@ISIDEWITHQuestionsForeign policy8yrs ago

Should intelligence agencies be merged to create a central EU agency?

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 @ISIDEWITH submitted…2mos2MO

Israeli prime minister approves Lebanon ceasefire deal

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved the emerging ceasefire deal with Hezbollah “in principle” during a security consultation with Israeli officials Sunday night, a source familiar with the matter said.Israel still has reservations over some details of the agreement, which were expected to be transmitted to the Lebanese government on Monday, the source said.Those and other details are still being negotiated and multiple sources stressed that the agreement will not be final until all issues are resolved.A ceasefire agreement will also need to be approved by the Israeli cabinet, which has not yet occurred.Sources familiar with the negotiations said talks appear to be moving positively toward an agreement, but acknowledged that as Israel and Hezbollah continue to trade fire, one misstep could upend the talks.United States envoy Amos Hochstein said in Beirut last week that a ceasefire deal between Israel and Lebanon was “within our grasp,” but that it was ultimately “the decision of the parties.”He met Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati and parliament speaker Nabih Berri, the interlocutor with Hezbollah in the talks and said there had been “constructive” and “very good discussions to narrow the gaps.”“We have a real opportunity to bring conflict to an end,” he added last week. “The window is now.” He departed Lebanon for Israel on Wednesday to try to bring the negotiations “to a close.”The US-backed proposal aims to achieve a 60-day cessation of hostilities that some hope could form the basis of a lasting ceasefire.On Sunday, CNN analyst and Axios reporter Barak Ravid cited a source as saying Hochstein had told the Israeli ambassador to Washington on Saturday that if Israel did not respond positively in the coming days to the ceasefire proposal, he would withdraw from the mediation efforts.Hochstein’s trip to the region followed Beirut responding “positively” to a US-backed proposal to stop the war, Mikati said last week, adding that large parts of the draft agreement were resolved.

▲  268 replies

 @ISIDEWITH submitted…2mos2MO

Netanyahu's Pre-Inauguration Gift to Trump: A Lebanon Cease-Fire Deal"

A close aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Donald Trump and Jared Kushner this week that Israel is rushing to advance a cease-fire deal in Lebanon, according to three current and former Israeli officials briefed on the meeting, with the aim of delivering an early foreign policy win to the president-elect.Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s minister of strategic affairs, made Mar-a-Lago the first stop on his U.S. tour Sunday before traveling to the White House to update Biden administration officials on the state of Lebanon talks, a sign of how swiftly America’s political center of gravity has shifted after Trump’s electoral victory.“There is an understanding that Israel would gift something to Trump … that in January there will be an understanding about Lebanon,” an Israeli official said. Like others in this article, the official spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations.Trump has said he wants to bring an end to the wars in the Middle East, but he also told Netanyahu in a call last month to “do what you have to do” against Hezbollah and Hamas. It is unclear what impact, if any, the Lebanon proposal discussed at Mar-a-Lago would have on stalled cease-fire and hostage-release talks in Gaza.“Netanyahu has no loyalty to Biden and will be focused entirely on currying favor with Trump,” said Frank Lowenstein, a former special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations under President Barack Obama who served during the transition to the first Trump administration. If 2016 is any indication, he added, “Trump won’t hesitate to act like he’s already president when he sees an opportunity.”

▲  1510 replies

 @ISIDEWITH submitted…3mos3MO

Harris’s Fatal Shift: Abandoning the Anti-Trump Playbook for CEO Approval

Earlier this fall, one of Joe Biden’s closest aides felt compelled to tell the president a hard truth about Kamala Harris’s run for the presidency: “You have more to lose than she does.” And now he’s lost it. Joe Biden cannot escape the fact that his four years in office paved the way for the return of Donald Trump. This is his legacy. Everything else is an asterisk.In the hours after Harris’s defeat, I called and texted members of Biden’s inner circle to hear their postmortems of the campaign. They sounded as deflated as the rest of the Democratic elite. They also had a worry of their own: Members of Biden’s clan continue to stoke the delusion that its paterfamilias would have won the election, and some of his advisers feared that he might publicly voice that deeply misguided view.Although the Biden advisers I spoke with were reluctant to say anything negative about Harris as a candidate, they did level critiques of her campaign, based on the months they’d spent strategizing in anticipation of the election. Embedded in their autopsies was their own unstated faith that they could have done better.One critique holds that Harris lost because she abandoned her most potent attack. Harris began the campaign portraying Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business. During the Democratic National Convention, speaker after speaker inveighed against Trump’s oligarchical allegiances. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York bellowed, “We have to help her win, because we know that Donald Trump would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his own pockets and greasing the palms of his Wall Street friends.”While Harris was stuck defending the Biden economy, and hobbled by lingering anger over inflation, attacking Big Business allowed her to go on the offense. Then, quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer. (West did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) To win the support of CEOs, Harris jettisoned a strong argument that deflected attention from one of her weakest issues. Instead, the campaign elevated Mark Cuban as one of its chief surrogates, the very sort of rich guy she had recently attacked.

▲  2518 replies

 @ISIDEWITH submitted…3 days3D

TikTok Goes Dark for 170 Million U.S. Users

TikTok went dark for American users in an unprecedented display of the U.S.-China divide over technology and national security.The app started halting service Saturday night for 170 million users in its most important market shortly before a law took effect requiring it to shed its Chinese ownership or close in the U.S. It marked the first time the U.S. government has compelled the closure of such a widely used app, and disrupted millions of American businesses and social-media entrepreneurs who use TikTok to connect with customers and fans.TikTok users started seeing a message late Saturday saying, “Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now.”“A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use TikTok for now. We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!” There is an option under the message to get more information, and clicking brings users to a link to download their data. The app wasn’t available to download from Apple or Google’s app stores.TikTok’s disappearance could be brief, however. President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday said he would likely give TikTok a 90-day extension from the potential ban after he takes office Monday. On Sunday morning, Trump posted on social media in all capital letters, “SAVE TIKTOK!”TikTok Chief Executive Shou Chew is scheduled to attend Trump’s inauguration, along with U.S. tech luminaries including Mark Zuckerberg, whose Meta Platforms owns TikTok rival Instagram.Trump’s comments were the latest in a flurry of last-minute statements that capped a yearslong saga complicated by U.S. presidential politics, conflicting geopolitical interests and the ambiguities surrounding enforcement of the law, which outlines hefty penalties for noncompliance. Before positioning himself as TikTok’s potential savior, Trump tried to ban TikTok in his first term. President Biden, who signed the bipartisan law last April, ended his term with aides saying he wouldn’t enforce it on his final day in office.TikTok and parent ByteDance have portrayed themselves as independent of China, but their ability to do any divestiture deal to satisfy the U.S. law has been constrained by Beijing. In recent days, Chinese officials have internally discussed options including allowing a trusted non-Chinese party such as Elon Musk to invest in or take control of TikTok’s U.S. operations.

▲  1214 replies