Gregg Carlstrom
speaker
466 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 14 Sep
Gregg Carlstrom’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Someone close to the president explained their thinking to me, which is we want to present the Shia community, Hezbollah's constituents, with two images.
We want to show them, on the one hand, Hezbollah has dragged this country into a war on Iran's behalf.
It has killed thousands of your sons.
It has started a war that led to your villages being destroyed.
On the other hand, we have a Lebanese state that is going to come in and secure the south and rebuild.
Really, the mechanism here is to try and drain Hezbollah's support by stepping in and providing the services that the government has long failed to provide in southern Lebanon.
But again, this is where the two problems come together, because to rebuild the south, you need resources.
And this government, seven years into an economic crisis, doesn't have those resources.
So they also need to tackle the economic side of it.
They need to make a deal with the IMF.
They've been talking about that for years.
It hasn't happened because they haven't passed the reforms that the IMF insists on as a precondition.
Noef Salem's government has passed some of those reforms, but they haven't figured out how to apportion the $80 billion losses in the banking sector between depositors and shareholders and the state.
And they haven't done it in part because the banks still have a lot of political power and their shareholders don't want to see their equity wiped out.
So they need to move faster on that.
They need to move faster on administrative reforms from strengthening the judiciary to trying to trim the enormous civil service.
There's a lot that they need to be doing on the economic front so that donors and investors will finally step in, give money to Lebanon, and then allow the government to start this process of reconstruction.
Almost made it through an interview without talking about Trump at length, but we can never do that these days.
I think President Aoun wants three big things from Trump.
One is support for the Lebanese army.
Showing 261–280 of 466 · page 14 of 24
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