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The Monocle Daily
Israel strikes Beirut despite new ceasefire. Will it jeopardise a wider peace deal?
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You're listening to the Monocle Daily, first broadcast on 7 May 2026 on Monocle Radio.
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Is the ceasefire in Lebanon over and did it really ever start? US Secretary of State Marco Rubio practises the Latin and the Italian for look, I just work there and what to do when professional and or peer recognition is not sufficiently swiftly forthcoming. I'm Andrew Muller. The Monocle Daily starts.
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Foreign.
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Hello and welcome to the Monocle Daily. Coming to you from our studios here at Midori House in London. I'm Andrew Muller. My guests Julie Norman and Yossi Meckelberg will discuss the day's big stories and we'll meet the people who keep track of how many people there are. Stay tuned. All that and more coming up right here on the Monocle Daily. This is the Monocle Daily. I'm Andrew Muller and I'm joined today by Julie Norman, lecturer in politics and International Relations at ucl, and Yossi Meckelberg, senior Consulting Fellow at the Middle East North Africa program at Chatham House. Hello to you both. Hello, Yossi. First of all, on the subject of the Middle east, if not necessarily North Africa, you are off tonight. Is it opening night of the Israeli Film Festival?
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It is. It's called Seret, which means film in Hebrew.
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They worked long and hard.
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C
I'm sure it requires the committee, but it's a week of Israeli movies in different places in London and today is the opening night. Usually some big film stars from Israel coming to London, which is always a nice evening.
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B
What is the opening offering, do you know?
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I do. It's a movie called Bella and believe it or not, part of it is taking place in the West Bank. It's two friends that are traveling through the checkpoints to find very precious dove. Maybe it's symbolic about the piece because it's an Israeli and Palestinian and all the way they arrived at time to a dove beauty pageant in Jerusalem. So I see that you asked for a ticket.
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Weirdly, I can kind of see that working as a. As a conceit. I look forward to hearing more about it. Julie, by way of contrast, I think we can say you have been walking some of the length of an ancient monument.
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Yes, this last weekend I went and did trekking on Hadrian's Wall path up north, which, you know, obviously dates back to hadrian's time, like 2,000 years ago. And it's a wonderful path. It's coast to coast from Newcastle all the way to the coast. It's about 85 miles. And yeah, the middle part is just. It's just fantastic. It's like history and hiking and just fantastic views, scenery, and then just like ruins that you just walk up and, like, can, like, look at them and, like, learn something. It was really great.
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How much of it did you walk?
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I did about 55 miles.
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Okay, 55 miles in how many days?
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About two and a half.
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That's not bad.
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Yeah, I go pretty fast.
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That is considerable going. No, I would be keen to do that. I'm interested in particular in the views because I do think that the United Kingdom undersells itself somewhat as a natural spectacle. The parts of its landscape that are glorious are glorious.
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It is true, yes. Though I will say I think Hadrian is actually had rain because there was some rain. So it kind of.
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What rain in northern England, Southern Scotland.
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What I know.
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Extraordinary. We will begin in Lebanon where the ceasefire to which Israel grudgingly agreed on April 16 has at the very least been interrupted. An Israeli airstrike on an apartment block in the southern suburbs of Beirut yesterday has, according to Israel, killed Ahmed Ghalib Balut, commander of Hezbollah's Radwan Force, an elite commando unit. Further strikes on Lebanon have been reported since, as have further Hezbollah drone raids on Israeli troops in Lebanon. In other, ominous fears are growing of renewed Israeli operations in Gaza, where talks between Israel and Hamas have stalled. Dialogue, perhaps not encouraged by an Israeli airstrike last week killing the son of Hamas chief negotiator Khalil Al Hayer. Yossi, first of all, before we look at the wider picture, I mean, do Israel have a case when they say that someone like Ahmed Galleb Balut is a legitimate target?
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It depends how you look at the legitimate target. He was the commander of the Radouan Brigade, which planned very similar thing to what hamas did on October 7th.
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This was, as I understand it, the unit whose whole thing was planning infiltration operations inside Israel.
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C
It's the elite unit of the Hezbollah and the one that had the tunnels on the border between Israel and Lebanon. So is he a threat to Israel? Yes. The question is, of course, is the question of is this a ceasefire? Because there's something very confusing. The same in Gaza as in Lebanon. We still insist that there is a ceasefire. But, you know, in my, you know, my modest opinion, if there's ceasefire, no one shoots and kills anyone. And what you see, it's a very,
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very literal interpretation of the phrase.
