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How miserly time is. Lebanon and the East have known few women like Salma Merchak Slim, mother of the thinker-martyr Lokman, who passed away yesterday, longing to be reunited with him, without having seen human justice strike down his assassins. Salma Merchak survived her son by exactly five years, her tears flowing inward, within a vast heart saturated with sorrow, only rarely moistening her cheeks. She remained present, upright, unbroken, alongside her daughter Rasha al-Ameer, Monika Bergmann, and her son’s companions, steadfast in defending the values of dialogue, acceptance of the other, knowledge, culture, and the Enlightenment. This mother, scholar and intellectual, accused no one. And yet her son Lokman had named his killers even before they committed their crime. In a written statement, he had personally held the head of Hezbollah responsible for any harm that might befall him, his home, or his family, after a group from the party had demonstrated in the garden of his great-grandfather’s house in Haret Hreik. He nevertheless refused to leave that house, just as his mother Salma had done before him, faithful to the recommendation of her husband, MP Mohsen Slim, who had asked her to preserve its memory and presence. The demonstrators hung on the garden wall the sinister words: “Glory to the silencer.” To which Lokman replied: “They will not silence us.” Six months after Beirut itself had been assassinated by the port explosion, Lokman was assassinated in turn. It is likely that his crime was to have dared expose those responsible, to have brought to light, through facts and a coherent narrative, the roles of the Assad regime and its allies in Lebanon. The government, then convened under the presidency of Michel Aoun, promised a transparent investigation within five days and the identification of those responsible for this catastrophe, which had killed nearly 230 people, injured 7,000, and devastated entire districts of the capital and its surroundings. But Hezbollah paralyzed the investigation with an arrogance that has since become proverbial. Lokman, for his part, hastened to proclaim the truths as he had gathered and understood them, before walking toward martyrdom. In his book published by Dar al-Jadeed, the publishing house directed by Rasha al-Ameer after her brother’s assassination and titled in its Arabic version By Soul and by Blood… Nasserism and Its Legacies , journalist Alex Rowell reports that Salma was the first to notice the striking similarities between her son’s assassination and that of Kamel Mroué, founder of the newspaper Al-Hayat , killed in 1966. Despite the difference in age, Kamel and Lokman shared the same hostility toward totalitarian regimes. Both were targeted by systematic campaigns accusing them of treason and allegiance to the West and to Israel, in a press skilled in moral assassination. Both were Lebanese Shiites convinced of the necessity of pluralism and openness. Both were shot at close range, a preferred signature of apparatuses acting on the orders of foreign states, which thereby dispels any lingering doubt as to their involvement. Cruel irony of fate: the family of Kamel Mroué had entrusted its defense to Lokman’s father, the late Mohsen Slim, a criminal lawyer and one-term MP for Beirut’s Second District, so that he might support them and claim their rights. Two of the murderers were arrested at the time. When Mohsen Slim agreed to defend the Mroué family, he too was threatened with death. Decades before his son was targeted, a bomb exploded at the entrance of his home, intended to silence him, perhaps to eliminate him.” Alex Rowell further writes: “From the balcony of the first floor of the family ‘White House,’ Salma, widow of Mohsen and mother of Lokman, shows me the exact spot where the explosion took place more than half a century earlier. “That October afternoon in 2021, stifling with heat and humidity, her daughter Rasha was sitting with us, passing around glasses of chilled wine. ‘At the time of the explosion, our gates were wooden,’ Salma said. After the attack, her husband replaced them with the heavy iron gates we see today. She drew a long breath, then sighed: ‘How many threats we received.’ “Salma, like her late husband and son, seemed to have learned to live on the threshold of danger. “She was an extraordinary woman. When I met her, she was entering her tenth decade and remembered with undiminished precision her childhood in British and monarchical Egypt of the 1930s and 1940s. After studying at the American College for Girls in Cairo, now Ramses College, she pursued journalism at the American University in Cairo, where she was trained by Wilton Wynn, whom Reuters described on the day of his death as ‘one of the greatest American journalists of the twentieth century.’ She was also a student of Samir Souki, Newsweek ’s correspondent in Cairo, who offered her, during her final year of studies, an internship at the magazine. That internship opened to her, after her graduation in 1956, the doors to full-time employment. “That same year the Suez War erupted. The revolutionary officers newly installed in power in Egypt began restricting the foreign press and public freedoms. In 1957, censorship reached its peak; Newsweek closed its Cairo bureau, and Salma joined her new post in Beirut, alongside her director, in the Kantari district, that ‘Paris of the East,’ free and enchanting, between sea and mountain, according to optimistic accounts. “Hardly had she arrived when the events of 1958 broke out, claiming hundreds of lives over the months. In the relative stability that followed, Salma earned a master’s degree from the American University of Beirut and studied under distinguished figures, among them Professor Malcolm Kerr, assassinated on campus in 1984. After her marriage to the successful lawyer Mohsen, elected to Parliament in 1960, she entered Beirut’s social elite; and it was in those renowned circles that she met Kamel Mroué. “With a Cairene accent unchanged despite decades in Beirut, she would say of him that he was an affable and endearing man with whom it was a pleasure to converse and debate. “When she left Cairo to say ‘no’ to military dictatorship, Salma Merchak Slim believed she had saved herself. She believed that her husband’s engagement in accusing Kamel Mroué’s killers, the instigators of the 1958 events, and the perpetrators of the attack on her own home would keep the bitter cup far from her. But that was without reckoning with fate’s blow… called, in this context, Nasser.” Despite the intense burning that ravaged her heart in the wake of Lokman’s assassination, she carried to the end the message of dialogue and encounter with the other. She thus kept the flame alive before taking her leave with the dignity and courage of enlightened intellectuals. *** A service for the repose of her soul will be held on Thursday, February 26, 2026, at 11 a.m. at the National Evangelical Church of Beirut, opposite the Grand Serail. Condolences will be received on Thursday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and on Friday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the church hall.

On April 2, 2025, standing in the White House Rose Garden, President Donald Trump declared what he called “Liberation Day.” By signing Executive Order 14257 under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the administration imposed sweeping “reciprocal tariffs” on foreign imports. The justification was expansive: the persistent U.S. trade deficit—exceeding $1.2 trillion annually—was declared a national emergency. Blanket tariffs were applied to nearly all trading partners, with rates reaching as high as 50 percent. The objective was explicit: compel bilateral negotiations, extract investment commitments, and accelerate industrial reshoring. Several major economies accepted negotiated ceilings in exchange for investment pledges: Japan agreed to a 15% tariff ceiling alongside $550 billion in semiconductor and AI investment. South Korea committed $350 billion in industrial expansion. The European Union accepted a 15% framework tied to energy and chip procurement commitments. Indonesia negotiated 19%. India negotiated 18%. For the first time in modern history, tariff policy became an instrument of direct geopolitical leverage. The underlying assumption was clear: the executive branch could unilaterally reshape the international economic order. That assumption ended on February 20, 2026. The Supreme Court Draws a Boundary In Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump , the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that the administration’s use of IEEPA to impose broad-based tariffs exceeded constitutional limits. The Court held that: Trade deficits do not constitute the type of emergency contemplated under IEEPA. Congress had not clearly delegated tariff authority of such magnitude. Broad reinterpretations of open-textured statutes to justify sweeping economic transformation violate constitutional structure. The ruling did not eliminate tariff authority altogether. Within hours, the administration pivoted to Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, imposing a temporary uniform 10% tariff. But Section 122 carries strict constraints: a 150-day limit and nondiscriminatory treatment. The country-specific leverage architecture collapsed instantly. The Fiscal Consequence The economic significance of the ruling extends well beyond trade policy. The Liberation Day tariffs had produced: An effective U.S. tariff rate near 17% — the highest since the 1940s. Hundreds of billions in projected annual revenue. Negotiated investment commitments exceeding $2 trillion. Critically, tariff revenue had been embedded into the 2025 budget reconciliation package. