Moment of truce: a ceasefire in the Middle East

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The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Bloor. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Europe had high hopes that that Northvolt was going to make car batteries for electric vehicles that would rival those of China. Now it's hit something of a bump in the road and the French are known for having firm views on beauty standards. But our correspondent says that they are finally learning that women at 60 can still be sexy. First up though, This morning, two months after Israel launched a ground invasion in Lebanon, a ceasefire began.

I just spoke with the prime minister of Israel and Lebanon. I'm pleased to announce that their governments have accepted the United States proposal to end the devastating conflict between Israel and.

Hezbollah brokered by America and France. It came into effect at 4am this.

Is designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities. What is left of Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations will not be allowed, I emphasize, will not be allowed to threaten the security of Israel again.

It's been a grim year.

Over the next 60 days, Israel will gradually withdraw its remaining forces and civilians, civilians on both sides will soon be able to safely return to their communities.

Now, finally, a pause in fighting.

For some, this is a rare bit of good news for the Middle East.

Greg Karlstrom is our Middle East CORRESPONDENT.

It has seemed for more than a year now that we were in the middle of a war that just kept expanding. But for the first time since October of last year, that regional war has shrunk.

Greg, I keep saying that I hope we're going to speak on a happier occasion. And this appears to be one. Tell me what has actually been agreed. What are the details of the deal?

The agreement calls for a 60 day halt in the fighting. And during that time, first Hezbollah is meant to move its fighters north of the Litany river. That's about 30 kilometers north of the border with Israel. As they do that, Israel will gradually withdraw its own troops, southern Lebanon, back across the border into Israel. And then the Lebanese army is meant to deploy around 5,000 soldiers to the region. And it is meant to ensure that no one else will have weapons south of the Lutani except for the Lebanese army and UN Peacekeepers. And then all of this is meant to be monitored by a panel of five countries led by the United States. They will review any alleged violations of this agreement. And there is a separate side agreement between Israel and America which gives the Israelis the right to strike at what are described as immediate threats emanating from Lebanon.

Even yesterday, Israel was striking Lebanon and it seemed implausible that a ceasefire was about to take effect. Why has Israel agreed to this now?

I think some of it has to do with the strains on the Israeli army after a year of fighting, first in Gaza and then in Lebanon. You've had many, many reservists who have been called up for long tours of D. There's some official data that suggests that around 54% of the reservists who've been mobilized since October 7th have done more than 100 days of service. About 30% of them have done more than 150 days of service. So it's put a burden on the reserve force and it's put a burden on the economy, which has been starved of workers as so many people are called up and put in uniform. To continue the war in Lebanon would mean expanding it, pressing even further into south Lebanon, sending more ground troops there. And so you've had some Israeli generals who have been arguing for weeks now that they need to end the war here rather than putting that heavier burden on the force. And we heard Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, allude to those pressures in a speech on Tuesday night announcing the ceasefire. He said the threat of Iran was one factor in agreeing to it, but he also said the army needed a breather.

And how has Hezbollah reacted to this deal.

We haven't heard any public statement yet about the deal from Hezbollah, but they are in a position where continuing the war wouldn't really have served their interests. In the past year, their leadership has been almost entirely wiped out, including Hassan Nasrallah, of course, the charismatic leader of Hezbollah three decades. He was assassinated in Israeli airstrike in September. The group has lost much of its advanced missile arsenal. Its military infrastructure in South Lebanon has been badly damaged. Thousands of its fighters have been killed. It has suffered blow after blow for the past year. And those losses are only going to mount if the war drags on. So I think both for Hezbollah and for its Iranian sponsors, there was an incentive to agree to stop the war now. And that is something that has the support most people in Lebanon who didn't want this war to begin in the first place and are desperate for it to end.

And a deal is one thing. Will this ceasefire last?

There are concerns about this deal on both sides. The fear in Israel is that what's going to happen will be a repeat of 2006. Of course, that's when Israel fought its previous war against Hezbollah, which ended with UN Resolution 1701, which called for Hezbollah to disarm. That resolution was ignored. And the Lebanese army supposed to patrol the region south of the Lutani river, was too weak to enforce that resolution. And so the concern for Israeli politicians and for ordinary people in Israel is that this agreement will prove to be equally hollow. The Lebanese army is still quite weak. It's also broke at the moment because Lebanon is five years into a grinding economic crisis. So the idea that it is going to recruit new soldiers, equip them, deploy them to the south, and then confront Hezbollah if needed, and take away its weapons is something that many people are skeptical about, including the Israeli government. This five country monitoring panel set up in the agreement is meant to review alleged violations of the deal. And the Israeli government has warned that if the Lebanese army won't act against those violations, then Israel says it will.

