WPR Daily Review

"Hezbollah is fighting a war it never wanted."

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October 28, 2024

Hello, everyone. Today at WPR, we’re covering the escalating war between Israel and Hezbollah, as well as last week’s BRICS Summit.

But first, here’s our take on this past weekend’s elections in Japan and Georgia, both of which introduced uncertainty in strategically important regions.

Japanese PM Ishiba Shigeru during a press conference the day after parliamentary elections, in Tokyo, Oct. 28, 2024 (The Yomiuri Shimbun via AP Images).

In Japan, the long dominant Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP, lost its parliamentary majority for the first time in 15 years yesterday. The results come just a month after new PM Ishiba Shigeru won the LDP’s leadership election and quickly called snap elections in a gamble meant to strengthen his mandate. (Washington Post)

Our Take: The election outcome puts Japan in a somewhat unprecedented position. The last time the LDP lost its parliamentary majority was in 2009, but that was an outright loss that put the party in opposition. This time, the LDP won the vote but, even with its junior coalition party, fell short of a majority, introducing uncertainty into Japan’s famously stable political environment.

For Ishiba, the results mark a clear sign that his gamble in calling elections a year before they were due backfired. He took over as leader of the LDP in large part because the party has suffered from low approval ratings since being rocked by a financial scandal late last year. As a maverick with a reputation for criticizing some of the LDP’s policies as well as its leadership over the years, Ishiba was meant to reinvigorate support for the party. But after Ishiba backtracked on some of his more iconoclastic positions, instead of cleaning up the LDP’s image, he appears to have been tarnished by it.

Ishiba has vowed to stay on as leader, giving him and the LDP 30 days to negotiate a governing arrangement. The results of those talks could have major implications for Japan’s foreign policy. The LDP has in recent years pursued a more muscular defense policy, breaking from the country’s post-World War II pacifism to turn Japan into a regional security power. Working with smaller parties could force the LDP to limit or walk back some of those reforms, even as political instability could weaken Tokyo’s ability to act with resolve, at a time when the U.S. is relying on it to counter China in the region.

For more: Read all our coverage of Japan here.

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In Georgia, electoral officials said that the ruling Georgia Dream won yesterday’s ballot, but the country’s opposition condemned the conduct of the election and vowed to boycott the new parliament. A European election observer mission also cited a number of issues, including violence against opposition members, voter intimidation and smear campaigns targeting the observers themselves. (New York Times)

Our Take: In a country that is deeply polarized and already facing a critical juncture in its foreign policy, this election not only creates uncertainty for Georgia’s political future, but raises the likelihood of a full-blown crisis.

The main fault line in Georgia is over its pursuit of EU accession. The population overwhelmingly favors joining the bloc and moving closer to the West more generally. Georgia Dream says it does, too. But the party, which has governed since 2012, has taken a number of steps in recent years that have undercut Georgia’s EU accession hopes, including pursuing closer ties with Moscow and passing a highly contentious “foreign agents” law.

There are diverging opinions about whether Georgia Dream actually wants to fully turn its back on the EU and align with Russia or if it simply wants to pursue a multi-alignment foreign policy while maintaining its own power domestically. But regardless, the party’s increasingly illiberal actions, including the foreign agents law and the credible allegations of election fraud, have undoubtedly undermined Georgia’s candidacy for EU membership. The situation also raises the stakes for Brussels, which still wants to attract Georgia toward the West but can’t overlook the democratic backsliding there.

On Oct. 8, 2023, as Israel was reeling from the deadly Hamas attacks of the previous day, Hezbollah launched mortar rounds against Israeli outposts alongside Lebanon’s southeastern border. A Hezbollah statement declared that the attack was a gesture of support for the group’s Palestinian ally Hamas. It was the opening salvo in what was to become a sustained effort to try and alleviate the pressure on Hamas as Israel prosecuted its war in Gaza.

A year later, however, Hezbollah has become embroiled in a debilitating war that has seen Israel decapitate its top political and military leadership, while leaving more than 2,000 Lebanese dead and many villages along the border so heavily damaged they have become uninhabitable.

Regardless of how the current war ends, Hezbollah’s fateful decision to open what it called a “support front” for Hamas in October 2023 will go down as the greatest strategic blunder the organization has made in its 42 years of existence.