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Yossi, you know me, I'm very literal generally. But it's. This is. This is the case and basically there is an ongoing war. The question is the agreement between not Lebanon and Israel, but the United States and Israel, that you can target Hezbollah in South Lebanon, up to the Litany river, taken to the east, but not in Beirut. And this was the exception of actually. Now, if it's legitimate, that's a question in international law, if at all assassinations are legitimate.
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Is there an argument here, Julie, that perhaps also what Israel are doing, as well as, as they would see it, eliminating a, you know, a pertinent threat to their country? They are testing how serious the United States is about this ceasefire. Is this Israel thinking, well, the United States is not going to yank our chain over this, therefore, let's see what else they. How far we can push this before anyone does.
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Yeah, I think there's a couple layers here. Obviously, again, this was not the first abrogation of the ceasefire, so to speak. There's been fire back and forth just in the south. So the ceasefire, as it were, was already being tested in a way that I think Israel could live with the name ceasefire, but still be able to take actions where they felt they needed to. But there's also the other ceasefire that is being negotiated between the US and Iran. And I think there was a sense, too, if that is looking towards it's going to possibly have some kind of progress this week. We don't know that for sure, obviously. I think there's also a sense before something like that goes into place, you try and get in the shots and the hits that you can. And I think we see Israel often does that before, and many actors do this before a bigger ceasefire goes into place. You try and get what you can get done before that ceasefire becomes official. And so that's obviously a separate one. But I could see Israel trying to take this shot now before Trump is really trying to wind down the broader Middle east operations.
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Yossi, in the background, in theory, talks are ongoing between Lebanese and Israeli officials. That's not nothing. That is the first actual contact between the governments of Israel and Lebanon since 1993. But are they going anywhere? Do they mean anything? And does the Lebanese government, such as it is, actually have anything to offer? Does it and. Or indeed any leverage?
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This is the biggest challenge. The Lebanese government, are they capable to assert their authority inside Lebanon? Because if they can't, at the end of the day, it's very different from the Palestinian issue. There is a border between Israel and Lebanon, and as long as whether the security is maintained and Israel is not occupying any part of Lebanon, there is no reason beyond ceasefire to envisage a peace between Israel. The problem Here is security and whether actually any Lebanese government can reign at the Hezbollah. Now the Iranians creating the link in the ceasefire negotiation with Hezbollah with what's happened in Lebanon, of course they cannot to do that, to basically abandon one of the other Pakshes. And as Julie says, as a result, Israel is in a rush to achieve as many targets. But we know at the end of the day, yes, Israel is capable to target most of the Hezbollah, probably almost anyone that want but where it translates into some diplomatic effort, how they can translate it into diplomatic achievement. So probably if you leave the Hezbollah out of the equation, the Lebanese government and Aoun would love to negotiate. But one of the things that when President Trump really put pressure on Aun to meet with Netanyahu said I can do that as long as they bomb my country, as long as there is no they don't end occupation. So we need to get. So then eventually it happened. The two ambassadors, the Lebanese and the Israeli met in the US but this is a much lower level. The question is any of them have enough authority to make progress on the real issues.
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Is there a role, Julie, that could be played here by an outside authority? Because granted that Israel, like really most countries, does have a somewhat pick and choose approach to international law, they do have a case when they say there is a UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which absolutely insists that there must be no non state armed factions in between the Litany river and the Israeli border, that the only militaries operating in that space should be Lebanon's military and unifil, the UN peacekeeping operation. That obviously means that under international law Hezbollah must be disarmed. Obviously easier said than done.
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Absolutely. And to the last point too, the current Lebanese government supports that as well. I mean, it does. They would also like to see that upheld and you know, would also like to see Hezbollah's power really diminish. But, and I would say over the last year there was kind of a window where the US was trying to see if the Lebanese government could in fact do that. And they really just don't have the power and the leverage still over Hezbollah. But I would say the tragedy for so many people is that, right, the state, Lebanese people, the Lebanese government want that upheld, but we have a spoiler like Hezbollah. It's very difficult for a government to assert their any kind of leverage over them. And I would say, as Yossi said too, when it's then happening that there are strikes in a city like Beirut, not just this last one yesterday, but the big barrage from a couple weeks ago. It makes it that much harder for a government like the Lebanese to really come down hard on Hezbollah or re engage in real meaningful negotiations with Israel.