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, extended major corporate and high-income tax cuts. The Congressional Budget Office scored the legislation as increasing primary deficits by $3.4 trillion over the 2025–2034 period, rising above $4 trillion including interest. Tariffs were designed to function as the principal fiscal offset. A recent Federal Reserve paper estimated that approximately 96% of the tariff burden was ultimately borne by U.S. consumers. The Supreme Court decision removes an estimated $1.5 to $2.4 trillion in projected revenue over the next decade. This is not a marginal adjustment. It is a structural fiscal gap. The United States already faces: Budget deficits near 7% of GDP. Net interest costs approaching $1 trillion annually. Federal debt exceeding 120% of GDP. Fiscal arithmetic is not ideological. It imposes itself. Financial Fragility The ruling arrives as the U.S. economy shows visible deceleration. Fourth-quarter 2025 growth slowed to 1.4% annualized, down from 4.4% in Q3. Full-year growth for 2025 came in at 2.2%, below 2024 levels. The U.S. economy is primarily consumption-driven — and consumption is highly sensitive to asset prices and interest rates. The top 10% of earners now account for roughly 49% of consumer spending, reflecting an increasingly K-shaped structure. Middle- and lower-income households carry record debt burdens. Total household debt stands at a record $18.8 trillion, or approximately 65% of GDP. Every 1% increase in effective interest rates translates into roughly $188 billion in reduced disposable income. Should structural budget deficits widen further, upward pressure on long-term yields could intensify. A move above 5% on long-term rates would materially challenge current equity valuations and amplify negative wealth effects. The risk is tightening financial conditions interacting with fiscal vulnerability. The Geopolitical Implication The cancellation of negotiated country-specific tariffs removes a core instrument of U.S. leverage. Because these agreements were never ratified by Congress, their legal durability evaporates alongside the IEEPA framework. Temporary uniform tariffs do not provide targeted bargaining power. Investment commitments from Japan, India, Europe, and others become politically reconsiderable. Industrial reshoring transitions from enforcement to negotiation. At the same time, strategic dependencies remain acute. China continues to dominate global rare earth refining — a critical input for defense systems and advanced manufacturing. Domestic capacity development requires a decade or more while the US military and defense industry crucially depends on magnets. Trade leverage has been legally constrained precisely where industrial dependence remains unresolved. Institutional Signal The broader constitutional message is significant. The Court signaled heightened scrutiny of expansive statutory delegations under the “major questions” doctrine. Future presidents, regardless of party, will face tighter boundaries around the unilateral use of executive powers. The United States retains immense structural strengths. But its ability to weaponize trade policy without congressional alignment has been materially limited. Coercion gives way to negotiation. Multilateralism regains relevance. Confidence and Constraint For decades, American power rested on a paradox: The United States could sustain persistent deficits because global capital trusted its institutions. Foreign investors hold approximately 30 % of total US assets outstanding: $8 trillion in U.S. Treasuries $17 trillion in U.S. equities $6 trillion in U.S. corporate debt That external financing underpins both fiscal operations and asset valuations and constitutes a major vulnerability. Economic systems do not destabilize merely because debt rises. They destabilize when sustainability is questioned. The Supreme Court ruling did not cause structural fiscal weakness. It exposed it. February 20, 2026 may be remembered not as a tariff decision, but as the moment when two boundaries became visible simultaneously: The constitutional limits of executive power. The fiscal limits of deficit expansion. Empires rarely decline abruptly. They weaken when borrowing costs rise and political leverage diminishes. The world is watching both.

We could have mourned her passing as one mourns a beloved friend, and suffered as one suffers when death severs a part of a shared life: a friendship, a brotherhood, a family. She might also — and perhaps it would have been the easier path — have spent her life in sheltered comfort, protected from the hardships of origin and the harshness of destiny. She was the daughter of a noble and prosperous household, heir to a legacy that allowed her to lean upon inherited security and remain beneath the shade of a family untouched by either disgrace or deprivation. But she was not “just any woman.” She was Leila Shahid. With her passing a few days ago, sorrow thickens into a wound both heavy and deep. For what has been lost is not merely a friend; it is a life that resisted the easy temptation — the temptation to save oneself and leave one’s homeland to its fate. Our story with her begins when she was still an infant… yes, at that threshold History rarely opens in the biographies of the great, though it is the very source of the narrative. Her mother, Sirine, nursed my sister Hayat alongside Leila, and my mother, Salma, nursed Leila together with Hayat. In our home, Leila was the daughter of Kamel and Salma; in theirs, we were the children of Mounib and Sirine. Thus were we introduced