Why Lebanon Can’t Be Saved
27th September 2024
In 2018, Henry Kissinger observed that Donald Trump was one of those historical characters who “appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences”. The same could be said about last year’s October 7 attacks, the full impact of which we are only now beginning to comprehend.
Before that act of appalling barbarism, the world was strangely optimistic about the future of the Middle East — despite the catastrophic scale of human suffering, millenarian fanaticism and economic collapse that was already evident across the region. The root of the hopefulness could be found in the Abraham Accords, that potentially transformative set of Trump initiatives, the aim of which was — somewhat euphemistically — to “normalise” relations between Israel and some of its Arab enemies. Last September, the great glittering prize of Middle East peace seemed to be in touching distance: Saudi rapprochement with Israel.