A few further thoughts on Trump's Syria announcement. First, beyond the obvious benefit for Syrians, it might have a broader impact: it demonstrates, for the first time I can remember, that American sanctions aren't a one-way ratchet. They can be lifted if conditions change. 🧵 That's an important shift. Too many politicians in Washington find it easy to impose sanctions but lack the courage to remove them. It's a useful signal to adversaries: if I were Iran, trying to negotiate my own sanctions relief, I'd probably see it as an encouraging sign.

Netanyahu trying frantically to spin things, claiming that Edan Alexander's release is due to his "vigorous policy" in Gaza. But it's the opposite: Alexander will be freed from 19 months of captivity because Trump finally realized Netanyahu's policy is going nowhere. 🧵 Since Israel abandoned the ceasefire in March, @SteveWitkoff has privately told the families of Israeli hostages that he realizes Netanyahu played him and that he would do things differently next time around: no more protracted deals that allow Netanyahu to delay and sabotage.

Once again @SteveWitkoff offers some mixed messages for different audiences, this time in an interview with @BreitbartNews. On the one hand he denounces the "neocon element" pushing for war with Iran, which sounds as if the administration will be pragmatic in pursuing a deal. Later in the interview, though, he says the administration's position is basically the neocon one: "An enrichment program can never exist in the state of Iran ever again. That's our red line. No enrichment." If that is indeed a red line, very hard to see how they'll make a deal.

If you want to see how the Trump administration seems to have made up its tariff rates out of thin air, let's look at Jordan, the first Arab country to sign a free-trade agreement with the US (in 2000). It got whacked with a 20% tariff rate anyway, among the region's highest. 🧵 Per the White House, that means Jordan imposes a 40% trade barrier on goods coming from America. Which doesn't make sense, given the FTA! And indeed, if you look at the US government's own data, you'll see that it isn't true. American exports to Jordan are often tariff-exempt.

Our cover in the Middle East this week looks at a newly unrestrained Israel. It wants to reshape the region; its foes can no longer deter it, and its friends will not dissuade it. Yet doing so puts enormous strain on domestic cohesion, foreign alliances and the Jewish diaspora. My briefing starts with the contours of this rampant Israel, which is not content to merely smash Hamas and Hezbollah. It has resumed war in Gaza and threatens permanent reoccupation. It is waging a major offensive in the West Bank. It seized a swath of Syria and plans to stay.

Joking aside re: the @JeffreyGoldberg piece. If you read some of the exchanges, you get the sense that various aides believe reopening shipping lanes in the Red Sea will be speedy and straightforward. That's unrealistic, and it touches on an ideological schism in Trumpworld. 🧵
If you're a shipper or insurer, you are averse to uncertainty. Days or weeks of air strikes probably won't convince you it's safe to return to the Red Sea. You'll want to see either an extended period of calm or political change that dislodges the Houthis from power.

Back to work after a week off and wanted to belatedly share thoughts on America's Middle East policy after a trip to DC this month. The first of which is that Trump has a skeleton crew: if personnel is policy, there's almost no policy because there are almost no personnel. 🧵 Witkoff is overstretched and spends little time in DC. People on the Hill (from both parties) are getting frustrated that he doesn't engage with them. The NSC deputies working on the region were all fired or quit; replacing them is hard because the administration wants loyalists.

Hamas is keen to show the public it survived. But in private it is in chaos. My piece with @AnshelPfeffer this week @TheEconomist looks at how Hamas was once simultaneously a militant group, a government and a force in Palestinian politics, but may now have to choose just one. 🧵 Hamas has never been in such a fraught situation. The reconstruction of Gaza is an unprecedented challenge that will need tens of billions of dollars in aid, and Israel is unlikely to treat the group with the same forbearance as it did before October 7th. economist.com/middle-east-an…

Seems like, in Lebanon, we've reached a point where both combatants have decided that the cost of continuing the war now outweighs the expected benefits of continuing the war: you get to a ceasefire when neither Israel nor Hezbollah sees a better alternative. 🧵 The ceasefire deal has a lot of critics in Israel: Benny Gantz, for example, said Israel had only done "half the job". But none of those critics outline a coherent, realistic vision for how they would end the war. They just want to keep fighting and chase unicorns.

So, yes, encouraging (if unsurprising) that Iran's state media is downplaying the Israeli attack, claiming it was repelled by air defenses. Suggests there's no immediate desire to retaliate. But that doesn't mean the region is just going back to the status quo... 🧵 First, the broader context for Iran: an ongoing failure of deterrence. After the April strikes the IRGC chief promised a "new equation" in which Israeli attacks on Iran's interests would draw direct retaliation. Israel wasn't deterred, as we've seen since Haniyeh's assassination.

I have a piece this week about the idea that "you can't kill an idea", a pithy statement that leads to poor analysis. Hamas and Hezbollah are institutions, not ideas: there's reason to think they will emerge from this war in radically diminished form. 🧵 economist.com/middle-east-an… Scholars argue that so-called "decapitation" strikes don't work. That's often true. But what Israel has done to both groups in the past year goes far beyond that: killing echelons of leaders, ravaging not just their military capabilities but their economic and political bases.