to the world: without borders between houses, without distance between bloodlines. From those early days, Leila was a force in motion — driven by curiosity, by the hunger for discovery, by the urge to raise questions endlessly. She was a whirlwind of energy, as if she had been created to unsettle stillness, challenge inertia, and set even stone into motion. Armed with the knowledge she acquired at the American University of Beirut, she rushed into the field — not as one who “visits” camps, but as one who returns to her own. She went to the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon as one goes back to one’s own children. She left the comfort of her life for the heart of tragedy, not to write and testify from afar, but to encounter reality from within and earn the right to speak of it because she had carried its weight. She then immersed herself in journalism when the magazine Monday Morning was founded alongside Fawaz Najieh, a journalist and publisher of stature. There, on the demanding ground of rational thought rather than easy rhetoric, her diplomatic gifts began to unfold: articles, interviews, research were developed and written with seriousness, rigor, and scholarship. This approach was not cultural ornamentation; it was a set of instruments forged for struggle. Major media outlets quoted her, for her voice was not the “clamor of a cause,” but a discourse of knowledge and responsibility. Then came the diplomatic path: her appointment as representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization, chosen by Yasser Arafat. Leila served her homeland because she believed — with early political intuition — that a homeland belongs to all its citizens, and that a leader is “mandated,” not “crowned.” Even with Abu Ammar, she perceived him as entrusted with a mission, not enthroned for eternity. This was not severity toward him; it was mercy toward the cause. For causes that transform into the worship of individuals are sacrificed upon the altar of individuals. During her diplomatic mission, Europe — yes, Europe — was often more severe toward the Palestinian cause than America. The Old Continent was shaken by terrorism carried out in the name of resistance: airplane hijackings, the tragedy of Munich. Palestinian representation operated within a context marked by the Cold War and Soviet alignments that led the West to see the Palestinian not as the bearer of a right, but as a potential threat. Added to this was the wave of assassinations carried out by the Israelis against Palestinian representatives; this other kind of war emptied the political stage of men and figures of great stature. During that phase, Leila was, in many respects, alone. She was the political representative; she left her imprint on the media, on research centers, on cultural life, on university lectures, on meetings in policy circles… she embodied the “Palestinian face,” all with an endurance rarely demanded of a single human being. Leila Shahid had succeeded. More than that, she triumphed — in the way justice is permitted to triumph in the great capitals: through argument, through reason, through intellectual and linguistic eloquence that does not descend to the level of the crowd and does not solicit demagoguery. She debated with a ferocity of mind — the ferocity of an eagle protecting her young… her Palestinians. She confronted her adversaries in France, in the media and in public, not through invective, but by transforming the cause into a narrative that could be understood… then accepted… then progressively freed from conditions. She moved the wall, stone after stone, pushing Europe from instinctive rejection toward conditional acceptance, and then working to dismantle the conditions. Until she was awarded the French Legion of Honour at the rank of Officer — not as an ornament upon her chest, but as evidence that she had wrested recognition of dignity in the midst of a fierce struggle. Yes, it is natural to grieve the loss of Leila Shahid, because we have lost a friend. But our sorrow today weighs heavier than the absence of friendship. We are living through a “new Nakba,” and Palestine more than ever needs a civilized leadership, clean-handed and clear-minded, one that resembles its people and does not treat them as bargaining currency. Leila Shahid was — had destiny been just — the closest thing to a “President of Palestine,” in the moral rather than protocol sense: culture, experience, commitment to the Palestinian citizen — wounded, expelled, scattered to the four corners of the earth. She had moved Palestine from the state of bargaining and corruption toward an upright patriotism that forced even the malicious to confront their own shame. That is why we weep: because we have bid farewell to a woman who was light in a time of darkness, and because we have been deprived, once more, of a model of leadership that does not demand ovations but seeks to fulfill its mission. It is almost a sacrilege that Palestine should lose women like Leila… and it is deeply lamentable that our age remains orphaned of women like her.

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?

