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Soriek  1yr ago (text post)   1408 thread views

Transnational Thursdays 25

This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum lives in or might be interested in. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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So I take it from the French response that Hezbollah’s involvement in the Israel war would be expected to trigger a declaration of war on them by the rest of Lebanon? I know a prominent Christian leader had said it would be taken as an aggressive act, but thought Hezbollah was the main remaining military force in Lebanon.

You're 100% correct that Hezbollah is the only meaningful fighting force in Lebanon but they do actually retain a military still, which sounds funny to even say lol. It's hard to say what would happen (and hopefully cooler heads prevail) but yeah I would definitely say arming the actual armed forces is at the least a sign that Hezbollah should expect internal politics to not give them a blank check in the conflict. The last Christian President Aoun actually had a tacit alliance with Hezollah, but there's no President now and no alliance to paper over demographic divisions, and the Christian population of Lebanon has often looked to France as a possible protector.

Alternatively, the French response hasn't been a warning to the Israeli's, it's been a warning to Iran- in the sense of 'if Hezbollah gets involved, these APCs go to the other side of a potential Lebanese civil war.'

While the OP's framing is that the French position is a response to Israel, a lot of maneuverings going on in the region right now have been aimed at Iran, who reportedly was preparing to try and arrange basically a regional intifada that was supposed to have been called for by Hezbollah as the relevant proxy. There's been quite a bit of shuttle diplomacy in the region in the region, and depending on who you believe, there were direct threats that if other Iranian proxies got involved in earnest, it would be considered a formal act of war by Iran by the US. This allegedly occured right before Hezbollah did a significant announcement speach that had some potential groundwork for being the referenced call to arms, but ended up being an underwhelming 'we're staying out of it, mostly' and restriction to token efforts.

If you believe those framings- and I wouldn't discount them entirely- the French action isn't 'we will help Lebanese national army against Israel'- for which APCs would do little to no good- but 'we will help the Lebanese national army against Hezbollah,' in which the APCs would be directly relevant.

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