MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Vice President JD Vance is insisting the United States holds all the cards in its deal with Iran. Does it? And what about the other countries in the region affected by the near four-month war? In other words, who are the winners and who are the losers as this war with Iran seems to be heading into a new phase. That is something I discussed on NPR's national security podcast, Sources & Methods. Joining me were national security correspondent Greg Myre from Tel Aviv, international correspondent Aya Batrawy from Cairo and international correspondent Jane Arraf, who has spent much of this week reporting in Southern Lebanon.
You're in Lebanon, which has been dragged into this war. Israel, of course, has been fighting Hezbollah. That has complicated U.S. diplomacy with Iran. I know you have been on the move. Just give us a little taste of where you've been reporting from, what you're seeing, what you're hearing.
JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: Well, it's a lot of Southern Lebanon because that's where most of the fight is. That's where the border area is with Israel, and Israel is fighting Hezbollah - Iran-backed Hezbollah. So it's incredible devastation. When we go out there, a lot of times, what we're covering is the aftermath of Israeli strikes, so...
KELLY: How do you get there? You're just - you're in a car. You're on the road. You can drive.
ARRAF: We can drive. It has to be carefully plotted because a lot of the airstrikes actually do happen on the roads, and some of the roads around the places where fighting is can be dangerous, as well. But as you know, we take managed risks because that's where we have to be to actually report on what's going on.
So it's a very different picture from Beirut. I mean, here in Beirut, you can sit here and you can hear the drones, and it's really annoying. But we were in the city of Tyre, for instance, a few days ago, and we were in one neighborhood that was still under threat by Israel. And the drone was flying so low that the policemen we were with got really scared and said, we have to leave here. Because, you know, here it's annoying, there, it's deadly. And it's just kind of part of a feeling that you get that the South is increasingly disconnected from the rest of the country.
KELLY: So circling back to our central question of who are emerging as winners, losers in this war - Lebanon.
ARRAF: It's complicated. And I think that's shorthand for, it's got such a complicated history, right? Small country - it has a system set up where top posts are divvied up according to religion. And what this war has done, in some sense, is could've upset what was a precarious balance. It didn't always balance by any means. This country has been through a lot of wars - some of them through Israeli invasions, some of them through some civil war. But really, what this has exposed is just a huge disconnect between people who - and politicians who feel that Hezbollah is the only thing standing between them and being permanently occupied by Israel, and others who see Hezbollah as part of the problem. And all of this going on while there are talks in the U.S. So the U.S. has pressured Lebanon, and they're actually holding direct talks with Israel in Washington on security. But it's still very fragmented.
KELLY: So I have a big-picture question, which I'll throw to you, Greg, and Jane and Aya, feel free to jump in. All three of you have covered wars in the Middle East for a long time. Greg, are you - from where you are perched right now in Tel Aviv, are you seeing a fundamental realignment in the region as a result of this Iran war of 2026, or is it too soon to say?
GREG MYRE, BYLINE: I think it's in progress, Mary Louise. I mean, I really go back to the Hamas attack on October 7, '23, that just ignited this firestorm in the region, and we've been working our way up the escalation ladder, from Israel and Hamas fighting in Gaza to Israel and Hezbollah fighting in Lebanon to Israel and Iran fighting and now the U.S. joining in - a twelve-day war last year, a three-month war this year - and it just has gone up and up and up over the past three years, and it's rattled the region. It's shaken every country in the region. Now we're at a point where we're trying - seeing this effort to try to stop this and, in a sense, work your way down that escalation ladder, that the U.S. and Israel not going to attack Iran and vice versa under this agreement, trying to sort out the Israeli presence in Lebanon. Gaza is still there as a festering sore.
So the region has been thrown into upheaval. It's changing. It's going to be realigned. Every country has to rethink itself, whether it's, you know, Israel carrying out powerful military operations but not getting any political gain from it, or from Iran and its proxies being hit and weakened but still surviving. But is that still a viable project? Does Iran want to continue to support these proxies? Is that the way forward? The Gulf states having to re-evaluate, can the U.S. protect us? You know, are we a safe, stable place that people want to invest in and come take a vacation in? So everybody is going through this transition. We haven't come out on the other side yet.
KELLY: Although, you do keep flying in and landing just as a peace deal or some sort of ceasefire is announced so...
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KELLY: Maybe you will be some...
MYRE: Some bizarre - yes. Some...
KELLY: Yeah.
MYRE: ...Bizarre luck. Every time I come in here, there's a ceasefire, but it never seems to last.
KELLY: Yeah. Aya.
AYA BATRAWY, BYLINE: Well, off the back of what Greg was saying about Gaza being a festering sore, it is very much like an open wound. And you can't have an open wound and not expect it to affect everything around it and the entire body, and the body being all these other countries in the region. It's kind of like trying to say that you can have a fire raging in your backyard, but come, look at my front porch and look at how beautiful my front yard is, right? Dubai is 1,000 miles away from the Gaza Strip. But what we saw from the Hamas attack on October 7 and the war that Israel launched on Gaza is that that being unresolved, did lead us to where we are now with the war in Iran.
ARRAF: And I think across the region, Mary Louise, this has just injected such a blanket of uncertainty over governments, over people. I mean, for so long, the thought was, the U.S. will help keep us safe. The U.S. will help make us rich. And that is just not a feeling that most people have these days.
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KELLY: That was NPR's Jane Arraf in Beirut, Greg Myre in Tel Aviv and Aya Batrawy in Cairo. You can hear our full conversation on Sources & Methods. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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