What if UNGA Takes Place Amidst a Widening Regional War in the Middle East?

Bad timing

A few quick things before we get into today’s newsletter

- A new episode of To Save Us From Hell dropped yesterday in which Anjali Dayal and I take a deep dive into the Biden Administration’s (surprisingly detailed!) plans for Security Council reform.

- I have a brand new episode of Global Dispatches in which I interview former WTO executive director and all-around big thinker Pascal Lamy about the geopolitics of global trade in the world today.

-Our friends at Mercy Corps are using our news and announcement platform to share the following message:

Based on testimonies from people in Sudan combined with crisis analysis, the new report "If bullets miss, hunger won't" by Mercy Corps, Norwegian Refugee Council, and Danish Refugee Council reveals the direct and indirect ways in which the conflict and widespread violations of international humanitarian law have led to suffering and starvation countrywide.

To share an announcement like this with our community of 13,700+ subscribers, go here.

Now, on with today’s newsletter! And click the button below to unlock our UNGA79 promo, running through September.

Exploding Pagers

One of the first podcast interviews I did after the October 7th attacks was with Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator. I asked him a question on everyone’s mind at the time: how could Israel, with its vaunted intelligence and security apparatus, be so vulnerable to this kind of terrorist attack?

I’ve been thinking about his answer in recent days. Citing the prevailing conventional wisdom of the Israeli security establishment prior to October 7th, he said, “the serious people don't deal with the Palestinian file. The Palestinian file is a mowing-the-lawn maintenance file. Serious people deal with the Iranian file." The implication here is that top talent and energy were focused on threats from Iran, and by extension, its proxy Hezbollah. Hamas in Gaza was not deemed worthy of such attention.

Over the last week, we’ve been seeing the logical extension of this mindset play out in Lebanon—and in the process, potentially ignite a broader regional war.

The details of the pager and walkie-talkie attacks in Lebanon, ostensibly carried out by Israel, are mind-boggling. Somehow, someway, Israeli security forces inserted themselves into the supply chain of personal electronics destined for Hezbollah. They blew up those tainted devices at a time of their choosing. It was audacious, yes, but also extremely sophisticated.

The sheer complexity of this operation stands in stark contrast to Israel’s tactics in Gaza, which bear more resemblance to siege warfare and carpet bombing—inherently indiscriminate tactics common in conflicts of yore. In Gaza, entire blocks are leveled by massive bombs because Israel never invested in a more sophisticated way to counter Hamas without inflicting mass suffering on the people of Gaza. Gaza is old-school war tactics. Detonating personal electronic devices by tampering with supply lines? That’s the future of war — the serious people, remember, worked on the Iran file.

And now these serious people are poised to escalate a regional war—right before UNGA.