10 International News Stories that Defined 2023

The world is approaching the conclusion of President Joe Biden’s third year in office in a state of elevated geopolitical chaos.

The optimism of the Trump-era Abraham Accords has vanished in the Middle East, replaced by the grim reality of post-October 7 jihad. The Russia-Ukraine war trudges towards its second anniversary a virtual stalemate and a potential afterthought to Vladimir Putin’s scheduled sham elections. In the Americas, inept leftist leaders from Canada to Chile are embarrassing their nations – and potentially inspiring the rise of conservative opposition in neighboring countries.

Nothing helps understand what lies ahead quite like taking a look at the year that was. Below, ten unforgettable 2023 international news moments, from the harrowing to the hilarious, the hope-inspiring to the plain bizarre:

The Chinese Spy Balloon

Arguably the defining Biden foreign policy moment of 2023 – just as the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan was for 2021 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine was for 2022 – the discovery of a massive Chinese espionage vessel looming over Montana in early February set the tenor of U.S.-China relations for the rest of the year. Chinese Communist Party officials claimed the spy balloon was a “meteorology” vessel and acted outraged that it alarmed Americans. Biden allowed the balloon to traverse the continental United States, shooting down random unrelated balloons before finally shooting the Chinese spy balloon down in the Atlantic Ocean. By then, it reportedly flew over sensitive military sites and sent intelligence back to China in real-time.

The balloon incident was an embarrassment for Biden when it happened, and the hits seem to keep on coming, from later revelations that the Biden administration attempted to hide a separate Chinese balloon incident to reports published two weeks before the new year accusing Biden of trying to hide the balloon from the public.

U.S. Soldier Travis King Runs into North Korea

On July 18, then-12-year-old Private 2nd Class Travis King was supposed to board a flight out of Incheon International Airport in South Korea back home to Texas. Instead, he left the airport, booked a tour of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), and ran into North Korea.

“This man gives out a loud ‘ha ha ha,’ and just runs in between some buildings,” an eyewitness in King’s tour group recalled to CBS News at the time.

King’s disappeared for more than two months, finally being deported out of North Korea because he entered the country illegally in September. The bizarre episode was unprecedented and left a host of unanswered question: what was King trying to achieve? How did North Korea treat him in captivity? Why did North Korea give him back so promptly, rather than using him as a hostage as it has with other Americans in the past?

The North Korean regime claimed in state media reports that King told the communist regime it was fleeing “inhuman treatment and racial discrimination within the U.S. Army,” using him to disparage Washington. Pyongyang published few reports on King during his captivity, stating only that the regime was engaging in an investigation to ensure that King was not a spy or American operative on a mission to harm North Korea. It ultimately concluded that King’s only crime was illegally entering the country and returned him, all reports suggest, unscathed.

Reports following his disappearance indicated that King had struggled in the U.S. Army. He had spent two months in jail following a drunken altercation with locals in Seoul, multiple outlets reported. Following his return, in October, Reuters reported that the U.S. Army had charged King with eight crimes including attacking other American soldiers and soliciting child pornography.

King is one of seven American soldiers to have defected to North Korea in the 70 years since the Korean War began and the only one to return to America. Only one of the other six, Charles Robert Jenkins, left North Korea after his defection, resettling in Japan 40 years after his defection.

The incident did not appear to affect American-North Korean relations in any way; Kim Jong-un is still threatening to use nuclear weapons on the U.S. homeland as usual.

October 7

The indisputable darkest moment of 2023, the Hamas atrocities in Israel on October 7 changed the history of Israel forever. Hamas, a genocidal jihadist organization that enjoys significant support in the West – even after October 7 – invaded Israel and proceeded to go on a rampage of killing, raping, and torture against civilians of all ages and backgrounds, from infants to the elderly. Evidence collected by the Israeli government – and published by the radical leftist New York Times – indicates that the terrorists engaged in gruesome gang rapes in which many women and girls were mutilated during the attack, their breasts cut off or nails hammered into their bodies. First responders found entire families massacred in their homes, including babies whose heads had been cut off and some burned alive. Some of the terrorists filmed their actions and uploaded themselves torturing and desecrating corpses to social media – one family found out about their grandmother’s death because a Hamas terrorist uploaded a video of her dead body to her Facebook account.

Israeli officials estimate Hamas killed 1,200 people that day, the largest massacre of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust, and abducted about 250 people, of which an estimated 129 remain unaccounted for as of Thursday.