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Yeah, again, and I read from different sources, in ideal world, the Lebanese government would have loved Israel to hit as hard as possible Hezbollah, but don't hit any civilian.
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So we return to the phrase easier said than done.
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But it's easier said and then you end because they put themselves so they in a way they encourage Israel to take on Hezbollah, but it has consequences that complicate so at a certain point, and that's probably the question of an external mediator and I don't think the US has this interest in Lebanon as much as they have in Iran. In other places, if no one come from the outside and almost force them to do that, it's not going to happen.
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Well, moving along or really just somewhat to the east, Israel may be confronting a careful what you wish for scenario in Syria. Although given Israel's preemptive proclivities, so may Syria. While Israel, like most sane observers, does not miss the regime of former Syrian president Bashar Al Assad, Israel is also a bit iffy about his successor, Ahmed Al Sharar, who until really quite recently answered to the Nomdigeh Abu Mohammed Al Jalani, commanded an Islamist rebel militia and was a wanted terrorist with $10 million on his head. President Al Sharra now wishes to rebuild Syria's military, which is not an unreasonable thing for someone in his position to wish to do. But both Bashar Al Assad and his father Hafez, were he still with us, would be able to remind him that Israel tends towards a firm line on Syrian military procurement. First of all, Yossi, we did see shortly after Al Shar seized power in Syria, Israel taking fairly determined action to smash up as much as Syria's military remained. Is Israel actually legitimately right to be concerned about the prospects of a militarily powerful Syria? Because there is an amount of history here.
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I mean the life in the Middle east, you're always concerned because it's not the most accommodating of neighborhoods.
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Well, indeed.
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So every country when it says neighbors that you don't not normalize relation, not in a state of peace with it have concerns. But again, when you have a government that has only one policy which is using force and if force doesn't work, it uses more force.
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This is Israel you're talking about.
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Yeah. Then the end result you don't also when there are windows of opportunity. And if you see actually the the reaction from Ashara it's very mild. You think that most government, basically you decimate their navy and attacks bases and attack the capital. The reaction would be very, very different. It's not. And actually, and we saw a few weeks ago, Ashara was in London. He actually didn't want, when he talked in public, actually to expand on it. He didn't condemn Israel. He said, we actually send messages to Israel what we are ready to accommodate. But there is no repair because, again, Israel sees the entire region as hostile, and not only hostile, existentially hostile. So it means the only way that Syria won't be a source of concern or threat is if it doesn't have any army at all. And this is not going to happen
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because, of course, every argument you've made about living in that neighborhood. Syria. Syria could make just as easily, in fact, if not more so, given some of the proclivities of its neighbors. Julie, reports suggest that one of the reasons that Israel is vexed about this is that Turkey is apparently especially interested in helping Syria reconstitute its military. What actually is Turkey's angle here?
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Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's been a secret since the Ashar government kind of started taking shape and since the fall of the Bashar al Assad regime that, you know, Turkey obviously has interest in Syria as one of their key neighbors. They want this to be a state where they have some, if not control, at least some influence. And one place where they can do that is by helping with this military kind of buildup and strengthening. And they're doing that quite readily. And for Israel, seeing Turkey as one of what they see as one of their main foes, I guess you can say in the region, they see that as, you know, as a kind of an automatic warning sign. But I would say if it wasn't, Turkey would be someone else. I mean, Ashara is just being, I would say, rational in this regard of trying to rebuild the state military capacity with the size of Syria, where they are geopolitically, like, this is not, like, odd that he is trying to do that and to consolidate and, you know, other states, just a classic security dilemma, are going to be kind of worried about that. Not just Israel, but, you know, I've read that even Hezbollah was, like, a little skittish when they saw this happening, because they would be. You have been on the opposite sides of things during the civil war. So, you know, all actors are kind of watching these movements. But in general, this is. It's what a state, a new state, kind of new government. Forming like Alshara's is would be doing. And they're going to be looking around at their neighbors if who can help them do that. And Turkey is one of them.
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But just to follow that up, Julie, wouldn't most of Syria's neighbors actually prefer the idea? I mean, you don't have to like the people in charge of it. But wouldn't it be preferable if Syria was a basically orderly, functional and coherent state as opposed to the brawling mess it has been for most of the last 15 years?
