Review of World Affairs

• Lebanon
• US Presidential Election
• Sri Lanka’s New Direction

By Shashi P.B.B. Malla

Israel Escalates Conflict With Hezbollah in Lebanon

Israel has launched a ground operation in southern Lebanon targeting Hezbollah. The ground offensive comes after hours of Israeli raids and artillery fire across the border.

Israeli officials said there would be “no long-term occupation” of Lebanon but declined to provide a timeline (CNN, Oct. 1).

Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon have moved closer to all-out war.

An Israeli strike in Beirut last Friday targeted Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and brought him down.

A deadly situation has intensified drastically.

For more than three decades, Nasrallah was the face and brain of Hezbollah. He served as a charismatic unifying figure for the militants fighting Israel.

His dramatic liquidation is “a blow to the organization so deep that it raises crucial questions about how and whether its remaining forces can strike back at Israel” (The New York Times/NYT, Sept. 30).

Israel was completely caught off guard by Hamas’s October 7 attacks in southern Israel and did not expect to find itself in a protracted war in Gaza, Zakaria said.

But this looks like the execution of a more thought-through plan to strike at Hezbollah definitely.

In recent weeks, Israel has sharply ramped up its campaign against Hezbollah: the Lebanese Shiite militia and political party – designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. and other Western governments – against which Israel fought a devastating war in southern Lebanon in 2006.

Soon after the dastardly Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, Hezbollah itself began firing rockets into Israel in solidarity with Hamas and Gaza.

Since then the two sides have traded cross-border fire.

Tens of thousands have been displaced on both sides of the northern Israel/southern Lebanon border, and Israel’s government has now said its top priority is allowing Israeli citizens to return safely to their homes in the north.

In July, Israel escalated sharply by assassinating a senior Hezbollah commander in Beirut.

It escalated again more recently with deadly pager and walkie-talkie explosions that targeted Hezbollah members.

To Zakaria, this recent sequence looks like an attempt to eliminate Hezbollah as a threat.

For weeks, observers have feared Lebanon could suffer a full-scale ground war.

In a nightmare scenario, such a conflict could grow even larger and draw in Iran, Hezbollah’s chief backer, Iran’s broader network of allies in the region; and perhaps the US military.

Israel and Hezbollah “appear locked in an upward military spiral,” Dana Stroul of the Israel-aligned Washington Instutute for Near East Policy wrote in a Foreign Affairs essay last week, “but both would lose more than they would gain from a full-scale war right now.”

In language that may be understated, Urban Coningham wrote last Thursday for the. world’s oldest and the UK’s leading defence and security think tank Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) that the uptick in Israeli attacks “perhaps also reflects a weakness in the US’s security arrangements, as it has been unable to effectively dissuade and disincentivise its own allies from escalation.

After Israel’s latest strike, CNN’s Bianna Golodryga heard from London School of Economics political science professor Fawaz  killed or not…this is the tipping point. This is the spark that will most likely trigger all-out war. You’ll see in the next day or so. This is it. Hezbollah will retaliate strategically – and that’s exactly what [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu has been gunning for. He wants, really, a justification to go to launch a ground invasion, and a ground invasion will be really a long war, a much longer war than the war in Gaza. It will likely last for a decade.”

The U.S. Presidential Election & Ukraine

It is not precisely clear what the US presidential election will mean for Ukraine.

Former President Donald Trump has called for the war’s immediate end, while Vice President Kamala Harris has pledged continued support for Kyiv.

Trump’s inclination, however, is coming more sharply into focus, writes Fareed Zakaria (Global Briefing, Sept. 26).

Trump has said publicly that he wants the war to stop – and that he could end it in a day!

On the campaign trail, James Politi and Felicia Schwartz write for the  Financial Times (FT), Trump has amplified criticisms of Ukraine and its leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was in the U.S. last week for the UN General Assembly.

Zelensky had said he would present a “victory plan” to President Joe Biden, Harris , and Trump.

The FT’s Politi and Schwartz write: “Trump has accused…[Zelensky] of refusing to strike a deal to end ‘the war with Russia and casting “aspersions’ against him as he increased his attacks on Kyiv ahead of the US election…

“We continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refuses to make a deal [Zelensky],” Trump told the audience [at an event in Charlotte].

“There was no deal that he could have made that wouldn’t have been better than the situation you have right now. You have a country that has been obliterated.”

Broadly, Trump and his team have attacked US spending in support of Ukraine.

A recent op-ed in The Hill by Donald Trump, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (now a member of Trump’s transition team) warned against Biden’s and Harris’s “insane war agenda” and called for,

In February, Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance had articulated the Trumpist case against helping Ukraine in an FT op-ed, questioning the cost and arguing Europe must do more.

