Friday News Roundup — May 31, 2024
By James Kitfield
Each week brings fresh evidence that domestic and geopolitics have entered a period of increasing instability and conflict nearly unprecedented in modern times, and this past week was certainly no exception.
On Thursday, presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to hide hush payments to a porn star over an alleged sexual encounter, all in order to influence the 2016 election. Trump thus became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes, creating enormous uncertainty both at home and abroad about how the case will reverberate in November’s election and beyond. Nothing in the U.S. Constitution bars a convicted felon from serving as president.
With a cross-border Russian military offensive threatening Ukraine’s second largest city of Kharkiv, this week the Biden administration reversed course and granted permission for Ukraine’s military to use specified American weapons to strike inside Russia proper. The move came after NATO Chief Jens Stoltenberg and a number of key European allies pushed to relax such restrictions on Western-supplied arms, especially given that Russia has launched strikes on Kharkiv from its own soil just across the nearby border. Both France and Germany announced that they would join the United States in easing such restrictions against attacks inside Russia, despite veiled threats by Russian President Vladimir Putin that such an escalation could draw a response with nuclear weapons.
The rising tensions come after Russia recently launched a spacecraft that Pentagon officials believe was an anti-satellite weapon. “Russia launched a satellite into low Earth orbit that we assess is likely a counter space weapon,” said Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder, who added that the Russian spacecraft was launched “into the same orbit as a U.S. government satellite.”
Despite the United Nations’ highest court recently ordering Israel to halt its military operations in Rafah due to the “immense risk” posed to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees sheltering in the southern Gaza city, Israel confirmed on Friday that its forces remain on the offensive and have seized central Rafah for the first time. This comes after at least 45 people, most of them presumed civilians, were killed in an Israeli air strike on a refugee camp in Rafah earlier this week. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the civilian deaths a “tragedy.” Even after Israeli tanks were seen entering central Rafah for the first time this week, Biden administration officials continued to insist that Israel had not crossed their “red line” against “a major ground operation” in the enclave.
Also this week, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin traveled to Singapore and met with his Chinese counterpart for the first time in 18 months. The meeting was part of what both countries have characterized as an effort to keep Sino-American tensions from spiraling out of control over contentious issues such as China’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, recent threatening Chinese military operations around Taiwan, Beijing’s continued backing of an increasingly belligerent regime in North Korea, and U.S. trade sanctions on Chinese products.
James Kitfield is a Senior Fellow at CSPC