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While diplomats debate Libya's political future in air-conditioned conference rooms, The persistent fragility of the country's expansive southern region poses significant risks not only to Libya itself, but also to neighboring states, most notably those within the African Sahel. The Fezzan region, spanning one-third of Libya's territory, has become a black hole of governance where state authority has collapsed, armed groups proliferate, and transnational crime networks operate with impunity. The numbers paint a devastating picture. In the Fezzan, 67% of households require humanitarian assistance—the highest rate in Libya. Nearly half resort to crisis-level survival strategies, selling productive assets or forgoing medical care. Youth unemployment reaches 52% in some areas, creating a generation with no stake in stability. Chronic electricity outages last up to 20 hours daily. Maternal mortality rates soar as 73% of health facilities operate only partially, forcing women to deliver at home or travel 150 kilometers for basic care. But these aren't just statistics, they represent the daily reality of 600,000 people whose suffering has been systematically ignored. Tebu and Tuareg communities face entrenched discrimination, denied citizenship and documentation that locks them out of political life and economic opportunity. The region that produces up to 30% of Libya's oil receives a fraction of the investment, fueling resentment that armed groups eagerly exploit. Dismissing the Fezzan as a remote problem would be a catastrophic miscalculation. This region is critical to Libya's survival and a critical node in a network of crises spanning from the Mediterranean to the Horn of Africa. The Sharara and El-Feel fields alone contribute significantly to the national budget. Disrupt the Great Man-Made River aquifers beneath the southern desert, and you cut off water and electricity to Tripoli and Benghazi. The stakes couldn't be higher. Beyond Libya's borders, the Fezzan has become a superhighway for every threat imaginable. Arms flowing through its 2,700 kilometers of porous borders fuel conflicts killing thousands across the Sahel. Fuel smuggling networks worth billions empower jihadist groups in Niger and Mali. The ongoing war in Sudan has transformed southeastern Libya into a corridor for mercenary mobilization, with fighters and weapons flowing toward conflicts in Ethiopia and Somalia. For Europe, the Fezzan region functions as a pivotal hub and transit point for irregular migration. The migration dynamics in Fezzan are shaped by a complex interplay of local, regional, and international factors, and while its role is central, it must be understood within the broader network of migratory routes and influences. Notably, Fezzan remains the primary entry point for human trafficking networks that contribute to humanitarian crises along Mediterranean migration pathways. From the perspective of the African Union, Fezzan represents the intersection of Sahelian instability and North African fragility, posing the risk of igniting a crisis with the potential to surpass current regional conflicts. The good news is that stabilization is achievable. The bad news is that it requires abandoning failed approaches and embracing comprehensive, locally driven solutions. First, governance must be restored through concrete legislative action. Libya needs a Southern Development Act establishing a Fezzan Stabilization Authority with real budgets and clear mandates. Local councils require fiscal autonomy and constitutional guarantees of representation, including reserved parliamentary seats and cabinet positions for the region. Tebu and Tuareg communities must finally receive the citizenship and documentation they've been systematically denied. Second, security sector reform cannot wait. A phased disarmament and reintegration program must offer armed group members real alternatives—vocational training, economic opportunities, and dignified futures. Border security requires a critical number of locally recruited guards equipped with modern technology, not corrupt checkpoints that facilitate the very trafficking they're meant to stop. Most critically, Libya needs tripartite border compacts with Niger and Chad for joint patrols and intelligence sharing. Third, economic revitalization must dismantle the war economy. A resource revenue-sharing law should guarantee that 20-25% of southern oil proceeds are reinvested locally through transparent formulas. Free economic zones in Sabha and Kufra can formalize cross-border trade, removing incentives for smuggling. Infrastructure investments—roads, solar plants, agribusiness—must create 5,000 jobs immediately, with targeted support for women and minority communities. Fourth, basic services must be restored to rebuild trust in the state. Quick-impact projects can rehabilitate roads, modernize water systems, and ensure 25% of national health budgets reach southern facilities. Every day of delay entrenches the cycle of violence and predation. Foreign fighters consolidate control. Criminal networks expand their operations. Young people lose hope and join militias. The international community faces a critical strategic choice: to invest in comprehensive stabilization through political engagement—rather than financial aid, given Libya’s high-income status—or to risk the exponentially greater costs of future state collapse. Failure to act invites the exploitation of power vacuums by criminal actors, potentially leading to humanitarian crises, military interventions, and regional conflict proliferation. It is therefore imperative that the European Union, African Union, United States, and United Nations elevate the Fezzan from a peripheral concern to a collective security priority requiring coordinated action. International partners must align their efforts with Libyan-led frameworks, offering technical expertise and diplomatic backing for difficult reforms. This transition requires a shift from piecemeal interventions toward comprehensive development programs targeting the structural root causes of fragility. While the challenges facing the Fezzan are significant, they are not insurmountable; with sustained political will and a commitment to inclusive governance, the region can be transformed from a security liability into a cornerstone of a stable and prosperous Libya. However, this transformation requires the abandonment of "quick fix" illusions or military-centric solutions. Lasting stability depends on the rigorous work of building legitimate institutions and fostering economic opportunity. The inhabitants of the Fezzan have historically endured resource extraction and systemic violence while remaining excluded from the decision-making processes that govern their future. Ultimately, the stakes of this engagement extend beyond the region; the recovery of the Libyan state, Mediterranean security, and the stability of the Sahel are all intrinsically linked to the trajectory of the Fezzan.