Israeli officials have vowed to eliminate the Hamas threat and ensure another such slaughter never happens again. In response, the international left has issued a loud, violent outpouring of support for Hamas. Jihadist allies such as Iran, the world’s premier state sponsor of terrorism, through street parties to celebrate the slaughter. Joe Biden has publicly criticized Israel’s self-defense operations in Gaza, where Hamas is the elected government.

The Iran-Saudi Peace Deal

In another example of China humiliating the Biden administration, Beijing presided over the surprise reconciliation of one-time American ally Saudi Arabia and its geopolitical rival Iran, the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism. Under the auspices of the Communist Party, the two nations agreed to formally restore diplomatic ties, reopening embassies, establishing flights between the two nations, and leaving the door open for business cooperation. Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi made his maiden visit to Riyadh in November, widely considered a gracious gesture by Saudi Arabia given attacks on the country by Iranian proxies, to cooperate on their pro-Hamas reaction to the jihadist atrocities on October 7 in Israel.

China’s leading role in the negotiations left Washington completely sidelined. Biden mouthpiece John Kirby grumbled in response to the news that “anything that can bring the tensions down in the region is welcome,” but the administration had little else to say about the matter. Months later, in the summer, the China-led BRICS coalition announced it would accept both Iran and Saudi Arabia as members.

Poor Leftist Forest Management in Canada Blankets 70 Million Americans in Smog

Canada experienced one of its most severe wildfire seasons in history this summer and largely failed to subdue the flames in time – causing surreal scenes throughout much of the northern United States of cities covered in orange smog all the way down to New York City. Estimates suggest 70 million Americans in 23 states were affected by the disaster, which the radical leftist government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau desperately attempted to blame on climate change and insist it could do nothing to improve the situation. In reality, Canadian media outlets had been lamenting “decades of bad decisions” in forest management for years, including negligence in clearly highly flammable underbrush and the lack of a centralized federal firefighting agency.

“Canada has failed to fund the proactive management of forest fires sufficiently and is not poised to do better moving forward,” an analysis published by the Canadian think-tank the Fraser Institute observed.

The Wagner Mutiny and Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Unfortunate Plane Accident

This year, for the first time in recent memory, someone made Vladimir Putin look vulnerable. Then he abruptly ceased what was widely labeled an “armed uprising” against Moscow and vanished, only to die in a mysterious plane crash two months later.

The last days of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the late leader of the notorious Wagner paramilitary group, were chaotic and often incoherent. Prigozhin published videos regularly condemning the Russian government’s poor handling (according to him) of the invasion of Ukraine but insisted he was loyal to Putin. In late June, he abruptly turned his soldiers around in Ukraine and invaded Russia, capturing the city of Rostov-on-Don and pushing onward toward Moscow.

Then, suddenly, he stopped.

As recently as five days after the invasion, according to the Kremlin, Putin himself met with Prigozhin and offered him a job. Prigozhin largely vanished from the public eye after the mutiny with the exception of an audio clip in which he once again disparaged the Russian military, called his invasion of Russia a “master class,” and lamented that the ease with which he invaded Russia should have been how Russian troops conquered Kyiv in February 2022.

The lack of legal action against Prigozhin – initial charges of armed uprising were dropped – puzzled international observers given Putin’s reputation of ruthlessly silencing challengers. Those observers only got two months to wonder, however, as Russian authorities announced on August 23 that Prigozhin was dead. Several top Wagner officials were on the same plane with Prigozhin and also perished.

Putin eulogized his former favorite chef as a “man of complicated destiny” in the aftermath of the crash. In October, he openly speculated that Prigozhin blew himself up by detonating a grenade on the flight while drunk and/or high.

Volodymyr Zelensky Stands Up Brazil’s Lula, a Low Point in an Especially Petty Presidential Feud

For months, socialist Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva attempted to sell his country as an ideal mediator between Russia and Ukraine – never mind his longstanding friendship with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and a barrage of insulting comments he unleashed against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky while running for president in 2022.

Zelensky bizarrely appeared open to the idea of engaging Lula and scheduled a meeting with him at the G7 summit hosted by Japan in May. Then, Zelensky did not show up.

“I had a bilateral meeting with Ukraine here in this hall at 3:15 p.m.,” Lula told reporters in Hiroshima, explaining what happened. “We waited and kept getting information that they were delayed. So then I met with the president of Vietnam.”

“When the president of Vietnam left, the president of Ukraine did not appear,” Lula continued, declaring himself “upset.”

Asked about the incident later in the summit, Zelensky insisted it was “definitely not” his fault, but smirked when asked if he was disappointed to not have met Lula.