With every rise in tensions between the United States and Iran, the same question hangs over Beirut: are we facing a delayed war or an inevitable confrontation? Will Lebanon be the battlefield or simply an anxious spectator, witnessing the events? The reality is that the region has been living for years in a state of 'neither war nor peace'. Calculated escalations, localized strikes, inflammatory statements, and movements of military assets by sea and air provoke responses through indirect negotiations and regional and international mediations. This is a delicate strategy of managing relations, taking one step forward and two steps back, but the situation has not yet degenerated into open warfare. Why does Washington not want war now? The United States understands that any large-scale confrontation with Iran will not be a simple surgical operation. Iran is not an isolated country without leverage. Iran has a regional influence network, missile and drone capabilities, and exerts considerable influence on many fronts. A direct war would entail: • Strikes on strategic facilities in Iran. • Missile retaliations against American bases and interests. • The simultaneous eruption of several fronts. Moreover, the global priorities of the United States are numerous: a struggle for influence with China, a war in Ukraine, and energy and economic crises. A new war in the Middle East would mean an increased weakening of its resources, with uncertain consequences. Why does Tehran not want war? Iran is also not ready to commit strategic suicide. Its economy is weakened by sanctions, and its internal situation is precarious. A direct confrontation could severely damage its military and nuclear infrastructure and potentially trigger internal unrest. This is why Tehran favors a policy of 'indirect retaliation', using its regional allies as leverage without engaging in direct conflict. Thus, a fragile balance is maintained: controlled escalation with carefully calculated limits. What is Lebanon's place in this equation? Lebanon is at the very heart of these calculations. The presence of Hezbollah as an active military and political force integrates it into the Iranian deterrence network in the region. Consequently, any evolution of the US-Iranian confrontation will have a direct impact on Lebanon. The question is not whether Lebanon will be affected, but to what extent. Scenario 1: Continuation of the shadow war In this scenario, localized attacks and media tensions persist without escalating into open conflict. Hezbollah then maintains its policy of 'calculated engagement': • Keeping the front within certain limits. • Avoiding a large-scale war with Israel. • Using its influence without fully involving Lebanon. This scenario is the least costly domestically, but it keeps the country in a state of constant anxiety and delays any real economic or political stability. Investments remain hesitant, tourism is seasonal, and banks are paralyzed, caught between the hope of a breakthrough and the threat of collapse. Scenario 2: A large-scale confrontation If the decision to go to war is made, the entire region will enter a new era. There will be retaliatory strikes, cross-border missile fire, and potentially attacks on vital infrastructure. In this case, Hezbollah will face a critical dilemma: 1. A massive intervention in support of Iran: this would mean opening a major front with Israel and the risk of widespread destruction in Lebanon. 2. A limited and calculated intervention: symbolic strikes to save face and avoid total collapse. 3. A relative neutralization of the Lebanese front by an Iranian strategic decision, if the preservation of power is deemed more important than its use. The first option carries existential risks for Lebanon. Its economy, already in ruins, cannot withstand a new war, and its infrastructure is struggling to recover from accumulated crises. Reconstruction will not be easy, and society, exhausted, could experience a new wave of emigration. What about the Shiite community in Lebanon? Any war will disrupt the situation within the Shiite community itself. Some perceive the confrontation as part of a broader regional conflict, while others fear that Lebanon alone will bear the consequences. If the war is short and limited, it could strengthen the discourse of 'deterrence and resistance'. On the other hand, if it drags on and leads to massive destruction, it risks opening an internal debate about the relevance of associating Lebanon with regional issues. But it's too early to be certain. Political circles react to results, not forecasts. The Israeli factor Any confrontation is inseparable from Israel's calculations. Striking Hezbollah's military infrastructure constitutes a strategic objective, but Israel is also aware that a war against Lebanon would be far from a walk in the park. The experience of 2006 remains vivid in military memories. This is why Israel prefers localized strikes and gradual attrition to a total and uncertain war. Is a new agreement conceivable? The possibility of a US-Iranian understanding remains. A limited agreement on the nuclear issue or a lifting of sanctions in exchange for certain restrictions could ease tensions. In this case, détente would spill over into the regional scene, including Lebanon. Tensions would subside, and attention would refocus on internal issues. However, any agreement will remain fragile if it does not address the root causes of the conflict: regional influence, Israel's security, and Iran's ballistic missile program. Lebanon: the weakest link The fundamental problem is that Lebanon does not fully control decisions regarding war and peace. It suffers the consequences of decisions made outside its borders. In a context of economic collapse and recurrent constitutional voids, the country is even more vulnerable to regional upheavals. If war breaks out, it will not just be a military event, but also a political and social earthquake. This could raise major questions about Lebanon's position in conflicts, the limits of its role, and the future of Hezbollah's weapons in the international context. Between fate and probability At present, war does not seem inevitable. But it is not impossible either. We are facing a dangerous tug-of-war, marked by shows of force and exchanges of messages, but everyone is aware of the price of a major explosion. Lebanon, as always, is on the brink. It is unable to completely neutralize itself and is not prepared for a new conflict. Therefore, hope rests on international rationality and on the conviction that igniting the region will bring no decisive victory to any party, but will plunge everyone into a long spiral of chaos. The real question is not just: will war break out? Rather: does Lebanon have a plan to protect itself if it does? For now, the answer is as painful as it is obvious: preparations are made externally. While internally, people live in hope that the door will not be opened.

