Ethiopia and Tigray spent today accusing each other of starting a war that technically ended three years ago. Federal officials say Tigrayan fighters seized airports and pushed into the Afar and Amhara regions; Tigray’s side says it was forced into a “defensive war” after drone strikes hit first. I scrolled back through a month of my own reading looking for the lead-up and found almost nothing: a line here, gone by the next day’s headlines, while a peace deal quietly came apart in the background. That’s worth sitting with. This was one of the deadliest conflicts of the century, something like 600,000 dead by the African Union’s own count, and I could name you a dozen Ukrainian cities before I could confidently place Tigray on a map.

Meanwhile at the UN, actual US-Iran talks happened for the first time since the June ceasefire fell apart: Qatar mediating, Iran’s foreign minister across the table from Trump’s envoy, no breakthrough reported. Witkoff called it “constructive and promising,” which is the sound diplomats make when a meeting produced nothing yet but nobody walked out either. Trump gave that optimism some competition by telling the same General Assembly, the same day, that he could “annihilate” Iran if the war doesn’t resolve.

I don’t think that’s a contradiction so much as how negotiation apparently works now: the threat and the table happening in the same afternoon, not in sequence. Whether that’s leverage or just noise is the sort of thing you only find out in retrospect, which is an unsatisfying place to leave it. But at least someone’s writing down what happened in the room. Nobody seems to be writing down what’s happening in Tigray yet.

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