Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
The Middle East Institute (MEI) and the American Task Force on Lebanon (ATFL) convened a group of experts on Lebanon who co-authored this policy brief.
Executive Summary
As tensions between Israel and Hezbollah escalate, the specter of a full-scale war, with the potential to draw in the United States and Iran, demands the US’s immediate attention. The Biden-Harris Administration has tasked, in response, White House Senior Advisor Amos Hochstein with mediating efforts to de-escalate the conflict and bring stability to the Lebanon-Israel border.
Nearly six decades after Kanso moved to America and began his career as a visual artist, his work remains enormously important, channeling the zeitgeist of our uncertain and violent era. Yet as dark as Kanso’s vision is, he also reminds us that even the most hellacious of contexts can contain light and the possibility of rebirth and renewal.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
Ambassador David Hale joins MEI’s US-Lebanon Fellow Fadi Nicholas Nassar to discuss his book American Diplomacy Toward Lebanon: Lessons in Foreign Policy and the Middle East. They cover takeaways from his time as ambassador and the state of US-Lebanon and regional diplomacy following the Gaza war.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
The month of April saw a series of unprecedented escalations in the long-simmering Iranian-Israeli conflict, with both countries launching missile and drone attacks against the other’s territory for the first time in history.
In the wake of these strikes, what will be the impact on the regional security and political environment going forward, what is needed to stabilize the new rules of the game, and how can US diplomacy help to facilitate that process? MEI has asked its experts to weigh in.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
Six months since the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and subsequent outbreak of war in Gaza, the deadly and devastating conflict looks no closer to concluding. Is it still possible to achieve a sustainable cessation of hostilities and restart the conflict-resolution process? To get there, what are the incentives and disincentives that could be constructed for the two main combatants, Israel and Hamas?
International funders have often called upon recipients to carry out reforms before any funding can be made available or the amount increased. But in many crisis-wracked countries, such as Lebanon, the prospect of reforms may be too distant, with intervention needed immediately. This is why greater emphasis must be placed on risk mitigation measures over which funders can exercise control.
MEI’s US-Lebanon Fellow Fadi Nicholas Nassar and Emile Hokayem – Director of Regional Security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies – discuss the changing and uncertain rules of engagement between Hezbollah and Israel, and the potential for war between the two following Oct. 7.
With Israel and Hezbollah on the brink of war, there have been ongoing diplomatic attempts to defuse tensions along the Israel-Lebanon border. Among the long-standing issues between the two countries are disagreements over their shared boundary. Asher Kaufman takes a closer look at these territorial disputes and how they came about, with a particular focus on the village of Ghajar at the center of the tension.