Lebanese Sovereignty and Sorcerer’s Apprentices

There are moments when a sentence cast into the media storm reveals more than entire treatises of doctrine. When the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, declared a few days ago that “it would be acceptable if they took it all,” invoking the notion of an Israel extending, in a biblical reading, from the Nile to the Euphrates, before adding that “Area C is Israel,” he was not merely departing from diplomatic reserve—though that goes without saying—but displaying a political partiality which, if unsurprising given Washington’s near-unconditional alignment with the Hebrew State, remains intolerable in its gravity.

The diplomat inscribed his remarks within an expansive territorial logic subordinating international law to a theological-historical narrative—precisely the kind of mythic framework upon which Tel Aviv has grounded the legitimacy it claims for occupying Palestine. It matters little whether he later tempered his words or invoked hyperbole. What has been said has been said. And what is thought becomes visible, at a time when Netanyahu’s team has repeatedly expressed its determination to translate its mythical dream into reality.

Before him, the American envoy Tom Barrack, denouncing the legacy of Sykes-Picot as a Western mistake that had “imposed maps, mandates, borders drawn in pencil,” and asserting that “there is no Middle East, only tribes and villages turned into artificial nation-states,” opened, in 2025, another breach—one equally perilous. Under the guise of criticizing the colonial engineering of 1916, he suggested that the states born of that arrangement might be fragile constructions, perhaps even illusory ones. Behind the denunciation of former imperialism lies a new temptation—ideological, perhaps—to once again reconfigure the Levantine space according to parameters dictated elsewhere.

These two discourses, so different in tone, converge nonetheless on a single point: they relativize the full and complete existence of local sovereignties by advancing the notion that a territory may be redefined by biblical narrative or post-colonial critique, by strategic power or by realpolitik. They remind us above all of a historical constant: in the imagination of certain chancelleries, the Levant remains a malleable space. Since at least Kissinger, the Middle East has often served as a laboratory of experiments—each as disastrous as the last—and American diplomats have too often played the role of sorcerer’s apprentices. More recently, Obama offered the most striking illustration by implicitly paving the way, through the Iranian nuclear agreement, for the consolidation of an Iranian empire across the region.

This must be stated plainly. Neither Greater Syria nor Greater Israel; neither Syrian, Israeli, Iranian nor Western pseudo-protectorate. Neither the resurrection of a mythologized unity, nor absorption into a biblical continuum, nor management under tutelage disguised as regional stabilization. Lebanon first. And this stance does not stem from a narrow reflex of identity politics, but from the principle that sovereignty is not a rhetorical luxury; it is the minimal condition of any politics worthy of the name—even for a small country whose weight on the global scale may seem negligible.

Yet the problem does not end with American declarations. Lebanon’s own history clearly shows that every internal weakening has served as pretext or opportunity for an external hand. Whenever the elites replaced the authority of the State with parallel allegiances, whenever strategic decision-making fragmented among militias, regional patrons and sectarian calculations, the resulting vacuum was filled, and the logic of the State devoured by that of the non-State. Syrian tutelage did not arise in a desert. Nor did the Israeli invasion of 1982. The Palestinian presence found favorable cover among a significant portion of the Lebanese— including many of its future adversaries—after 1967. Iranian influence did not flourish without local complicities. Western mediations did not impose themselves upon a fully sovereign State.

It is true that Lebanon lies along a corridor through which conquerors, passing through, have succeeded one another since Antiquity. This geographical position has fostered a political culture of waiting: hoping for the least brutal occupier, the most useful protector; wishing for a shift in the balance of power in order to adjust one’s allegiance; expecting “others” to do the dirty work. This realism, often presented as strategic intelligence, has at times amounted to resignation in disguise.

Breaking this cycle requires more than occasional rhetoric. It demands that institutions cease to be façades and once again become effective centers of decision. It requires that no armed force claim to embody a parallel sovereignty; that Lebanese diplomacy speak with a single voice; that justice not be subordinated to partisan balances. Institutions are never abstract. They are what men make of them, as Napoleon once said.

The statements of Huckabee and Barrack may well constitute, for those jealous of their country’s sovereignty, external provocations. But they should also act as a mirror, reflecting the curse whereby a country that fails to draw its own red lines eventually sees them redrawn by others, and a State that does not safeguard its internal coherence exposes itself to becoming a mere strategic object—a toy for others, entirely dispensable.

So yes: neither Greater Syria nor Greater Israel, nor tutelage recycled under new garments. Lebanon first. And Lebanese leaders would do well to heed it. Each time its officials have failed to defend its sovereignty, someone else has stepped in to govern in their place. Hassan Rifai used to say that the Republic needed men and women to protect it.

But where, indeed, have the few yet valiant Guardians of the Republic disappeared?