BLACKWATER USA | DAILY BRIEF - Blackwater Worldwide

Posted by BW Actual on Oct 13th 2025

Coming up this week

The International Monetary Fund and World Bank hold their annual meetings in Washington this week, starting today.
Pres. Trump will host Argentine Prime Minister Javier Milei at the White House tomorrow. Milei will certainly thank Trump for lending Argentina unprecedented U.S. financial support to lessen the pain of the severe-but-overdue economic reforms Milei is implementing.
The Grand Sumo Tournament opens at London's Royal Albert Hall on Wednesday. It's a rare chance to see sumo wrestling outside of Japan: this is the first overseas competition in 20 years, and only the 14th event the Japan Sumo Association has staged abroad in its 99-year history.
NATO defense ministers will meet in Belgium on Wednesday to discuss Ukraine.
Bolivia votes in a presidential runoff between two right-leaning candidates on Sunday, after the long-ruling leftist Movimiento al Socialismo suffered a surprise defeat in August's first round vote. A La Paz-based analyst noted that the rightward swing fits a pattern of Bolivian voters becoming frustrated with the status quo and embracing the opposite political extreme roughly every 20 years.

Commodity and coin market prices

Gaza

Hamas released the last 20 living hostages in Gaza in exchange for Israel's commitment to return about 2,000 Palestinian prisoners later today.
Pres. Trump was in Israel to celebrate the hostages' return, which came about because of the 20-point ceasefire deal Trump proposed and successfully pitched to both sides.
The hostage-prisoner swap was only the first phase of Trump's plan - and arguably the most straightforward part of it.
Next, Trump will travel to Egypt, where he'll attend a summit to solidify the trickier next phases of the deal, including a path toward a decisive truce and a plan for administering Gaza after the war.

China

Cryptocurrencies and stocks fell on Friday - and gold rose - after Pres. Trump revived his threat to slap 100% tariffs on Chinese goods in retaliation for China's announcement of new export controls on rare earths last week.
Beijing's announcement surprised Trump, who called its timing "especially inappropriate" for stealing the spotlight from Trump's successful peace-dealing between Israel and Hamas.
An incensed Trump threatened to call off his upcoming - but still unconfirmed - meeting with China's Pres. Xi at an Asia-Pacific summit in South Korea later this month, saying "there seems to be no reason" to meet Xi now.
Separately, a new NYT report focused on a massive high-altitude solar project China has built on the Tibetan Plateau (see https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/business/china-solar-tibetan-plateau.html), and included an impressive statistic that illustrates the scale of China's solar ambitions: on average, China has added new solar panels with power-generating capacity equivalent to that of the immense Three Gorges Dam every three weeks during 2025.

Afghanistan

Pakistani troops clashed with Afghan Taliban forces at dozens of checkpoints along their shared border over the weekend.
Both sides claimed to have prevailed: the Taliban said it killed 58 Pakistani soldiers and captured 25 border posts, and Pakistan said it killed 200 Taliban and destroyed their posts. In reality, both sides likely suffered several casualties and some property damage.
The Taliban started this weekend's skirmishes in retaliation for last week's alleged Pakistani strike on Tehreek-i-Taliban* (TTP) militants who Pakistan claims have found refuge in Afghanistan. The Taliban denies harboring terrorists and was clearly embarrassed enough by Pakistan's intrusion that it felt compelled to respond.
[*Despite the "Taliban" in TTP's name, the group is distinct from the Taliban that rules Afghanistan, and it benefits more from the Afghan Taliban's incompetence and security failings than from any close ideological kinship or tacit protection.]
Both Kabul and Islamabad now seem ready to back down, and Kabul will probably happily agree to Islamabad's suddenly-amiable calls for dialogue: the Taliban is struggling to govern within its borders and ill-prepared for a fight beyond them, and Pakistan won't want to reallocate military resources away from its tense eastern border with India.

Madagascar

Madagascar's elite CAPSAT army unit threw its weight behind protesters demanding Pres. Rajoelina's resignation yesterday, leading Rajoelina to claim - perhaps correctly - that a coup attempt was underway to oust him from power.
CAPSAT was part of the 2009 coup in which Rajoelina seized the presidency, and it appears to be following a remarkably similar playbook this time around. Then, as now, discontent began with widespread public protests, and later morphed into a mutiny when heavy-handed government retaliation moved sympathetic military units - like CAPSAT - to side with demonstrators.
Rajoelina's newly-appointed prime minister - himself an army general - later said he'd reached an understanding with CAPSAT and ordered them to stand down, but that seems premature and optimistic. Rajoelina remains deeply unpopular and under immense pressure to resign.

Venezuela

Nicolas Maduro criticized opposition leader Maria Corina Machado's Nobel Peace Prize win two days after it was announced without mentioning Machado by name or commenting on her Nobel honor - but with his characteristic disregard for numerical accuracy: "Ninety percent of the population rejects the demonic witch."
In fact, 73% of the population rejected Maduro and voted for Machado's opposition in the July 2024 election, according to the 83% of voting tallies that the opposition meticulously collected and shared (the government refused to provide paper tallies supporting its counter-claim that Maduro won 52% of the vote).

France

Pres. Macron appointed a new prime minister on Friday to replace his previous, seventh pick - centrist Sébastien Lecornu - who lasted less than a month in the job amidst stonewalling from both extremes of the political spectrum.
Rather than bow to opposition pressure to abandon his centrist experiment and appoint a candidate with more fringe appeal, Macron appointed the most similar candidate possible to Lecornu...by reappointing Lecornu.
Lecornu reaccepted the job "out of duty" - and with the benefit of a week of meetings that renewed his optimism for a possible solution to the gridlock. He must name his cabinet and put forth a budget proposal today.
Macron's critics called Lecornu's reappointment a "joke" and said it proved the president had exhausted his options.