To Ukraine and its Western supporters, the counterpoints have always been that Russian President Vladimir Putin will not stop or negotiate in good faith, especially as long as Ukraine’s battlefield position is weak.

Giving away Ukrainian land could merely preview further encroachment, as two negotiated agreements did after the initial Russian incursion in 2014, analysts and Ukrainian officials have said.

Zelensky, for his part, makes the case in an interview with The New Yorker’s Joshua Yaffa, arguing: “Trump makes political statements in his election campaign. He says he wants the war to stop. Well, we do too. This phrase and desire, they unite the world; everyone shares them. But here’s the scary question: Who will shoulder the costs of stopping the war?… 

“My feeling is that Trump doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how…

“With this war, oftentimes, the deeper you look at it the less you understand…

“I’ve seen many leaders who were convinced they knew how to end it tomorrow, and as they waded deeper into it, they realized it’s not that simple.”

As for what Harris wants and what Ukraine should do, Ukrainian-American retired US Army Lt. Col. And former White House National Security Council staffer Alexander Vindman argues in Foreign Affairs that Harris can be expected to continue Biden’s levels of support.

A second Trump administration, on the other hand, would likely be hostile to European allies, Vindman writes.

In the interim, Vindman suggests, Ukraine should conscript more soldiers, afford them Western training, and build more drones to bolster its position.

Sri Lanka’s New President: A Fresh Start

Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s victory in Sri Lanka’s presidential election granted the public’s abiding wish for a fresh political start.

Dissanayake ran on a pledge to abolish corrupt and dynastic politics.

He has no links to the country’s powerful political families, and his party was involved in the protest movement to oust then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksain 2022.

As he settles into office, Dissanayake can count on public support in his ambitious effort to clean up politics.

However, as US South Asian expert Michael Kugelman writes: “his status as the change candidate will also present him with significant obstacles in his dealings with three key groups: the political opposition, the business community, and the country’s religious minorities” (Foreign Policy/South Asia Brief, Sept. 25).

Dissanayake is a more complex figure than some depictions suggest. He has been described as a Marxist; if so he is not a hard-core one.

His Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) party has renounced its violent past and now participates in the system that it once opposed [like the Nepalese Maoists].

Dissanayake, 55, has been a member of Sri Lanka’s Parliament for more than two decades and briefly served as a cabinet minister in 2004-05.

He is also not a traditional populist. He supports free trade and assistance from international financial institutions, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Dissanayake is strikingly different from most of Sri Lanka’s political class and is uncompromising toward his political rivals.

Since the Parliament was largely stacked against him, he has dissolved it and called early legislative elections in November. These polls could boost his party’s parliamentary clout but won’t necessarily stop rivals from trying to obstruct his agenda.

Sri Lankan political experts expect Dissanayake to pursue protectionist measures, including efforts to spearhead more domestic production while favouring small and medium enterprises.

He is also expected to renegotiate Sri Lanka’s current IMF deal so that it eases hardships on the poor – potentially risking tensions with a major donor that it cannot afford to aggravate.

Dissanayake will need to win over Sri Lanka’s minority communities – especially Hindu Tamils, who make up Sri Lanka’s largest ethnic minority.

This outreach wouldn’t just be good politics. Ensuring national unity in the face of serious domestic challenges would also serve national interests.

The new prime minister, Dr. Harini Amarasuriya has said that the problem in the country stems from the political culture, corruption, nepotism, the patronage system (NYT, Sept. 28-29). [In Nepal, the so-called leaders are not capable/willing to recognize a similar problem].

Sri Lanka’s Delicate Balance Between India & China

“India’s South Asian neighbours are increasingly adopting an ‘India plus China’ strategy to balance their economic interests between the two rising Asian powers,” Ajay Bisaria, a former Indian diplomat told Deutsche Welle/DW (Sept 25). 

Though Dissanayake has expressed his intentions to boost ties with both China and India, he made it clear that Sri Lanka’s assets are not up for grabs.

Professor Sreeradha Datta, a Sri Lanka expert from the Jindal School of International Affairs (Sonipat, Haryana, India) said in the long run, the strategic competition in the Indian Ocean is bound to play out sharply, and it was improbable for Sri Lanka to give any assurances to India on that count at this point.

“But given their history with China [the so-called debt trap], Sri Lanka is bound to be wary and would not be rushed to accommodate China as we have seen previous presidents do in the past,” she said.

“It would tread slowly and I am sure Dissanayake has a deftness that we may not be aware of yet” (DW).

The writer can be reached at: shashipbmalla@hotmail.com