By Eric Bazail-Eimil

New things afoot for Global Insider! POLITICO National Security Editor Heidi Vogt here, with some news about changes coming to the Global Insider newsletter.

Global Insider is shifting from a three-day-a-week newsletter to one that will show up in your inboxes for major global meetings, summits and conferences. You've already seen us on the ground with daily dispatches at events like the U.N. General Assembly, Davos and the Milken conference. Expect those to continue, and for us to expand to cover even more gatherings.

While you'll no longer be seeing this newsletter in your inbox every week, we'll be there whenever global thinkers and power players gather, giving you the lowdown as a pop-up event Playbook. We're excited for this new version of the newsletter and have a feeling you will be too!

Now over to Eric, who is providing your final regularly scheduled lookahead at this week's foreign affairs news.

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Good morning! Eric Bazail-Eimil, a POLITICO fellow on the National Security team, back with you one more time. Let’s dive into the latest power plays on the world stage.

Follow Eric on X | Send tips and insights to [email protected]

An ECOWAS deadline for the junta in Niger to relinquish power and restore ousted President Mohamed Bazoum expired yesterday. Now, West Africa waits. The threat of war still looms and neither side has indicated it will back down.

Over the weekend, Niger and ECOWAS both took important steps to prepare for war. Niger closed its airspace Sunday and readied its armed forces in the event of an ECOWAS invasion. The junta sent a delegation to Mali last week, reportedly asking the country to spare Wagner mercenaries in the event of a Western-backed military intervention, according to France 24’s Wassim Nasr.

ECOWAS leaders in Abuja worked on war plans over the weekend and Nigerian President Bola Tinubu asked the Nigerian senate Friday for authorization to deploy the country’s military in the event of a possible ECOWAS intervention. Nigeria has also cut off power to Niger, plunging most of the country into darkness.

An intervention is not a certainty. Nigeria’s senate wants Tinubu to exhaust all diplomatic options first before authorizing a deployment. Niger’s junta has also consolidated its support, with thousands rallying in support of the coup in Niamey, the country’s capital, this weekend. The junta also sent troop reinforcements to Niamey, suggesting that any conflict to restore Bazoum would drag out for some time.

“I fear that the junta will remain in place for the foreseeable future,” Ebenezer Obadare, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Global Insider.

The outcome of an ECOWAS intervention would almost assuredly be chaos, as your host and his colleagues Alex Ward and Matt Berg explained in NatSec Daily last week. If Nigeria and ECOWAS do invade Niger, it would spark the first multistate conflict on the continent in decades and test the military might of Nigeria, as well as the Wagner-affiliated Sahel states of Burkina Faso and Mali, who have pledged to defend Niger.

ECOWAS would not be able to go it alone, and the crisis has created some unlikely allies for the bloc. France, which has long seen Nigeria and ECOWAS as threats to its influence in West Africa, announced its support for an ECOWAS-led military intervention Saturday (French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna did not confirm whether her country would participate in the intervention). The U.S. has signaled some support for ECOWAS’ actions, though also hasn’t committed to supporting an intervention.

Aid groups are worried that conflict could exacerbate an already fragile situation in Niger. Whitney Elmer, deputy director of Mercy Corps’ West and Central Africa operations, told Global Insider that 3 million people in Niger are projected to face severe food insecurity before the end of the summer “lean season” in September. Some 500,000 people are also already displaced within the country.

“If there’s active conflict happening, we project that those numbers could go up,” Elmer said.

READ: WSJ’s Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon and Joe Parkinson report on how the U.S. and France left an ally out to dry and created a geopolitical vacuum for Russia and the Wagner Group to fill in Niger.

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TUESDAY:
The Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization holds its annual summit in Belem, Brazil Tuesday and Wednesday. Representatives from France, the United States, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela will gather to discuss sustainable development, the rights of Indigenous peoples, deforestation and climate change, among other issues.

THURSDAY:
Colombian president Gustavo Petro celebrates the beginning of a ceasefire with the Ejército de Liberación Nacional guerrilla at a ceremony in Bogotá.

Representatives from 40 countries at Saudi-hosted Peace talks this weekend are backing Ukraine’s push for an end to its war with Russia that preserves its territorial integrity, according to my colleague Veronika Melkozerova. The talks over the weekend are the second that have occurred this year and reflect a growing push by Kyiv to concretize terms for peace as the war in Ukraine drags on.

Russia was excluded from the talks. But China, one of Russia’s most loyal allies during the conflict, was present, represented by Li Hui, the country’s special envoy for Eurasian affairs. The Guardian’s Lisa O’Carroll reports that China is backing a third round of peace talks in the fall. Kyiv is also saying that China “did not object” to the territorial integrity terms discussed at the talks.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy works to finalize a 10-point peace proposal around which the international community can coalesce at those fall talks.

A ceasefire between the Colombian government and the Ejército de Liberación Nacional, the last remaining large guerrilla group in Colombia’s ongoing armed conflict, will take effect Thursday, according to El Pais’ Daniela Díaz. The news has sparked hopes that a peace deal is in reach to end one of the longest and destabilizing conflicts in Latin America.

The ceasefire is a top priority for Petro, the country’s leftist president and a former guerrilla fighter. It will last for six months as the Colombian government hopes to restart negotiations with ELN and other smaller armed groups in the country. Petro’s government has rolled back military operations against guerrilla groups and drug cartels in exchange for negotiations, working to bring groups to the table quickly as small-scale violence continues to plague the country.