Since the Arab Spring of 2011, Libya has not been undergoing any unfinished transition, but has settled into a durable state of political dissolution. Far from paving the way for a reconstruction process, the brutal disappearance of Muammar Gaddafi's regime, on the contrary, triggered a long sequence of fragmentation, where armed violence progressively replaced the State as the principle of power organization, as in Sudan. This series offers a structural reading of the Libyan war as a stabilized and coherent system in itself, embedded in regional and international rivalries, and now capable of eliminating any political alternative that would not fit into its logic. From the moment Libya ceased to be an effective sovereign state, it became nothing more than an international object. Not a central issue, far from it, but an available space, open to indirect strategies, opportunistic investments, and influence games at a low political cost. The Libyan war is not prolonged despite the international order, but because of it , or, more precisely, due to its increasing fragmentation. The first illusion to dispel is that of a frontal competition between great powers for control of Libya. None of them genuinely seek to govern the country, nor even to durably stabilize its institutions. What is at stake is more diffuse: the exploitation of a void, the normalization of exception, and the acceptance of a “manageable” and “stable” conflict. Russia fully fits into this logic: in this sense, its involvement in Libya is neither ideological nor structuring in the classic sense, but pragmatic, modular, reversible. Through paramilitary networks, advisors, and implicit security agreements, Moscow secures strongholds, levers of nuisance, and a disproportionate capacity for influence compared to its real investment. Libya indeed offers Russia several simultaneous advantages, as it allows for projecting a presence in the Mediterranean without massive official commitment and also provides a training and testing ground for hybrid devices. Finally, it constitutes a space where the weakening of the Western normative framework becomes visible and exploitable. Every blocked resolution, every ineffective ceasefire, every aborted political process contributes to establishing the idea that the liberal international order is no longer capable of imposing constraints outside its immediate perimeter. In fact, Russian strategy has no need for a victory stricto sensu . It aims for the durability of instability, an ideal condition for a power that seeks less to administer than to exert influence - as was more or less the case in Syria. A pacified Libya would be a normed, framed, less accessible space. A fragmented Libya is, on the contrary, a flexible playground. A godsend for Moscow. The case of China China, for its part, adopts a radically different but equally structuring posture. Beijing intervenes neither militarily nor politically in a visible manner, and adheres to its doctrine of non-interference, avoiding sharp positions, while maintaining open channels with all actors. But one should not be mistaken: this apparent neutrality is not an absence of strategy. It merely reflects a long-term calculation, in the pure tradition of the Chinese dragon, attentive, patient, and resilient. Moreover, for China, Libya is a space of potential interest, without being an immediate theater of projection. Resources, infrastructure, and geographical position indeed matter more than the current political configuration. Thus, Beijing can afford to wait, true to itself. As long as the conflict does not hinder its essential interests, the status quo is acceptable to it. Fragmentation, in this sense, does not constitute a problem for it, but a transitional state compatible with future economic integration, when conditions are met. This positioning has a major indirect effect, inasmuch as it neutralizes any dynamic of international constraint. In the absence of a consensus among powers capable of imposing real costs, declarations, symbolic sanctions, and UN processes lose their deterrent capacity - as is the case in all territories transformed into festering sores. Here, as everywhere in the current world configuration, international law flounders outside of grand principles. Iran rubs its hands together Without being a central actor in the Libyan issue, Iran, for its part, has benefited so far, as in Sudan, from this configuration, since each lasting peripheral conflict contributes to the dispersion of Western attention, to the erosion of pressure capacities, and to the normalization of entanglement. For Libya, like other theaters, contributes to an international environment where the multiplication of crises makes each of them more difficult to deal with decisively. Iran does not need to be present to profit from this dynamic: it simply needs the international order to be busy elsewhere, fragmented and unable to prioritize. Libya thus becomes a satellite conflict, whose very existence contributes to a global strategic blurring. “Create their many Vietnams,” Guevara said. Tehran doesn’t even need to do it. The mullahs’ regime watches and rubs its hands together. A disunited and hesitant West Faced with this, the West appears disunited, hesitant, structurally weakened. The United States oscillates between disengagement and minimal management. After the 2011 intervention, no political investment commensurate with its consequences was