And can Lebanon at least start to.

Rebuild now that is going to be a very long and very difficult process. The World Bank a couple of weeks ago estimated that the war had caused 8.5 billion in physical damage and economic losses. That's a sum equal to more than one third of Lebanon's gdp. And there are some estimates from Lebanese economists that put the damage even higher than that. Close to a million people have been displaced. Around 100,000 homes have been damaged or destroyed during the fighting. You've had entire villages in South Lebanon that have been raised. Despite that, there were remarkable scenes on Wednesday morning after the ceasefire took effect. Lines and lines of car driving south on the coastal highway in Lebanon. Thousands of people going back to the south to their cities and villages.

And what do you think all of this means for Gaza? Is there now a chance of a ceasefire there?

I don't think there is a chance of that. The Biden administration does. President Biden on Tuesday night when he announced the ceasefire in Lebanon, he said his administration would also make another push for a deal in Gaza. And he said in his opinion, there was even, even a prospect of a broader regional deal that would see Israel and Saudi Arabia normalize ties, something his administration has been working on for years. I think that misreads the incentives around the region for Netanyahu. In Israel, he had some political cover to end the war in Lebanon. His right wing coalition partners were not going to blow up the coalition over this ceasefire. Donald Trump has been eager to see the war in Lebanon end. He promised Lebanese Americans in October that he would bring peace to their homeland. He was elected. Those incentives look very different in Gaza. Netanyahu's coalition would probably fall apart if he agreed to a ceasefire there. His far right coalition partners are still dreaming about rebuilding the Israeli settlements in Gaza that were evacuated in 2005. And I don't think there will be much pressure from Donald Trump to end that war. So I don't think a ceasefire in Lebanon portends an agreement in Gaza. I certainly don't think it will pave the way for some kind of bigger grand bargain across the region. I think, in fact, Netanyahu, by ending one war in Lebanon and taking some of the pressure off of the Israeli army, he may have made it easier to continue the other war in Gaza.

Greg, thank you for talking to me.

Thank you.

Northvolt was once the great hope of Europe's electric vehicle sector. The Swedish battery maker was the darling of Wall street titans and national governments. Earlier this year, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz hailed the opening of a Northvolt factory as a sign of his country's continued industrial supremacy. But despite all the talk about green tech and the role that electric vehicles are expected to play in meeting climate goals, Northvolt's losses just kept adding up.

Northvolt was supposed to be Europe's industrial champion for batteries.

Anjani Trivedi is a global business correspondent.

But last week, Northvolt filed for bankruptcy protection in America.

So it's a pretty dramatic change. Anjani, what were the signs that things were going Wrong.

Oswald had essentially expanded too fast all over the world. It was planning to set up factories in Canada, in Germany. And carmakers believed in its technology, like Volkswagen, Volvo and BMW. But as it tried to expand very quickly, as capital flowed in, it got distracted. Soon carmakers orders weren't being fulfilled and they started pulling out. BMW canceled an order and slowly that started leading to the company's unwind. The company had undertaken a big strategic overview earlier this year and as part of that it was looking to rein in some of its expenditure. And it had cut back a big part of its workforce. It had put on hold some of its factories, trees. That wasn't enough.

We keep hearing that electric vehicles are the future.

So how did this happen?

Northvolt has been trying to innovate on many levels. It also chosen to use a difficult type of battery technology and that is what it was hoping to scale. That is again very expensive, very hard to do. The Chinese have been able to scale up technologies, but that has come over two decades and at a massive cost and has created champions in China. But in a hugely competitive environment, Europe or even the US does not have that ecosystem of suppliers, parts and raw material supplies. That meant that Northvolt was trying to do all of that on its own, from scratch and create a vertically integrated battery making giant in a very short period of time.

And you mentioned China there is it just that no one is able to compete with China now when it comes to electric vehicle batteries.