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Absolutely. And again, Turkey is not the only state that has had an attempt to have interests and influences leverage very quickly in Syria. The Gulf states have been very quick to also try and kind of elbow in a little bit with different kinds of offers some more on the investment and financial side and the military side. But I mean, Syria is, you know, it's such a kind of a key state in the region that once its transformation was in process, all of its neighbors wanted to make sure that they were on the right side of where that was going to be going.
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And just finally on this one, Yossi and as long as we're amusing ourselves if we think a few years down the track, because extraordinary things have happened in a good way in the Middle east in recent years, countries which had once foresworn never to recognize Israel have changed their minds about that. Is it absolutely unimaginable that at some point Syria might decide to sign on to the Abraham Accords, that there could be an exchange of ambassadors between Jerusalem and Damascus? Granted, there would be some conversations to be had about the Golden Heights and a few other things. But is it completely the stuff of fantasy?
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I don't think it's a fantasy. I mean, Israel and Syria negotiated peace in in the 1990s and they were very close to reach a conclusion that they were quarreling about 50 meters around the Sea of Galilee. And it's definitely possible. And if the Lebanon issue is out of the equation. But more important, Syria or Fashara is no friend of Iran. So actually there is an Israeli interest to get closer to Syria and to Syria with Israel. So again, if he sat here in 1977, said that Anwar Sadat will fly to Tel Aviv and say no more war, no more bloodsheds, completely insane. And this is four years after a bloody war of the 73. So I think that's the problem. If we get into the state of mind that the only destiny for the relations with neighbors is war, it became a self of a prophecy. If we look also the windows of Opportunity to change also can become, can become a reality.
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Well, to the VATICAN now, where U.S. secretary of State Marco Rubio has found some means of occupying himself while the fate of the Persian Gulf is negotiated by the President's son in law and one of the President's golf buddies. Rubio has today been received by his fellow American Pope Leo xiv and tomorrow will be ditto by Italy's Prime Minister Giorgio Meloni. Both have the material with which to amuse themselves by causing Rubio to squirm somewhat. Rubio's boss, US President Donald Trump, has recently teed off at both Pontiff and PM in a series of characteristically measured, coherent and above all, completely sane social media posts expressing his incredulous disappointment that neither has been much keen on rerunning the Suez crisis. Julie, do we actually suspect that both Rubio's hosts might be pretty sympathetic to him? I mean, both of them, under. Both of them understand by now what Rubio has to deal with just every day?
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Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's all rel. Like you had to kind of pick who from the administration is coming. I think, you know, Rubio might be who you would, who you would pick, especially in that context. And look, I mean everyone knows what Rubio's job is on this trip. Like he is aware of it, but we was aware of it and I think everyone played their parts pretty well today by all accounts. And you know, it was a little bit of diplomatic, what have you, but everyone knew the real reason. It was kind of clean up the mess that had been made. And I think if you're going to send someone, Rubio is probably the best bet.
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Well, just to follow that up, Julie, because you are here to be obviously blamed and held accountable for everything America does. I mean, Leo, at least you would think, has some experience of working for a tempestuous overlord, giving to issuing contradictory commands. But what, what did you make of Rubio's attempt at presenting the Pope with a gift? He gave the Pope, it says here, a small crystal football. To which, to which the Pope replied, and I quote, wow, okay. It still seems weird having a Pope with an American accent. I don't know why it seems weird,
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but it does, it does. I mean, I think there's like hot dogs in the holy water these days. No, I mean, I think these gestures, again, everything about this is going to be somewhat comical just when you have an American Pope, especially a Pope from Chicago, and just like the Americans attempts to kind of sidle up to his American side with footballs and whatnot. But like a crystal football. I feel like even that one's a little bit too far for even.
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Yeah. I'm not sure what it's supposed to be a metaphor for, but, Yossi, on the subject of things that take an amount of getting used to, I mean, have we become inured as a species to how just weird it is? You have a President of the United States denouncing the Pope as being weak on crime and terrible for foreign policy. I'm trying to imagine how the world circuit, I don't know, the 1980s might have reacted if Ronald Reagan had said that about John Paul ii.
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Probably would not. I think, by the way, it's completely wrong to bring in Italy anything to do with football because they didn't qualify.
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B
Well, yeah, but I mean, it was.
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So this is another American football.