therefore made. Libya has thus become a secondary issue, managed intermittently and without a long-term vision. Priorities have shifted. Ukraine, the Middle East, Israel and Iranian nuclear issues, the Indo-Pacific and Latin America now relegate Libya to the background. Europe, for its part, has never spoken with one voice. Chronic and habitual divergences between member states, energy interests, and migratory concerns have prevented the emergence of a coherent strategy. The stabilization of Libya is regularly invoked, but rarely considered as a demanding political project. The “European misfortune,” with its multi-speed diplomacy, in all its splendor… This combination of Western withdrawal and opportunistic engagement by non-Western powers is not without producing a cumulative effect: Libya becomes a strategic blind spot, too unstable to be integrated, but also still manageable enough to be treated as an absolute emergency. In this context, diplomatic processes follow one another, but without ever modifying the fundamental parameters: international conferences are fond of communiqués, nothing more, and ceasefires succeed one another like tactical pauses, with no horizon of a lasting solution. As for unity governments, they are temporary arrangements, devoid of coercive levers… and thus ideal for managing the continuity of the conflict, since no one has an interest in ending it. It is clear that Libya does not suffer from an excess of contradictory interference, but from a global tacit convergence towards the acceptance of instability. Each actor finds, in the short or medium term, sufficient interest to avoid a radical reset. Libya bleeds, yes, but with the blessing, if not a certain sadistic satisfaction, of all parties. Seif al-Islam: the assassination that closes the field of possibilities The assassination of Seif al-Islam Gaddafi, on February 3, 2026, nevertheless marks a certain silent, but decisive, rupture in the bloody conflict. Until his death, Seif al-Islam occupied a paradoxical position: politically neutralized, legally challenged, militarily without his own apparatus, but symbolically available. His mere existence maintained the hypothesis, however fragile, of a third path: neither the continuation of the militia system, nor authoritarian restoration based on regional balances, but a form of reinterpreted continuity, capable of capturing a still vivid social memory. This option was not mainstream, and probably not viable, but it still existed as a latent variable in the Libyan “system,” and forced armed actors, regional patrons, and external powers to contend with an additional uncertainty: that of a return of politics through the detour of the past. The son kept alive the specter of a return to the father’s “order.” Seif al-Islam’s elimination closes this breach. In this context, it is more than a man who was assassinated. It is the illusion of the eternal return to the “mythical golden age” maintained by all dictatorial dynasties. But, beyond that, this murder also says something fundamental about contemporary Libya, inasmuch as it confirms that the political field there is no longer simply constrained by violence, but is delimited by it. Any figure likely to introduce a symbolic recomposition escaping the existing armed balances becomes, by definition, incompatible with the “system.” Seif al-Islam did not directly threaten any camp militarily. The threat he posed was much deeper: he introduced a dissonance and a possibility of rupture, even regressive, in an order based on controlled fragmentation. His disappearance does not, however, cause an immediate shift and does not redistribute the cards of power. It does, however, produce something more lasting. In this case, a confirmation that post-2011 Libya can no longer be thought of as an open transitional space. It is a locked territory where only configurations based on force, regional alliances, and external interests are tolerated. With the liquidation of Seif al-Islam, the past can no longer be mobilized as a political resource, and the future is no longer negotiable outside of armed power relations. In this sense, his assassination acts as a final revelation, as it confirms that the Libyan war is not just a prolonged conflict, but it is a stabilized system, capable of eliminating any alternative that would not fit into its logic. This is where the cursed cycle that began in 2011 closes. Instead of paving the way for the long-awaited blossoming of spring, the fall of Muammar Gaddafi inaugurated an era where sovereignty itself proved impossible with the disappearance of the Leviathan - and, ironically, the ultimate confirmation of this reality lies in the elimination of his son. Rather than moving towards reconstruction and democracy, Libya has become a territory administered by default and maintained in a form of conflicted but agreed-upon equilibrium. Yet, peace is not impossible there. It is, more cynically, incompatible with the rationalities currently at play, a victim of the cold cynicism of realpolitik. As long as no one has an interest in it, will Libya remain nothing more than another brutal laboratory of contemporary conflict? And the Libyans, in all this? “The Libyans? Well, too bad for them!” Read on the same theme: 2011 or Libya in the post-state era (1/5) The Libyan conflict: an excessive “militiarization” of politics (2/5) “Two Libyas” and an elusive sovereignty (3/5) Libya, a regional festering sore (4/5)