Missing peace: will Israel imperil Iran deal?

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1:26The Economist.

1:32Rosie Blau:Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Bloor. And I'm Jason Palmer.

1:42Rosie Blau:Today on the show, a whopper El Nino and why Japan's popular princess will never take the throne.

1:56Rosie Blau:First up though

2:05Rosie Blau:It's been four days since peace talks between America and Iran began These came after the two countries signed a memorandum of understanding last week In theory, the deal ends the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, unfreezes Iranian assets, and begins a 60-day period of negotiations over the future of Iran's uranium stockpile. At Iran's insistence, it also includes a commitment to a ceasefire in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Shia militia. The question now is whether that conflict could undermine the prospects of long-term peace in the Middle East.

2:47Anshel Pfeffer:The village of Majdol Zun, seven kilometers north of Israel's border with Lebanon, is deserted.

2:55Rosie Blau:Anshil Fefer is our Israel correspondent.

2:59Anshel Pfeffer:It's a Shia village. It has been empty now for a while. And even though it was very dark there, you could see that many of the buildings have been destroyed by Israeli airstrikes. There's no electricity, but there was lighting in the Israeli command post and in the underground location where we were taken.

3:20Rosie Blau:And sure, you say you were taken to an underground location. Just explain what it is that you saw where you went.

3:26Anshel Pfeffer:Around about 30 metres under the centre of the village, there's this long and very wide tunnel, which from what we were shown there was used as a factory or an assembly line for building killer drones. I've been in quite a few tunnels over the last two and a half years under Lebanon and under the Gaza Strip. I think this was certainly the widest, most well-constructed tunnel I've seen in these wars so far. And from what we were shown there, just the piles and piles of dozens of sets of triangular wings, long cigar-shaped fuselages and cylindrical explosive charges, it was clear that this place was being used to assemble kits of drones, dozens and dozens of them, which were then to be launched from rails in other parts of the village towards Israel.

4:22Anshel Pfeffer:According to Israeli intelligence, back in 24, some of these drones hit Israeli bases, killing soldiers, and also hit Benjamin Netanyahu's seaside villa as well.

4:33Rosie Blau:Anshul, as you say, you've been in a number of tunnels over the years, you've been on a number of embeds over the years with Israel Defence Forces. What's it like to be embedded with them?

4:45Anshel Pfeffer:An embed with the idea of something that you're there in a couple of hours from your home or office and spend a few hours out in the field, and then you're back again. So it's something very short. You come, you meet the unit. There's the issue of the convoy, and most of the convoys into the battlefields of Gaza or South Lebanon are relatively short, about 20 or 30 minutes. And you're in that sort of a tense moment when you're driving on rather unsecured roads. And usually they want to show you something. There's obviously a PR or propaganda purpose for these visits. In this case, they wanted to show this drone factory that they had discovered a few days earlier to make the point that Hezbollah, with Iran's support, still has a very significant military presence in southern Lebanon, which is a point that Israel has been trying to make against the ceasefire that Donald Trump and the Iranians have been trying to impose on Israel in Lebanon.

5:41Rosie Blau:So Israel's keen to show that its campaign in Lebanon against Hezbollah is justified. How does that play into apparent plans for peace in the Middle East?

5:53Anshel Pfeffer:So the backdrop to everything that's been happening in Lebanon and to our embed there is the talks that were due to start 24 hours after our visit to Lebanon in Switzerland between Iran and America, reaching a longer lasting ceasefire. And Lebanon is in a way a sideshow to this. But for Israelis and for Lebanon, it's very much an immediate conflict. And Israel went into Lebanon back in March after Hezbollah began firing rockets in support of or in solidarity with Iran after the war began. And ever since, this war has been rumbling on. And when the Americans and the Iranians reached a deal a week ago, one of the clauses of the memorandum of understanding was also a ceasefire in Lebanon.

6:44Anshel Pfeffer:Now, Israel was America's partner in the war, but it wasn't part of the negotiation. So they had this ceasefire foisted on them. And the point that they're trying to make now is that there is a real conflict going on in Lebanon with Hezbollah still retaining these significant military capabilities to attack Israel. and Israel now has had its hands tied by its American ally.

7:06Rosie Blau:So is a ceasefire in Lebanon possible or feasible?

7:10Anshel Pfeffer:The ceasefire has held for the most part now for two or three days. There was one incident on Tuesday when two Lebanese were killed. It's obviously a very tense affair and it's hard to see it lasting for long and it wouldn't be existing now if it wasn't for a very intense American pressure on Israel.

7:27Rosie Blau:And why does Netanyahu not want a peace deal?

7:31Anshel Pfeffer:Well, I think in this case, it's not just Netanyahu. I think in this case, it's the entire Israeli defence establishment. They're seeing Hezbollah rebuilding its military capabilities in South Lebanon, close to the Israeli border. They're seeing the drones being used. And from their perspective, there isn't currently a diplomatic or a political arrangement that can deal with this Lebanese government, maybe willing to disarm Hezbollah at some point, but it doesn't have the capability to do so right now.

8:00Rosie Blau:Initially, Israel and America launched the conflict against Iran together, very much united. How has this difference of opinion over Lebanon affected that relationship?