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It was a crystal American football, to be clear. I mean, like a soccer ball might have been gloomy shooting something.
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Yeah, in a way. But I think you expect the unexpected. Everything good. In his first administration, he managed to insult 1.9 million Muslims and blame all of them. Now you move in 1.4 billion Catholics, you know, who knows what's next? You just take on anyone because they disagree with you. Something. Yeah. What do you say? Weak on crime and terrible for foreign policy. I always expect weak also on the roots of crime. But, you know, as someone is leading a spiritual leader, probably understand the kind of what's about sinning and criminal and all of this. And that's probably what he's preaching day in, day out against. Against crimes. But this is. On one hand, we need to take Trump seriously because he's the President of the United States.
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He is.
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On the other hand, how can you take him seriously when he changes his mind every minute and insult anyone that just disagree with him? It's not kind of a slight, you know, disagreement. It goes straight insults and trying to assassinate their characters in the process. So. So my fear, if this continues, we'll stop taking seriously the United States, not only Trump.
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I mean, is there a potential upside in this sort of endeavor for Rubio Giuliani? Because I think it's safe to say that he does not perceive being Secretary of State under Donald Trump as the eventual pinnacle of his political journey. Does this help him? I mean, this is the only option he's got, is trying to position himself as the sensible Republican option in 2028. This is, of course, placing the very dangero bet that the Republican Party actually wants a sensible option in 2028. But that's all he's got.
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I mean, I think it's going to be a stretch for Ribio to get the nomination. I don't think him meeting the Pope is going to, like, push him over the line, to be honest. I would think more.
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I mean, the Pope does know people.
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I mean, a few.
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It can bless him, you know, give him a blessing or something.
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It would be a miracle. No, I mean, I think Rubio, I'm the more the short game. If I were Rubio, when it's like, do you want to be, like, in the middle of Strait of Hormuz negotiations, or do you want to be, like, dealing with whatever was happening elsewhere, or do you want to go and meet with the Pope? I'd pick the Pope as part of the other kind of messes that we're kind of dealing with these days. I feel like that's probably the best bet.
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B
Going well to France now, where one boffin has determined not to sit around waiting for some or other body of his distinguished peers to drape him with an award signifying the recognition he is due Professor Florent Montaclair. For it is. He was in 2016, decorated with the Gold Medal of Philology by the International Society of Philology. It has emerged, however, that this accolade may not be unrelated to the fact that both the medal and the Society are inventions of Professor Montclair himself. Yossi, first of all, I. I absolutely adore this story.
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He's.
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He's been getting away with it for years. He nearly got rumbled about 10 years ago, and everyone sort of forgot about it. But he has now at last been caught out by Romanian journalists, weirdly. But nevertheless, can we find it in ourselves to condemn him?
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I mean, you can't condone this kind of behavior. There is an element of cheating here.
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B
There's a huge element of cheating. There's also a huge element of proving that no one ever reads anything that's on your cv.
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C
You can say anything, you know, to be honest.
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B
Yeah.
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C
When it comes.
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How do you think I got this job
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when it comes to creativity, 10 out of 10. The guy is creative, you know. Yes. If you can call it courage. Some sort of courage. Audacity. Depends what word you like. You know, I think Julie and I have been in academia for long enough to know there is a lot of characters, so to speak. In academia, we do anything for an accolade.
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B
When you say characters, does this. Is this your way of letting our listeners know you've lived in Britain long enough to have internalized their lexicon of Passive aggressive euphemism. Because I'm assuming in Britain, British academia. Julie, help me out here. When you call someone a character, you mean they're a charlatan.
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Yeah, And I will say, like, in academia too, like, there is like a hilarious number of absolutely, like inane awards and prizes. So like the fact that this guy made one up and got away with it, it's like, it's like me announcing I won the Monocle Award or something
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B
and just like, oh, I've won that several times. I'm sure you have.
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And so like, I just think, like. And also I would like, for me, it's fun. Contrary to belief, I feel like Americans were not as awardsy in work, but it was interesting to. When I moved to the UK and Europe, people are very into prizes and awards. And so I can totally see someone doing this. And I mean, there's so many awards that get given out in our unis and our conferences that are like the best niche book for a person between this age range of this niche time. And it's like. And I got an award.