China has mastered the art of manufacturing these batteries at scale. Now, the actual technology or the battery chemistry hasn't evolved hugely. That means there is room for the west or for other countries to leaf frog. However, if they can't reach the manufacturing and if they can't get over the technical challenges, there will likely be problems and they won't be able to catch up. And across the world there is a huge battle for the minerals needed to make batteries. China not only has started taking over mines across the world, but it also more importantly actually has a tight grasp on the refining of the minerals like lithium and graphite that are needed for batteries. That has made it very challenging for companies and countries across the world to actually have access to and make their own supply chains for batteries.

So what does Northvolt's collapse mean for the future of electric vehicles in Europe?

Northvolt accounted for just under 10% of total production capacity of batteries in Europe. So its collapse will have a significant impact on the market. The thing was, there was a few players, but Northvolt was the one company that hogged all of investors attention and their capital. With Northvolt gone, the competitive landscape is in theory open, but there will be a chilling effect on investors and policymakers and whether they are willing to fund and support this industry in the same way, there will be a shortfall in terms of supply, especially because Europe has set very stringent targets about banning internal combustion engine vehicles and has put in place various green goals. That makes this even more difficult. If it cannot meet the demand, whether for electric vehicles, for energy storage systems that will power renewable energy, then it will have to largely depend on foreign companies. As of today, LG Energy Solutions has the biggest battery production capacity in Europe, and that's a South Korean company. Now part of the dynamic here is that electric vehicle sales in Europe and in America are slowing, which means the market for these batteries is slowing. Some of that will get offset by renewable energy and the large grid scale batteries. However, ultimately if they can't reach those goals, and especially with industrial policy doing what it's doing, keeping players out, it will then find itself in a tight spot. If it can't get the supply, or if that supply is expensive or it's protected, then Europe will struggle to meet all of its requirements, not just for its green ambitions, but also for reducing emissions.

Anjani, thank you so much for talking to me.

Thank you for having me.

One of the most surprising features of the Netflix hit show Emily in Paris is that the character who has most captured the French imagination is not Emily, but Sylvie, played by the 61 year old French actress Philippine Leroy Beaulieu.

Sophie Pedder is our Paris bureau chief.

Sylvie is a core stick marketing executive. She's Emily's boss. She has a fabulous wardrobe and she has a knack for the one line put down that's not black, that's off black. And if you keep smiling like that, people will think you're stupid. If you're their new arbiter of taste, we want nothing to do with them. Companies hire savoir to raise their standards, not lower them. The actress herself is also having quite a moment. In September, she appeared at the Saint Laurent fashion show in which what's known as the naked dress, these are folds of transparent organza or tulle or chiffon draped over bare breasts. In the version she wore, she bared it all through a translucent midnight blue gown. It showed, said the French critics, that even in France you can be sexy at 60. Across the country, women are casting off unforgiving codes about femininity and aging. Two journalists, both approaching 60, have recently published a book which is an ode to single women in their 50s. You can have more wrinkles, they say, but you can still be attractive. And another book argues that women in their 60s are freed from the weight of the gaze of others. It makes the age liberating. French women have long faced a tension between their countries, post war feminist theorists and the objectification that its film and fashion industries serve up. The messaging has been both defy the patriarchy and conform to it. In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir published her groundbreaking work the Second Sex, in which she challenged the way women are defined only in relationship to men. At the same time, France launched the bikini and Brigitte Bordeaux to the world. It's a complicated, contradictory sort of environment for French women to have grown up in. But if wrinkles and white hair used to wreck a public career, that is starting to change. Think of Elizabeth Bourne, the 63 year old former prime minister, or even Christine Lagarde, the 68 year old head of the European Central Bank. Both of these women embody silver power, and a recent poll showed that a quarter of young French women had undergone some form of aesthetic nip or jab. But for older women, the figure was just 13%. Perhaps the Netflix show, which the French pretend to hate, has tapped into more than just cliches about Paris. Leroy Beaulieu plays Sylvie with swagger, but the actress privately lacked confidence. She thought that casting agents wouldn't hire her because she looked too old.

So I went and read and then I didn't hear any nothing for like a month and a half and I thought, okay. They went for a younger actress.

When her husband was first elected president, France's first lady, Brigitte Macron, became something of an icon for older women because she wore a stylish wardrobe well into her 60s. And today Leroy Beaulieu is furthering that point. In France, you can get older but still wear the best outfit and get the best lines.

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