Today's Essential

The French government announced its first measures on Monday in response to the weekend riots in several cities across the country, starting with “partial” and “localized” curfews, even as the possibility of declaring a state of emergency was raised. President Emmanuel Macron, who is touring the Gulf states, reportedly preferred not to declare a state of emergency to avoid spooking the markets, especially since Paris had very recently announced an increase in its debt and public deficit. Political or security instability would certainly affect interest rates. The “chaos” is “confined to very specific urban areas,” Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said. He said he had “asked prefects to impose a number of curfews tonight,” Monday, specifying that they would be “localized” and “partial.”

The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to South African jurist Navi Pillay comes at a time when international law is increasingly being called into question, weakened by the growing number of conflicts and attacks on the institutions tasked with upholding it. For several months, reports and statements from international organizations have warned in succession of the threats facing human rights and the foundations of the global legal order. Israel’s strong reaction to the award, along with the latest U.S. offensive against the International Criminal Court, illustrates the situation. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on Friday to jurist Navi Pillay, an 85-year-old South African who has devoted much of her life to defending international law. Ms. Pillay notably chaired the independent UN commission of inquiry that last year accused Israel of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip.

On Thursday, Lebanon bluntly asked Iran to stop meddling in its internal affairs through Hezbollah and to keep their bilateral relations on a state-to-state footing. That was the essence of the message Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam conveyed to Iranian President Massoud Pezeshkian during their meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, attended by Lebanese and Iranian foreign ministers Joe Raggi and Abbas Araghchi. Against the backdrop of the acute crisis that has persisted for more than six months between Beirut and Tehran, the Lebanese-Iranian meeting in New York would normally be considered highly significant. But divisions within Iran’s leadership—where decision-making power, as is well known, lies not with the president and his foreign minister but with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—and differing Iranian views on how to handle regional issues, diminish the scope of the exchange.

Lebanon did not miss this week’s major UN General Assembly gathering at United Nations headquarters in New York. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has held a series of meetings on the sidelines of the event over the past two days, beginning with UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Monday evening. The messages he delivered were of vital importance, both with regard to the renewal of the mandate of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and the state’s monopoly on arms. On the Lebanese political front, the presence of Foreign Minister Joe Raggi alongside Salam did not go unnoticed, at a time when his near exclusion from the diplomatic trips undertaken by the president and the prime minister had raised questions among observers and caused tensions with the party that had backed his candidacy for the post, the Lebanese Forces.

Donald Trump faces a dilemma: responding to the demands of Saudi Arabia, a major Washington ally, while avoiding opening a new front as the war against Iran continues to spread across the region. The U.S. president reportedly backed out at the last minute of launching American strikes against the Houthis, despite renewed urgent requests from Riyadh. According to the New York Times , Donald Trump has repeatedly reconsidered his Yemen strategy in recent days. The NYT says the U.S. administration had prepared an air operation for Sunday. Target lists had been approved and bombs were already loaded onto aircraft when the U.S. president reportedly decided to cancel, or at least postpone, the strikes.

While tensions between the United States and Iran have eased somewhat around the Strait of Hormuz, hostilities between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis dominated the week, with the equally strategic Bab el-Mandeb Strait emerging as another flashpoint. Saudi Arabia is now being hit by Houthi strikes almost daily, increasing pressure on the world’s largest crude oil exporter, while Washington, its longstanding ally, has made it clear that the U.S. military will not come directly to the kingdom’s aid. According to several corroborating sources, including the Reuters news agency and New York Times , U.S. diplomats met with Houthi representatives in Oman in early September to preserve the ceasefire agreed between Washington and the Yemeni movement and keep Bab el-Mandeb open to U.S. shipping.

Republicans in the United States are not the only ones suffering from the war in Iran, nor are people around the world or countries still facing the actions of Iranian proxies. Indeed, the conflict could cost Donald Trump’s party a significant number of Senate seats, even under the most favorable projections. The world, meanwhile, is feeling the effects of inflation fueled by rising energy prices. In Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq, the mullahs’ hydra has lost several of its heads, but it still retains its capacity to wreak havoc. Today, however, Saudi Arabia finds itself on the front line of the conflict launched by the United States and Israel last February. Yemen’s Houthi rebels continue to harass its borders, strike its critical infrastructure and, above all, hamper its oil exports—the lifeblood of its economic power.

Thursday was a distinctly Lebanese day in Paris, where Lebanese President Joseph Aoun called on participants in the preparatory meeting for the international conference in support of the army to “draw up a roadmap and a precise timetable” for the conference, an initiative launched by President Emmanuel Macron. Its date, however, has yet to be determined. The meeting, held at the Hôtel des Invalides, was part of the Aqaba Process launched in 2015 by Jordan’s King Abdullah II to strengthen security and military cooperation against terrorism. Abdullah II attended the meeting alongside representatives of the United States, including US Ambassador to Beirut Michel Issa and the head of the Lebanon Military Coordination Group, General Joseph Clearfield, as well as senior officials from Arab countries and the European Union.

Marked by shifting flashpoints of tension, the regional crisis continues to escalate without, however, crossing a point of no return. The standoff over the Strait of Hormuz now appears to have taken a back seat as the world focuses on tensions in the Red Sea, and more particularly on the renewed military conflict between Yemen’s Houthis and Saudi Arabia. Riyadh on Wednesday accused the Iran-backed group of attempting to strike Mecca with a drone, which the kingdom considers a “red line.” According to the Saudi-led military coalition, cited by AFP, the drone was destroyed south of the city by Saudi air defenses just before “entering the prohibited airspace over Mecca.”

Beyond the usual reports on the war in the Middle East and on the southern Lebanese front, Lebanon woke up to sad news on Monday morning. Dory Chamoun, a former MP and former president of the National Liberal Party, died in Beirut at the age of 95. The son of Lebanon’s iconic President Camille Chamoun, Dory Chamoun made his mark on the country’s history throughout the various phases of the Lebanese war, particularly in the aftermath of the assassination of his charismatic brother, Dany Chamoun, along with his family. Lebanon was then entering a period of intensified Syrian occupation that would last until 2005.