The Middle East threat to Kamala Harris

Anybody who anticipated the detonation of thousands of Hizbollah pagers and walkie-talkies across Lebanon had better come forward now. Other than Mossad, which will never claim responsibility, I doubt anybody dreamt of such a forensically devastating operation. It took everyone by surprise, which was the point. Morale within Hizbollah’s vast network of officials and fighters could take years to recover. I say this to stress that we live in a highly unpredictable world.

Being both monomaniacally focused on the US presidential election, and aware of my limited insights into the Middle East, I have asked my friend Kim Ghattas to respond to today’s note. Kim, who is based in Beirut, has a great track record of looking round the Middle East’s many corners. This is what she wrote in the FT at the start of 2023:

There’s a danger that the US and the world will be caught unawares by events in the region. The words of the year will be escalation and disintegration.

And so it turned out. I will return to Kim in a moment. 

Here is my working assumption. Kamala Harris’s victory looks marginally likely. But the race is way too close for her comfort and I am tempting fate even by stating that marginal probability. Of the two obvious exogenous events that could affect Harris’s prospects for better or worse, one has already happened — and it is positive; the US Federal Reserve’s half a percentage point cut in interest rates on Wednesday came like manna from heaven to the Harris-Walz campaign. To the Maga world, it was tantamount to election interference. Though the Fed chair, Jay Powell, cannot technically be dismissed before his term ends in early 2026, expect Donald Trump to fire him summarily if the former president wins in November. 

The other obvious shock would come from the Middle East and it would be negative for Harris’s prospects. Should Israel and Hizbollah get into a full-blown war, the turmoil could rapidly change the US political weather. Oil prices would undoubtedly shoot up and feed straight into higher US pump prices. What the Fed did this week for consumer sentiment could be reversed in short order. It would also give Trump a perfect opportunity to argue that under Joe Biden and Harris the world has gone to hell. I thus paid unusual attention to Israel’s defence minister Yoav Gallant on Wednesday when he said that the Israel Defense Forces’ focus would now be moving to Israel’s northern front. He made that comment just hours after the Day Two of exploding devices in Lebanon. To my untutored eye, that sounds like Israel could be preparing a ground operation.

But as experts such as Kim often remind me, nothing is quite as it seems in the Middle East. Gallant and his boss Benjamin Netanyahu famously loathe each other. Indeed, Netanyahu this week had to deny plausible reports that he was planning to fire Gallant and replace him with a yes-man. Part of their antagonism stems from Gallant’s view that the war against Hamas in Gaza is basically over. That might well be true from an operational perspective. But Netanyahu has an incentive to keep it going for as long as possible. Gallant’s comments may thus have been aimed at a domestic audience. Or he could have been signalling to Hizbollah that Israel was primed for any retaliation it was planning. Or possibly, Israel really is planning a full-blown ground operation. From Harris’s point of view, the first two are fine (and not incompatible).

It is worth reminding Swampians just how effectively Harris has defanged Gaza as a potential drag on her ticket. As I wrote in late August from the Democratic convention, “Gaza is the word that Democrats dare not mention in Chicago”. Broadly speaking, Democrats have stuck to that omerta. Such was the relief that Biden had made way for Harris — even among some of the nugatory groups of anti-Zionist protesters in Chicago — that Harris has been reaping the benefit of the doubt. She craves quiet on the Middle Eastern front, especially in the next seven weeks.

Kim, I know the signals on the ground are ambiguous. So do feel free to finesse my questions. Does Hizbollah’s incapacitation on the communications front outweigh its urge to retaliate? How does the broader Lebanese public see the picture? What’s your hunch about Israel’s intentions?

Recommended reads

• My column this week looks at the (twisted) method in Trump and JD Vance’s seeming madness over the fake pet-eating story. It may not be doing him as much damage as most people I know like to think.  

• The most fateful foreign policy debate, if Harris wins, would be on China. As such, much of the foreign policy blob are airing their ideas of where to change course. Of these, the one I like the most is SAIS’s Jessica Chen Weiss, who lays out the “case against the China consensus” in Foreign Affairs.

• Finally, my eye was caught this week by the following article hitting the FT’s most-read list for the day — because it was very much off-piste from US election content. London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has proposed the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street, perhaps the British capital’s least tolerable stretch of shop front. I almost never wade into FT comments section nowadays as it is governed by Gresham’s Law. But I’m hoping the response was enthusiastic. Cities should do this way more often.  

Join FT, Nikkei Asia and Asia Society experts on October 10 for a free webinar discussing Modi’s third term. Put your questions about Modi’s first 100 days to our panel now. Register for free here.

Kim Ghattas responds

The pager attack was a massive and humiliating blow to Hizbollah — to be infiltrated in such a way with rigged devices exploding in the hands and on the hips of its operatives and supporters is a movie script most producers would have rejected as implausible. But I don’t think it has incapacitated the group. I suspect most of these pagers were in the hands of civilian cadres in urban areas. Hizbollah’s military operations in the south are likely unaffected, clashes on the border continued apace today. But the group’s morale took a big hit — and heads will roll, starting at the Hizbollah procurement department.

The intel and security breach runs deep: Israel keeps degrading Hizbollah’s capabilities, assassinating commanders, blowing up arms depots, trying to pressure the group into giving up the idea of a support front for Gaza which Hizbollah began with the first rocket it launched on October 8. So far, and again on Thursday, Hizbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah made clear his group wouldn’t stop until there was a ceasefire in Gaza.

Whatever the noises from Israel about launching a big war or an invasion, I still think they won’t. They know it’s unwinnable militarily and the damage to northern Israel and even deeper into Israel from thousands of Hizbollah missiles will be devastating. But also, they don’t really need to: they’re degrading Hizbollah by attrition rather effectively. I anticipate we will see border clashes intensify, more asymmetrical warfare, more assassinations, more covert ops. 

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