8:11Anshel Pfeffer:Well, it has soured the relationship to a great degree. And we're seeing all these interviews that Donald Trump has been making and also his deputy J.D. Vance, where Israel has gone from being this trusted and close ally now is being portrayed as this unruly child which needs to be chased and put in its place. Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time. And he happens to be the head of state of the world's superpower. If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.

8:54Anshel Pfeffer:That's a very abrupt reversal of Israel's role in this. And most importantly, from an Israeli perspective, they've lost control of the event. Whatever it does is immediately reported by Iran. And Iran says this is something which is endangering the ceasefire. And we won't turn up to the next round of talks because of Israel breaking the ceasefire in Lebanon. And Israel doesn't really have a say in this. And this, from an Israel strategic perspective, is a huge blow.

9:24Rosie Blau:Anshil, I think every discussion we ever have ends this way. But where does this all leave prospects for peace in the wider region in the Middle East?

9:32Anshel Pfeffer:Well, there are talks ongoing between America and Iran. And in Washington, there are talks between the Israeli and Lebanese governments about finding a solution to this situation. But right now, from being there on the ground, I don't think that this is going to solve the problem of Hezbollah and Israel in Lebanon. And it very much looks like this could be the trigger for another Middle Eastern war when Israel and Hezbollah just can't stop fighting against each other there.

10:00Rosie Blau:Anshul, thank you very much.

10:02Anshel Pfeffer:Thanks for having me, Rosie.

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11:37Quick little dive into etymology. You know the climate phenomenon called El Nino? It goes back centuries. Fishermen in Peru noticed that every few years, the anchovies they were fishing for in the Pacific just disappeared. It happened around Christmas time, so the fishermen named the event after Jesus. In Spanish, El Nino, the Christ child. These days, it's become common global parlance. Meteorological shorthand for things are going to be even more out of whack than usual this season.

12:11El Nino is ultimately driven by a shift in the winds that blow above the equatorial Pacific. Katrine Braik is our environment editor. That shift in the winds causes a shift in the water underneath and the net effect is that you end up with this pool of warmer water in the surface of the Pacific over the equator. On June 11th this year, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is an arm of the American government, announced that that switch had been flipped. So we are now officially in an El Nino event. There are a lot of indications to suggest that this El Nino is going to be a whopper.

12:57So when you say it could be a whopper, I mean, how is this measured? El Nino is a vast band that is artificially defined in the middle of the Equatoria Pacific. If the average surface temperature goes above 0.5 higher than a historical average, then that signals an El Nino year. The degree to which it rises above 0.5 is then a measurement of how strong the event is going to be. And the stronger the event, the stronger the impacts. So an event that is two degrees warmer than the historical average is considered a strong event. We've seen this a few times. The current record holder was in 1982-1983 when that Nino index rose by two and a half degrees.

13:44There was also a really strong event in 2015-2016. Currently, modelers are anticipating that the event that's starting this year, that will run into next year, will be comparable to these two big events that I just mentioned. So the temperatures could rise to around 2.5 degrees above the historical average. It could even, according to some models, rise in the range of 3 degrees C. If it were in that range, then it would be unprecedented in 75 years of tracking these things. So you said this starts essentially as a migration of waters. What's the rest of the mechanism? What happens after that and elsewhere?

14:20So the size of the Pacific, the sheer mass of that water, basically means that these impacts don't just stay in the Pacific. You end up having a vast redistribution of heat and moisture that ripples out across the entire planet. Its effects are most felt in the tropics, but they can ripple out beyond. The most noticeable effect is that the world gets hotter. So during El Nino years, typically you see global average temperatures go up a notch and the stronger the El Nino event, the greater the global warming signature. So typically what you see in El Nino years are globally hot years. It's important to note that this is a natural climate cycle.

15:08So it's something that has always happened. At the minute, of course, and in recent decades, it's been layered on top of global warming. Right now, it's layered on top of accelerated global warming. So you've got a natural climate event that typically means the The world runs hotter than average during those years. And that's happening on top of global warming, which is also pushing temperatures up. So you're probably going to see some records broken in the next 12 months. So that's the global average picture, though. But what does it look like region by region, country by country? The impacts are most felt across the tropics.

15:46Southern Africa, the Sahel, Central America, Oceania. They do ripple out to Europe and North America, for instance, but those impacts tend to be milder and more variable. It's also worth noting that some regions feel some very severe impacts of El Nino and other regions might benefit. So you get different rainfall patterns. In some places that means drought. In other places it might mean extra rain, which can be good for crops, or a glut of rain, which can be floods and actually destructive to crops. You can look at patterns in history. So for instance, in 2018-2019, which was a relatively mild El Nino event, helped to fuel some of the worst fires in Australia's history.

16:29In 2015-2016, which was a very strong event, you saw an estimated 60 million people worldwide who were short of food and needed food assistance. There were huge outbreaks of Zika in South America. You get these disease outbreaks because different weather patterns and different rain patterns change the distribution of disease vectors, mosquitoes, other insects, etc. The economic costs and benefits of El Nino years are kind of in the balance. You get these benefits from some crops, for instance, and some commodities might get a boost and others not. And so we've seen in recent decades some studies suggesting that on balance there is no impact to global GDP in an El Nino year.