Podcast: From Bad to Worse: US/China Relations with Zanny Minton Beddoes

The Lebanon ceasefire that isn’t

Lebanon and Israel agreed to a new ceasefire on Wednesday, but there’s just one (ongoing) problem: Israel isn’t fighting “Lebanon.” Rather, it’s fighting the Iran-backed Lebanese militants of Hezbollah, who are beyond the Lebanese military’s control and who have rejected the ceasefire because it would require them to evacuate much of south Lebanon. This directly undermines prospects for a US-Iran accord, because Tehran has made a complete Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire a requirement of any wider agreement with Washington. US President Donald Trump, for his part, has lowered the bar for what a ceasefire entails “in that part of the world,” but the basic deadlock remains: Iran is uncowed by US military power, Trump wants a face-saving way out of an increasingly unpopular war, while Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is under domestic pressure to widen his campaign against Hezbollah, which continues to threaten large swaths of Northern Israel with rocket and drone strikes.