A few scattered thoughts, starting with a mea culpa: one thing I clearly got wrong in recent months was underestimating how much Israel was willing to take escalatory risks in Lebanon, and assuming there was some threshold at which Hezbollah would be compelled to respond. 🧵 Nasrallah was wedded to his idea that he could sustain an open-ended but limited conflict. Maybe he was afraid to escalate; maybe he believed his own rhetoric about deterrence. Who knows. Whatever the reason, he locked himself into a dead-end strategy and never rethought it.

There's no strategy anywhere, not in 🇮🇱 nor in 🇱🇧. Hezbollah has spent a year bombarding northern Israel as if depopulating Kiryat Shmona was an end in itself. But it failed to achieve its strategic aims: to relieve military pressure on Gaza or compel Israel into a ceasefire. 🧵 The months went on, pressure on the Israeli government mounted, and Netanyahu grew more comfortable with escalation and risk-taking in Lebanon. By then, however, Nasrallah had stuck himself way out on a limb, wedded to a quixotic "support front" on behalf of Hamas.

Iran has a dilemma. The barrage it fired at Israel in April broke its taboo against direct conflict but failed to impose deterrence. Now it feels compelled to do something bigger—but it will discover that it has few military options for reprisals. 🧵 economist.com/middle-east-an… Ballistic missiles are limited in number, and their launchers are a vulnerable bottleneck. Cruise missiles and drones need hours to cover the >1,000km to Israel. Forget air strikes or ground troops. Geography matters: Iran cannot bring overwhelming force to bear against Israel.

Israel is desperate to find Arab states willing to fix Gaza for them. The UAE wants to be seen as the Arab state most willing to help. Hence these sorts of meetings. But they don't mean the UAE is *actually* about to play a big role in a day-after plan. 🧵 axios.com/2024/07/23/us-… As @Abdulkhaleq_UAE lists here, the UAE has conditions for going to Gaza: an invitation from a reformed PA led by an independent prime minister; an Israeli commitment to let the PA govern Gaza and pursue a two-state solution; America in a leadership role.

https://twitter.com/Abdulkhaleq_UAE/status/1815800842533925355

Our briefing this week @TheEconomist is about Gaza's future. Optimistic "day-after" schemes have little basis in reality. No one has a real plan to provide security, distribute aid and start rebuilding—only a hope that someone else will do these things. 🧵 economist.com/briefing/2024/… That's also the subject of our Weekend Intelligence podcast. @zannymb asked politicians in Israel and Palestine about the actual "day after", the one where someone will need to control a lawless territory. They offered a lot of dangerously rosy thinking. economist.com/podcasts/2024/…

This talk of a "limited" Rafah offensive seems like spin from a White House that wants to backtrack from its warnings. And it dovetails with an Israeli talking point about how the evacuation from Rafah shows that Israel listened to America (it didn't). 🧵 timesofisrael.com/israel-moves-t… As @haaretzcom explains, the "limited" Rafah offensive isn't limited at all: "In practice, it is a deep ground operation, with a pattern of destruction similar to what has been seen in other cities across the Gaza Strip during earlier stages of the war." haaretz.com/israel-news/se…

A few thoughts after a long night. First, I think there's a strong case that Iran's reprisal was a strategic error. For months Israel was increasingly isolated, America looked feckless and Iran was projecting power through proxies whilst preserving detente with Arab states. 🧵 Then came last night. It was bad for Iranian deterrence. Iran opted for a big attack rather than a symbolic one, but a big attack that was calibrated not to do much damage. That won't deter Israel; on the contrary, it will make Iran look weak and ineffective.

In our cover package this week I write about how Israel has won the battle but lost the war. It has arguably achieved many of its goals. But it did so in a way that will ultimately leave it more insecure, more divided at home and more isolated abroad. 🧵 economist.com/briefing/2024/… Israel has done real damage to Hamas. Short of men and materiel, it will be years before the group can again pose a serious threat. It is also unlikely to rule Gaza, where its popularity has plummeted: many Gazans blame Hamas for dragging them into a war it could not hope to win.

I have a piece in @ForeignAffairs this week on myth and reality in the Middle East. The war has shattered a bunch of illusions about a shifting balance of power in the region. Instead the past five months revealed a power vacuum: no one is in charge. 🧵 foreignaffairs.com/middle-east/po… What were those illusions? Before October 7th policymakers in various countries argued that the Palestinian cause was dead, that an emerging Israeli-Gulf alliance would constrain Iran and that a multipolar, post-American moment had arrived in the Middle East.

A couple of good threads from Yemen experts on the strikes against the Houthis. This from @IbrahimJalalYE explains how they will use the strikes to boost their domestic and regional standing and distract from their atrocious governance in Yemen

https://twitter.com/IbrahimJalalYE/status/1745595354752360832

And this, by @gregorydjohnsen, on how America has a range of options in Yemen, from "do nothing" to limited box-ticking air strikes to attacking Iran directly, none of which are good options

https://twitter.com/gregorydjohnsen/status/1745638383399940585