Nicholas Blanford reports from Beirut:

A Battered Hezbollah Is Fighting a War It Never Wanted By Nicholas Blanford A year ago, Hezbollah opened a “support front” against Israel. Now, it’s fighting an escalating war without a face-saving off-ramp.

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The entrance of four new member states at last week’s BRICS Summit shifted the balance of power within the group away from electoral democracies and increased the perception that the bloc is a club of autocrats aligned with China and Russia. That perception was further amplified by the fact that this year’s meeting was held in Russia.

As a result, a summit that should have been an opportunity for BRICS to promote an alternative global agenda instead became a diplomatic victory for Russian President Vladimir Putin at the expense of the organization’s unity and vision.

But as columnist James Bosworth writes, while Russia may have won this round of BRICS diplomacy, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva scored a win of his own:

The Battle for the Future of BRICS Has Just Begun By James Bosworth Brazil’s president doesn’t want BRICS to simply be a diplomatic tool for China and Russia. Last week’s summit was a victory on that front.

Question of the Day: As a soldier in the 1970s and 1980s, Indonesia’s new president, Prabowo Subianto, allegedly participated in one of the bloodiest events of the country’s Timor war. What was this event called?

The Krakas massacre The Aileu village massacre The battle of Mount Matebian The Kopassus offensive

Find the answer in the latest WPR Weekly Quiz, then read Carolyn Nash’s in-depth article on Prabowo’s dark past.

Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said he takes full legal responsibility for the war on drugs that took place during his six-year term, which ended in 2022. During testimony before the country’s Senate earlier today, he said he offered “no apologies, no excuses” for the campaign, which included widespread extrajudicial killings.

Human rights groups say as many as 30,000 people were killed during the anti-narcotics crackdown, drawing international condemnation and an ongoing investigation by the International Criminal Court. As Ana P. Santos reported for WPR in 2018, the campaign wasn’t so much a war on drugs as a massacre.

Duterte’s Drug War Has Killed Thousands. Now the Victims’ Families Are Pushing Back By Ana P. Santos June 26, 2018 | Global outcry over Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s violent war on drugs has faded. That doesn’t mean the killings have stopped.

*****

Today, French President Emmanuel Macron began a three-day visit to Morocco, where he will meet with the country’s king and PM as well as address Morocco’s parliament. The visit comes just a few months after France quietly shifted its position on Western Sahara, recognizing Morocco’s sovereignty over the territory and abandoning its decades-long support for a U.N.-mandated referendum process to determine the territory’s final governance status.

France is not the first Western country to support Morocco’s annexation of the territory—the U.S. and Spain have both done so as well. But France has long been seen as the West’s diplomatic leader on the Western Sahara conflict. And as Sarah Leah Whitson wrote last month, the decision to disregard the Sahrawis’ right to self-determination erodes one of the most fundamental tenets of the rules-based international order they all profess to defend.

France’s Shift on Western Sahara Comes With a Huge Cost By Sarah Leah Whitson Sept. 6, 2024 | France says it is committed to the rules-based order. In the Morocco-Western Sahara conflict, it chose short-term political benefits instead.

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Last week, the Biden administration approved a massive lithium and boron mine in the state of Nevada despite environmentalists’ protests, calling the mine critical for the U.S. transition to clean energy and stating that it will not jeopardize the survival of a protected rare wildflower in the region. The push to expand the mining of critical minerals in the U.S. has set off alarm bells for environmentalists, because, as Lyuba Zarsky wrote last year, mining is always a dirty business.

*****

At least 40 soldiers were killed in an overnight attack on a military base in western Chad. The attackers have yet to be identified, but Chad has long battled the Nigeria-based jihadist group Boko Haram in the area. Internal security threats are just one of a number of challenges facing President Mahamat Idriss Deby, who took power in a coup in 2021 and consolidated his control in presidential elections earlier this year. Read more in this in-depth article by Nathaniel Powell from last year.

More from WPR

Paul Poast on Donald Trump’s tariff plans. James Courtright, Paul N.K. Aborampah-Mensah and Kars de Bruijne on Ghana’s democratic vulnerabilities. Carolyn Nash on the dark past of Indonesia’s new president. Yanliang Pan and Miles A. Pomper on the U.S. nuclear energy revival.

Read all of our latest coverage here.

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