Turkish operation to happen. Each country has its agenda. This also matters to Israel because Israel doesn’t want more Iranian entrenchment in Syria. – Jerusalem Post

Middle East & North Africa

Iraq is seeking a special shipment of $1 billion in cash from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, but U.S. officials have withheld approval, saying the request runs counter to their efforts to rein in Baghdad’s use of dollars and halt illicit cash flows to Iran. – Wall Street Journal

Iraq will ban cash withdrawals and transactions in U.S dollars as of Jan. 1 2024 in the latest push to curb the misuse of its hard currency reserves in financial crimes and the evasion of U.S. sanctions on Iran, a top Iraqi central bank official said. – Reuters

Lebanon faces one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with nearly 4 million people in need of food and other assistance, but less than half getting aid because of a lack of funding, a U.N. official said Thursday. – Associated Press

Alon Pinkas writes: It’s possible that Iran is content with threshold-state status and chooses not to bear the consequences of becoming a military nuclear power. It’s also possible that even with a reactor and a fuel cycle, Saudi Arabia won’t pursue the military nuclear option. It’s therefore possible that Turkey and Egypt will decide not to proceed. It’s also possible that all these assumptions will be proved wrong. Whether or not a “Saudi deal” happens, the idea of a nuclear Middle East no longer seems a matter of diplomatic or academic debate. It’s a rolling process. – Haaretz

China

The White House has begun making plans for a November meeting in San Francisco between President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping — an attempt to stabilize the relationship between the world’s two most powerful countries, according to senior administration officials. – Washington Post

China plans to expand its space station to six modules from three in coming years, offering astronauts from other nations an alternative platform for near-Earth missions as the NASA-led International Space Station (ISS) nears the end of its lifespan. – Reuters

Mike Gallagher writes: Francis has the power to confront Beijing. Truth, combined with the fearlessness to speak it, is fatal to every ideology of oppression. In 1979, John Paul knew that the power of communism in Poland lay not in Soviet tanks but in the acceptance of the lies that drove them. Destroy the lies, and China’s tanks, too, will rust in fields. It’s not too late. – Washington Post

Asia

Taiwan has shown it is already independent and sovereign by electing its own president and has no need for a separate declaration of independence, the frontrunner to be the island’s next leader said in an interview with Japanese media. – Reuters

Vietnamese and Chinese officials are preparing for a possible visit from President Xi Jinping to Hanoi at the end of October or early November, on the heels of U.S. President Joe Biden’s trip in September, four people familiar with the plans said. – Reuters

China has condemned a mission by four Philippine ships to re-supply Philippine troops on a disputed South China Sea atoll, saying the vessels had entered its waters in the Spratly Islands without its permission. – Reuters

A Chinese coast guard ship came within a meter (3 feet) of colliding with a Philippine patrol ship it was trying to block in the South China Sea, in an alarming incident that intensified fears that territorial disputes in the waters could spark a larger crisis. – Associated Press

Taiwan’s government has opened an investigation into four companies named in a media report as conducting business with firms linked to U.S.-sanctioned Huawei (HWT.UL) in China, and is considering tighter rules on key technologies. – Reuters

Seth J. Frantzman writes: Baku’s success and the tragedy that befell the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh is more a story of larger countries such as the US and Russia, rather than a story of defense tech that helped Azerbaijan achieve overmatch on the tactical level. – Jerusalem Post

Tuvshinzaya Gantulga and Sergey Radchenko write: The same logic could apply more broadly to Central Asia, which calls for serious Western attention, not in the form of political or ideological grandstanding or military involvement (here, the mess in Afghanistan has shown Americans what not to do) but in the form of hard-nosed economic engagement that would give regional players more breathing space as they face continued Russian bullying and China’s relentless drive for regional hegemony. – Foreign Affairs

Africa

The United States is resuming food aid to refugees in Ethiopia after assistance was paused earlier this year because donations were being diverted, a senior U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) official said. – Reuters

At least 30 pro-government fighters and dozens of al Shabaab militants were killed in Somalia in some of the bloodiest fighting of a year-long offensive against the al Qaeda-linked group, an army officer and clan elder said on Thursday. – Reuters

Armed separatists in Cameroon’s troubled northwest on Wednesday publicly executed two kidnapped civilians they accused of spying for the government, a local administrator and the separatists said on Thursday. – Reuters

Seaver Wang and Vijaya Ramachandran write: Rich-world advocates and policymakers should realize that their demands for immediate fossil-fuel abstinence are very likely to perpetuate the extreme poverty that many Africans face—and they should reflect more thoughtfully on the limitations of what energy research can and cannot say about our collective energy future. – Foreign Policy

United States

The Republican meltdown on Capitol Hill that toppled the speaker this week and left the House in chaos has also highlighted a sharp decline in G.O.P. support for continuing to send aid to Ukraine, and how opposition to helping Kyiv has become a litmus test for the right. – New York Times

The imbroglio in the House exposes a weakness in American foreign policy. Who can trust American assurances of military support in a crisis when all the promises risk falling apart, if not at the hands of an obstreperous faction in Congress, then in the 2024 elections for president and a new Congress? – New York Sun

Charles L. Glaser, James M. Acton, and Steve Fetter write: But now, maybe more than ever, the United States needs to change its nuclear doctrine by abandoning counterforce targeting in favor of infrastructure targeting. Doing so will enable the United States to avoid overreacting to the arrival of China as a second nuclear peer, generating an unnecessary and futile arms race, and increasing the probability of nuclear war. – Foreign Affairs