Podcast / The Time of Monsters / Sep 22, 2024

Israel’s Expanding War Against Lebanon

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Trita Parsi on the dangers of a lame-duck president with spiraling crisis.

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Israel’s Expanding War Against Lebanon | The Time of Monsters
byThe Nation Magazine

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Trita Parsi on the dangers of a lame duck president with spiraling crisis.

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Lebanese army soldiers stand guard near a hospital in Beirut on September 17, 2024, after explosions hit locations in several Hezbollah strongholds around Lebanon amid ongoing cross-border tensions between Israel and Hezbollah fighters.

(Anwar Amro / AFP via Getty Images)

Joe Biden’s foreign policy team was hoping for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas before his term was over, perhaps as early as the end of September. This always seemed wishful thinking but now is almost impossible as Israel not only continues to fight in Gaza but has expanded its conflict with Palestinian forces to neighboring Lebanon. The expanding conflict once again raises the question of Biden’s bear-hug strategy, which the administration argues would help foster peace and restraint. This failure of this policy is likely to haunt whoever wins the White House in November.

To survey the dire scene and discuss the possibility of American involvement in yet another large Middle Eastern war, I talked to Trita Parsi, executive vice-president of the Quincy Institute.

The Nation Podcasts
The Nation Podcasts

Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.

The End of American Global Power? W/ Anusar Farooqui | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer
byThe Nation Magazine

The conflict in the Middle East is currently in an intermittent holding action with an extended ceasefire but no diplomatic breakthrough. To assess where things are going, I sat down with the foreign policy analyst Anusar Farooqui, who runs an excellent substack called Policy Tensor and posts on Twitter here. We discussed the resiliency and growing stature of Iran, as well as the signs that unipolar US hegemony is coming to an end, to be replaced by a multipolar world. 

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Jeet Heer

Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The GuardianThe New Republic, and The Boston Globe.

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