“I think it disappointed him,” he said.

Such a clear gesture of disrespect – booking a meeting, then not showing up – is rare from president to president, as most world leaders who despise each other this much don’t bother to book summits. Zelensky and Lula finally did meet in person in September, at an event photographic evidence suggests was an unpleasant time for both parties.

Chile’s President Gabriel Boric Gets Stuck in a Kiddie Slide

How bad a year did Gabriel Boric, the millennial radical socialist president of Chile, have in 2023? His flagship initiative, the replacement of the Chilean constitution, was first handed to the right wing in a May election for constitutional drafters and then rejected outright in December. Lula – who, as established in the previous item, is one of the world’s least congenial presidents – dismissed Boric as a “hasty young man” for daring to oppose the Russian invasion of Ukraine. His erstwhile ideological allies in socialist Venezuela proclaimed him a “drunk” and a “moron” for daring to condemn Nicolás Maduro’s record of human rights abuses. His national nickname is merluzo, which roughly translates to “bumbling idiot.”

Boric announced a breakup with his feminist girlfriend, “first partner” Irina Karamanos, via Instagram, then jetted off to Antarctica.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Gabriel Boric Font (@gabrielboric)

Gabriel Boric decided to hop down an enclosed children’s slide at a playground and got stuck at the bottom. He broke the slide, requiring a 3,000 Chilean peso repair.

🇱 | ATENCIÓN: El Presidente de Chile, Gabriel Boric; se queda atrapado en un tobogán para niños. pic.twitter.com/NZ4b9fblyV

— UHN PLUS (@UHN_Plus) May 7, 2023

Not every memorable international news moment of the year has to be an important one.

Zelensky, Canadian Parliament Give Standing Ovation to Nazi Soldier

In one of the most surreal moments of 2023, the Canadian Parliament – with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in tow – gave a standing ovation to 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, a “veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians.”

Hunka fought for the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician), a Nazi unit found guilty of a variety of human rights atrocities during World War II.

No one in the Canadian Parliament bothered to question who Hunka was allied with when fighting against the Soviet Union in World War II. The Parliament speaker responsible for the invitation, Anthony Rota of Trudeau’s Liberal Party, resigned, stating his “profound regret for my error in recognizing an individual in the House.”

Trudeau blamed “Russian disinformation” for the invite, without elaborating, and largely escaped any political repercussions, despite a long history of racist behavior, including repeated use of blackface and “brownface.”

Javier Milei, a Libertarian Cable News Commentator, Becomes President of Argentina

Ending the year on a note of optimism, Argentina made history by electing the first-ever successful libertarian third-party presidential candidate in the West on November 19: Javier Milei, an economics professor and household name via his perch as a popular cable news commentator. Milei established his political party, Liberty Advances, in 2021, and was elected to the Argentine Congress that year.

Before his roles as a professor, talking head, and lawmaker, Milei fronted a band, played goalie in soccer, and taught tantric sex classes. He became popular for his anarcho-capitalist cosplay and his strange hair. He has often exhibited a fondness for singing on television.

What won him the election, however, was his consistent, direct condemnation of “what some call leftist, socialism, fascism, communism – and which we like to catalog as collectivism,” as he described in his first executive order. In a country 20 years deep into socialist Peronism, Milei routinely condemned the political “caste” as corrupt thieves whose existence was impoverishing the country. Milei repeatedly insulted “shitty leftists” as “envious” and “liars.”

“As long as the shitty lefties keep repeating their lies, we liberals are going to keep repeating our truths and we are going to beat them, because we are superior productively, we are superior morally and aesthetically. They can’t beat us in anything,” Milei proclaimed in a 2021 interview.

And instead of simply running on anger, Milei proposed a concrete set of policies: dramatically reducing the size of the federal government by shutting down unnecessary government industry, privatizing government corporations, and lifting onerous socialist regulations on the market. Milei has also promised to introduce the U.S. dollar as an official currency to fight the skyrocketing inflation in the country.

Milei will have been president for 21 days by January 1. So far, he has shut down nine of 18 government ministries, presented an executive order deregulating commerce and undoing socialist policies, and introduced a massive bill to Congress seeking to privatize state media and government oil companies, make public universities more profitable, and expand self-defense laws to allow Argentines to defend themselves from criminals more freely. While some leftist organizations have attempted to stage protests against the measures, his voters have stood by them, anticipating even more reforms to salvage the economy – which Milei’s spokesman Manuel Adorni described as a “patient in intensive care, about to die.”

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