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B
Yeah, I was nominated for that one. But Yossi, there is, I think, a thing he has demonstrated here and he could, if he liked and if he's listening, try. He can have this advice for free. He could style this out as a sort of ongoing art project, demonstrating that awards are always distributed for the benefit of the people giving the awards, not the people receiving them.
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C
He can make this. I mean, probably this guy can make a case almost for anything. Yeah, he proved that. I think it's got something about academia because not usually I quote Henry Kissinger, but he said once that the reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small. And I think when you all.
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B
That is an annoyingly good line by Kissinger.
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C
It's a great line because, you know, that's probably why he left academia. And it wasn't actually a good academic, a very good one. But I think because, you know, the kind of. The need to win something, we know it all university, when it comes price time, you know, academic of the year or the researcher of the year, people start lobbying for this. Is that their life dependent on it? So yes. Is it creative? Is it, you know, maybe his next stage is actually to go to Hollywood
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B
because, well, I. I mean, if this isn't a movie or a possibly slightly overdone Netflix series, I don't know what is. Julie, can we at least admire his commitment to the. He had the medal made up at apparently at a cost of circa $250 or the French equivalent. There is a website which is still
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A
there, which I did visit.
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B
I visited you and many, many millions of others. I suspect I did look at it earlier. It lists former and subsequent winners of the prize, including himself, sort of slotted in there around.
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A
Oh, definitely, yeah. I mean, this is what you said. Like, giving it a prize is one thing, but like the fact that he was the recipient and I love that the reason it got found out is he was supposed to be on some panel and like, misinformation or something. I've heard this old story about him.
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B
I mean, I do recommend our listeners to burrow all the way down this rabbit hole. There is a great deal to unpack. But, Yossi, I think my particular favourite subplot was that one of the people so honoured by this award, or at least was given the honorary gold medal for whatever it is on the subject of what we will euphemistically refer to as characters, was Noam Chomsky, who did turn up at a ceremony to be presented with a medal. Were you as surprised as I was that Noam Chomsky could buy into an obviously dubiously credentialed proposition? It seems very unlike him.
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C
Consider some of the things that were said about Chomsky recently in other connotation. Maybe we shouldn't be that surprised, but maybe not. And again, it goes back to the vanity of academics. Give me a medal, I'll be there. But if I have a second, which
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B
is pretty much my motto, if I
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C
can tell a show, short story, actually have the. Exactly. I don't know if the opposite. But an interesting take on this, a good colleague of mine from a university in the Netherlands, the late Peter van Krecken, was very colorful character, so he
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B
was another one of those British euphemisms, but carry on.
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C
And then he was part of a group that won the Nobel Peace Prize. He was famous, well known international lawyer. So what he did, he had a replica, a copy of this, the certificate that you get, and he put it in the loo in his house in Leiden, and especially where the guest will go, obviously. So every time that, you know, you go to the. You know that he was part of the group. So it was, in a way, modesty, you put it in the loo. But on the other hand, everyone will know about it.
- [31:38]
B
Julie Norman and Yossi Meckelburg, thank you both for joining us. Finally, on today's show, planet Earth officially gained its 8 billionth inhabitant in late 2020. Whether crossing that threshold sparked Joy or panic might say a lot about your views. Yet the job of calculating such figures falls to a discipline, demography, that on the surface is strictly non partisan, an objective measure of statistics. Reconciling that tension is a preoccupation for Jennifer Schuber, President and CEO of the Population Reference Bureau, a century old demographic think tank based in Washington. Shuber is the author of 8 Billion and Counting and more recently the editor of Toxic the Ideology and Politics of Population. Monocle's Gregory Scruggs recently sat down with Schubert to discuss the intersection between politics and population and asked why demography has the potential to become so toxic.
- [32:29]
D
It seems like every time we try to have these discussions of population in the public sphere, they always get hijacked by the elite and used for their purpose. And so there is something about not the demographics that is toxic. And we were very careful about that and went back and forth on the title. But it's about the approach to studying population, its itself. It seems like there's also a real divide often between demographers who study population and those who actually use that information for policy and it leaves it really vulnerable for exploitation. We're hoping with this book to really shape the study of demography such that there is an awareness on the front end of the way that our research is really used by those in power so that we can actually have better research ourselves. Not that we're trying to ask people to censor, not at all, but an awareness of how your information is used is really important to make sure that we have movement towards well being and rights.
