Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here. July 30, 2024 |
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Will Israel and Hezbollah Stumble Into War? |
"For almost ten months Israel and Hizbullah, a Lebanese Shia militia and political party, have stuck to unwritten rules in their low-intensity war," The Economist writes. "Both sides know their foe has fearsome firepower and so have tried to limit their strikes. They have aimed either for military targets or for evacuated border towns from which an estimated 150,000 civilians have fled. On [Saturday] July 27th those rules were shattered."
That's when a rocket killed 12 children at a soccer field in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Israel blamed Hezbollah, which denied responsibility. In the days since, Al-Monitor's Beatrice Farhat reports, anxieties have run high in southern Lebanon, major airlines have canceled flights to Beirut, and Western and regional diplomats have worked to avoid a full-blown war. Today, Israel struck in southern Beirut, targeting a Hezbollah commander it said was responsible for the Golan Heights attack.
Israel and Hezbollah are at their highest risk of all-out war since October, Paul Salem of the Middle East Institute wrote Monday, noting the attacks they've traded since the beginning of the Gaza war. A full-fledged conflict between Israel and Hezbollah could be catastrophic. The last one, in 2006, devastated southern Lebanon. The danger to Israel is high, too, given Hezbollah's large arsenal. "I've read estimates of what Hezbollah could do to us in three days that are just horrendous," former Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren told Foreign Policy last month, the magazine's Amy Mackinnon notes. "You're talking about knocking out all of our essential infrastructure, oil refineries, air bases, Dimona [a northern Israeli city that's home to a nuclear-research site]."
Because of that, analysts have said, neither Israel nor Hezbollah wants another full-scale conflict. Assessing the dynamics in a Foreign Affairs essay, Mohanad Hage Ali of the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center noted recently that Israel would risk a protracted ground operation, while Hezbollah "knows that a full-scale war with Israel would imperil its future and its regional status, as evidenced by its restrained response to Israel's recent provocations." And yet, The New Yorker's Dexter Filkins recently recounted (in a longer survey of Israel–Hezbollah war risk) post-Oct. 7 Israeli eagerness to mount a major offensive against Hezbollah. The Middle East Institute's Paul Salem wrote Monday that in the Golan Heights, "Hezbollah might have given the Israeli government a provocation they can leverage. The most likely scenario is a series of intense air attacks on a number of Hezbollah military targets, in south Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, carried out over the next few days." |
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What could avert such a disastrous war? Ending the one in Gaza, Bilal Y. Saab of TRENDS Research & Advisory writes for Foreign Policy.
Israel has been on edge since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, and Hezbollah faces pressure to both stand by Hamas and stand up to Israeli strikes in Lebanon. A Gaza truce would lower the tension, Saab writes: "The Israel-Hezbollah dynamic may have its own history, logic, risks, and consequences, but the path to defusing it runs through Gaza. A ceasefire in Gaza won't solve it—but it will give enough breathing room for all parties to lower the temperature, until the next crisis." |
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Maduro Is Announced as the Winner. What Happens Next? |
Nearly two weeks before Venezuela's election on Sunday, Shannon K. O'Neil and Julia Huesa of the Council on Foreign Relations foresaw three possible outcomes: A free and fair vote, with strongman President Nicolás Maduro probably losing; a rigged vote won by Maduro; or election authorities simply announcing Maduro as the winner.
Maduro indeed was announced the winner, but few seem to believe it. Venezuela has since been wracked by protests, and some Latin American leaders have questioned the results. (Chilean President Gabriel Boric tweeted that they were "difficult to believe.") At the Wilson Center, Latin America Program Director Benjamin Gedan notes in a short video: "There's lots of reasons to believe this election was stolen," as opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia was viewed as the heavy favorite in various polls. "So it would've been quite surprising if the election was close at all, let alone if the government managed to win." One big question in the short term, Gedan says, is whether Venezuela's military will stand by Maduro: Indoctrination, money and power (at the top level, at least) have given its members strong reasons to remain very loyal to Maduro's regime, but it's unclear how willing they will be to suppress major protests. At Americas Quarterly, Tamara Taraciuk Broner of Human Rights Watch's Americas Division writes: "Power is not monolithic in Venezuela today, and, especially after these elections, there will be divisions within" the ranks of Maduro's supporters. |
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… And How Did Venezuela Get Here? |
Asking what happened to Venezuela's democracy, The New York Times' Julie Turkewitz chronicles former President Hugo Chávez's populist experimentation and Venezuela's economic struggles. Having won office with promises to deliver power to the people, Chávez implemented "a system in which many people would solve their problems by going directly to the president, writing him letters (known as 'papelitos') begging for favors—a job, a loan, a home—and Mr. Chávez would grant their wishes. Sometimes he did so on his television program, Aló Presidente, in which he would address citizens for hours on end," Turkewitz notes. His socialist populism was followed by corruption and a further economic collapse under Chávez's successor Maduro. |
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It's too early to judge President Joe Biden's legacy, Fareed said on Sunday's GPS. But a tentative examination reveals significant highlights, like rallying and expanding NATO, bringing the US economy out of the Covid-19 doldrums, and pivoting US domestic policy away from tax breaks and toward meaningful investments. Biden sees himself as underestimated, Fareed said—and his White House record suggests he's right. |
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Wondering what's happening in the Middle East? From conflicts to breakthroughs, we're providing the context you need. Get the Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter for the biggest stories shaping the region. |
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Artificial intelligence is still imbued with hype. The Economist writes that tech companies are investing not only in programming AI engines, but in the microchips and server farms that make AI run. (On Sunday's GPS, Fareed examined AI's voracious appetite for electricity.) The magazine adds up a $1.4 trillion AI-related investment boom.
But so far, AI has not delivered on the world-changing miracles many expect. Some wonder when, how, and if it will. In a New York Times column, David Wallace-Wells notes a "neologistic term of revulsion, 'A.I. slop': often uncanny, frequently misleading material, now flooding web browsers and social-media platforms like spam in old inboxes. Years deep into national hysteria over the threat of internet misinformation pushed on us by bad actors, we've sleepwalked into a new internet in which meaningless, nonfactual slop is casually mass-produced and force-fed to us by A.I."
To Wallace-Wells (and others), the question is whether AI will find its productive niches: by modeling molecular-biological structures, for instance, or by locating mineral deposits in the earth—specialized, practical applications far afield from summarized search results. "[T]he answer to the many problems of generative A.I. may not be what boosters call 'scaling,' especially given the possibility that new training runs deliver some very expensive diminishing returns," Wallace-Wells writes. "It's the matter of weeding out the good from the bad, in the name of intellectual hygiene." |
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