Gregg Carlstrom

speaker

496 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Gregg Carlstrom’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Hard cedar: Lebanon seeks Trump’s help · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

If you go back to late 2019 when the economic crisis started and there were mass anti-government protests, Saad Hariri, who was the prime minister at the time, resigned but stayed on in a caretaker capacity. matched

And then he was followed by two additional caretaker prime ministers. matched

So there was no empowered PM, no empowered cabinet that could take decisions. matched

And then you had a stretch of more matched

More than two years where the presidential palace was vacant, which is not uncommon in Lebanon. matched

The president is selected by parliament, and often MPs can't agree on a president, and so you end up with a vacancy. matched

But this was one of the longest in Lebanon's history. matched

The vacuum finally ended at the beginning of last year under very strong international pressure. matched

Parliament chose Joseph. matched

If Aon, the former army chief as president, and then shortly afterwards, Noaf Salem, a former head of the International Court of Justice, was named as the country's new prime minister. matched

They look like an odd pairing. matched

Aun is this former soldier who spent his whole life in the army. matched

Salem is bookish. matched

He's an academic and a diplomat. matched

He's been outside of Lebanon for most of his life. matched

He was also the country's ambassador to the UN at one point. matched

So they're both political outsiders in a country where politics has long been dominated by the same set of ex-warlords who ran militias during the Civil War. matched

They both promised to come in and tackle some of the country's longstanding problems, but they came in in a very difficult situation. matched

There are two big challenges right now. matched

The first one is the issue of Hezbollah's weapons and the war that it has dragged Lebanon into with Israel. matched

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