But first, here's my take.

For around 15 years, many American leaders, including all three precedents in that period,

have believed that the country was too deeply entangled in trying to reorder the societies of the Middle East.

They felt the more pressing challenges were rebuilding America's industrial base at home and confronting the rise of

China. Yet, here America is, once again, fighting a war to reorder a society in the greater

Middle East. And like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, this seems unlikely to turn out quite

as its proponents hoped. Lisa, you heard in the earlier segment we're talking about how Israel says,

we're three weeks in, but we have three weeks to go.

What that means is not only will they totally destroy Iran's military capacity,

and they're destroying the factories where weapons are produced.

They're also destroying Hezbollah, root and branch. What is the Middle East going to look like,

and how are the Arabs going to view Israel, countries like Saudi Arabia, at this moment?

Well, look, I think one of the things that the region had been characterized was a sort of

balancing between Iran and Israel, from the point of view of the Arab countries.

In the absence of Iran, Iran decimated in the way the Israelis say that they're going to be able to do,

then you have an Israeli hegemony in the region,

which isn't, I think, exactly what people calculated. Even the Gulf countries, even the

Abraham Accords members didn't particularly see the region as having only one hegemonic power

or aspiring hegemonic power.

So I think it's going to be very complicated because when you have Israeli officials saying

they're going to do in southern Lebanon what they did in Gaza, when the guns stop, if there's

that kind of devastation also in Lebanon, which is, in a sense, not a combatant, I think there's going to be a very,

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