ELN has been fighting the Colombian state since 1964. It did not join onto a historic 2015 peace deal reached between the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia and the government of former President Juan Manuel Santos. Unlike FARC, which was a highly-centralized and effective organization and at its peak controlled wide swaths of territory in the country’s coca-growing regions, ELN cells operate independently and have largely used acts of terrorism to advance their message.

The leader of the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region Arayik Harutyunyan is warning that Azerbaijan may walk away from a peace deal with Armenia and resume war, according to Armenia’s state news agency. The remarks follow a war of words between the two Caucasus countries after Azerbaijan blocked a convoy of Armenian food aid from entering the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region last week, according to Radio Free Europe.

Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnically-Armenian enclave of Azerbaijan, has been fiercely contested between the two Caucasus countries since they gained their independence from the Soviet Union in the 1990s. For the last seven months, the Azeri government has blocked the Lachin Corridor, causing shortages of food products, medicine and other goods.

Armenia and its allies are increasingly raising concerns of possible ethnic cleansing against Armenians in Azerbaijan, calling Azerbaijan’s posture a “genocidal policy.” Baku has rejected the characterization that its actions are ethnically targeted.

In Washington, lawmakers who represent districts with large Armenian diaspora populations are calling for greater action from the U.S. government.

“Azerbaijan MUST allow humanitarian resources through the Lachin corridor, and the US must stand with Armenia and Artsakh,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) tweeted last week.

Some lawmakers are demanding sanctions against Azerbaijan. “I call on the State Department to use all diplomatic tools available, including sanctions, to bring this blockade to an end,” Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), a long-time advocate for Armenia in the House of Representatives, said in a statement last week.

Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry counters that the convoy, which it labeled a “provocation” from Yerevan, amounted to a violation of the country’s “territorial integrity and sovereignty.” Azerbaijan has also accused Armenia of smuggling weapons to separatists in the region.

KENYA TAKES LEAD ON HAITI: Kenya is positioning itself to lead a United Nations intervention in Haiti, as gang violence and unrest threaten to further destabilize the embattled Caribbean country, the Miami Herald’s Jacqueline Charles reports. The U.S. is supportive of the prospective intervention, which is expected to be finalized after the release of a U.N. report on conditions in Haiti on August 15.

ALASKAN PROVOCATIONS: Russia and China sent a large naval patrol to Alaska last week, prompting the United States to send four destroyers to the northernmost state in response, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Gordon and Nancy Youssef.

JUDICIAL OVERHAUL: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday his government will continue to pursue changes to the committee that nominates judges, but will abandon other measures to overhaul Israel’s judiciary.

SPANISH COALITION: Spain’s far-right Vox party is offering to join a coalition with the center-right Popular Party without any guarantees it will be included in a national government, my colleague Aitor Hernández-Morales reports. The news comes as Spain faces a possible impasse after last month’s snap election kept both major parties from winning enough seats to build majority coalitions.

GANDHI WINS: The Supreme Court of India vacated a defamation conviction on Friday against Rahul Gandhi, the former leader of the Indian National Congress and the scion of India’s Gandhi political family, according to The Times of India. Gandhi, one of the main opponents of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his political movement, is expected to return to India’s lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha, and stand in future parliamentary elections.

SOUTH AMERICA’S SCORCHING WINTER: Temperatures in Chile, Argentina and other Southern Hemisphere countries nearly reached 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit this week, according to La Tercera’s Francisco Corvalán and Carlos Montes. The unusually high winter temperatures, worse in and around the Andes mountains, are believed to be the result of this year’s El Niño conditions and accelerating climate change.

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan was arrested Saturday after a court sentenced him to three years in prison for corruption during his premiership, AP’s Riazat Butt reports.

Pope Francis visited the famed pilgrimage site of Fátima, Portugal on Saturday, praying the rosary with over 200,000 pilgrims. Ukrainians chided the pontiff, who prayed for world peace, for not criticizing Russia at this year’s World Youth Day in Portugal, the New York Times’ Jason Horowitz reports from Lisbon.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell will visit Beijing in the fall after a scheduled visit last month was canceled, my colleague Antonia Zimmermann reports.

Greta Thunberg is skipping the Edinburgh International Book Festival in protest of one of the event’s sponsors, Baillie Gifford, an investment firm with ties to the fossil fuel industry.

The U.S. government will not designate Travis King, the soldier who crossed illegally into North Korea last month, as a prisoner of war, according to Reuters’ Phil Stewart.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie became the second Republican presidential hopeful to visit Kyiv this year, meeting with Zelenskyy Friday, according to my colleague Kierra Frazier.

BRAIN FOOD

My colleague Giovanna Coi explores seven charts that reflect the state of the EU economy and the complicated factors adding to the bloc’s current economic woes.

The New York Times’ Patrick Kingsley and Gabby Sobelman look at how the increasing divide between secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel has been addressed in the city of Rehovot, including in the remodeling of a swim center.

ONE FUN THING

A British zoo is celebrating the birth of two rare Red Panda twin babies, a major win for a European breeding program working to save the endangered (and adorable) mammals.

This will be my final time hosting Global Insider, so I want to give one last round of thanks to editors Emma Anderson and Heidi Vogt, and producer Sophie Gardner. 

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