Lebanon has been integral to both cradles of civilizations and hotbeds of conflicts. A Semitic people, the Canaanites, occupied the littoral of Lebanon, out which emerged the Phoenician civilization that was held together by a string of independent Phoenician city-states from the north to the south of the country.
The Lebanese Shi’a Islamist party, Hezbollah, emerged at the intersection of three momentous developments. First, beginning in the 1960s, Shi’a religious scholars began mobilizing their marginalized community with the objective of empowering it on the communal and state levels.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida drew swift condemnations from establishment Republicans. They are wrong; the governor said what many have been blind and oblivious to, and these hawkish Republican critics have a warped, ill-informed view.
It is warped because DeSantis rightly said that the fight today is not about Kyiv; it’s about Crimea and Donbas, historically disputed territories and, therefore, not of vital interest to the United States.
In a recent op-ed, TNI editor Jacob Heilbrunn fundamentally misrepresented the Ukraine conflict, ignoring Russian president Vladimir Putin’s determination to retain Crimea and willingness to deploy nuclear weapons.
The Ukraine crisis has more or less reinforced the nearly global view that the world is better served with multipolarity and multilateralism.