- [33:33]
B
This chronic concern among national governments in countries that are not reproducing as quickly as national leaders would like, how are they attempting to incentivize or message increasing the birth rate and how does it work and how doesn't it work effectively that message getting down to the actual population who must choose to do the deed and procreate?
- [33:54]
D
Well, first of all, we're at this point in history where two out of every three people on the planet live somewhere with what's considered this below replacement fertility rate, this below 2.1 children born per woman on average. And the governments in these countries, in fact the governments even in some of countries that have not yet reached that level are really all panicking about what this will mean for them, particularly in terms of their ability to have a robust workforce and continue to propel economic growth. And so their solution to this thus far in their panic has been well, let's just try to reverse it, right? Let's try to get women in particular, of course, to have more babies. And they've done this through all sorts of means, typically carrots like tax incentives or modest cash bonuses. But what really seems to be the major effect of that is, if anything at all, and in fact, most of the time it's nothing at all. But if anything, it seems to be more about the timing of births than about. About increasing the number of children overall. And Hungary is one example of this. Many people have been tracking Hungary for the past few years and know that the country, I think at one point was spending 5% of GDP on these pronatalist measures. That is a lot of money. And in the moment, many observers said, look how it's working, right? The births look like they are up. Well, now here we are in 2026, and they have already reverted back down. Hungary's fertility rate has already gone back down to, I believe it's 1.3 now. And so what seems to have happened again, demographers draw the conclusion that it just affected the timing of those births rather than making a whole societal change in desires around family formation.
- [35:37]
B
Your area of expertise is Asian demography. How have different national governments approached the issue of demographic change more or less effectively?
- [35:46]
D
Yeah, it's really interesting that they actually have more in common than we might realize. And I even see this commonality between Asians and Europe and United States. And that commonality is women are. Have been the problem. They're not having enough babies, and therefore women must be the solution. So there seems to be a call across all of these governments to get women to work more in order to increase the labor force participation. Right? Like the workforce is shrinking, so let's get more women out of the home and into the workforce in many cases. But then also they need to care more, right? For especially for rapidly aging populations. And they care for parents because there's usually not infrastructure for. For that. But then also they want them to birth more, right? So if there's this birth more work more care more philosophy, that is overall pretty common around the world, but there are some exceptions or it shows up differently in different places. One of these places is in China where they've taken the work more right out of there. So Xi Jinping has actually stood at the podium and made speeches saying, get out of the workforce when women get into the home and have babies. And what I don't think that leaders who make these kinds of calls realize is that not only does this not resonate with women, right? They're not. Oh, thank you. I hadn't thought of that. Let me go, let me go do this. But that it actually pressures fertility rates lower because it leads women to really opt out of this kind of a, maybe we could say a middle finger
- [37:16]
A
to the idea that you would be
- [37:18]
D
asked to do this.
- [37:19]
B
What ultimately is your advice for demographers who feel caught betwixt and between with their data, either on the one hand leveraged for a sort of populist right pro natalist policy, or perhaps on the other hand a more left leaning subsidized childcare kind of policy. How do they manage to maintain their objectivity and not end up inadvertently in the service of a political project that, you know, they may or may not wish to advocate?
- [37:47]
C
Advocate.
- [37:48]
D
I think they need to control the narrative themselves. And so, you know, in the world of peer reviewed publishing, even the structure of a journal article means that maybe it's your last two paragraphs where the journal editor wants you to say and what do we think about this that you've just told us on the preceding pages? That imbalance is off. There should be much more in well, what are we supposed to think about this information? You tell us. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to tell take a stance on the particular policy, but you could throw out some on the one hands, on the other hand, and it would really behoove journal editors to start doing that as well because people do get a hold of this information. Right. But it only makes its way into the media in sound bites. And so demographers can actually play a really important role as translators like we try to do at PRB of this research so that it gets put into policies in ways that really can support decision making that again continues to work to towards overall well being for people rather than trying to engineer a particular demographic outcome which will probably elude those policymakers anyway.
- [38:55]
B
That was Jennifer Schuber of the Population Reference Bureau speaking to Monocle's Gregory Scruggs. And that is all for this edition of the Daily. Thanks to our panelists today, Julie Norman and Yossi Meckelberg. Today's show was produced by Tom Webb and researched by Josefina Astradene Gomez. Our sound engineer was Mariela Bevan Amandra Muller here in London. The Daily is back at the same time tomorrow. Thanks for listening.