It must be stated plainly, without equivocation: one of the recurring blind spots of Western democracies lies in their relationship to time. Democratic time—defined by alternation, electoral urgency, limited mandates, and the constant need to produce visible results within a short horizon—is indeed a rhythmic, segmented, fractured time… and therefore a fragile one. By nature, it is impatient, perpetually searching for exits, compromises, and provisional stabilizations. It clings to the belief, rooted in a teleological and almost gnostic conception of History, that history itself can be bent through goodwill, negotiation, and shared rationality. That it inevitably advances in the right direction. Totalitarian time, by contrast, never plays the same score. It is neither hurried, nor linear, nor subjected to the ordeal of suffrage. On the contrary, it is freed from all such constraints, which it considers futile. It is a long, obsessive, telluric time. A time devoted to the preservation of power at any cost. The Iranian regime is one of its most accomplished incarnations. It exists outside the democratic calendar, far removed from popular sanction, and even beyond ordinary moral temporality. It can wait, retreat, feign, and temporize at will. It understands that the essential thing is not to convince, but to endure. By any means necessary. It is this asymmetry that the current hesitations of the Trump administration vis-à-vis Tehran once again reveal, despite themselves. Not that Trump should “strike” Iran, nor even seek direct military confrontation. That would most likely offer the clerical regime exactly what it has always awaited: a posture of victimhood, nationalist mobilization, and the sanctification of power through the figure of the external enemy. The “Great Satan” has always been a convenient foil. It would also mean continuing a logic of international bullying and opening Pandora’s box, risking a generalized escalation. Such force has never resolved anything in the long run. The danger lies elsewhere. It resides in the illusion that a regime founded on duplicity, structural repression, and the ideological export of violence could transform itself through dialogue, gradual integration, or the promise of international recognition. Since at least 2008, and even more so since the wave of brutal repression of recent weeks—marked by massive civilian casualties—it has become clear that this regime negotiates solely to gain time. Time to rebuild its forces. Time to pursue its nuclear and ballistic programs. Time to continue financing, arming, and instrumentalizing militias within an imperial logic that has never wavered. The dark and immobile time of despotism is its ally; democratic time is its prey. Here, all moral ambiguity must be lifted. Just as Benjamin Netanyahu will sooner or later have to answer for the crimes committed in Gaza, the Iranian ruling apparatus must be held accountable for the methodical, continuous, and massive repression inflicted upon its own people. This is not a facile or lazy comparison, but a principle: no regime can indefinitely exempt itself from law and justice under the pretext of sovereignty or geopolitical complexity. Even in a disordered world reduced to spheres of influence abandoned to megalomaniacs of all kinds, renouncing this principle would mean definitively legitimizing chaos as the foundational pillar of the international order. Even in a world marked by a general regression toward pre-, or even anti-democratic forms, indifferent to the time of international law and its demands. The clerical regime is out of time in every sense of the term. Out of democratic time, which it despises; out of moral time, which it tramples; out of historical time itself, insofar as its project rests on a rigid, monolithic, sclerotic political theology, incapable of producing anything other than violence and death in order to sustain itself. To demand anything other than its departure and the dismantling of its martial being in all its ramifications would constitute a major strategic error, if not an act of complicity. Experience has demonstrated this cruelly with the 2015 agreement under Barack Obama: the idea of Iran’s return to the international community under this very regime—championed by a Washington-based Iranian elite bordering on bad faith—was not only an illusion, but worse still, a destructive utopia. It strengthened the hardliners, weakened internal forces of transformation, and provided the regime with the financial and political means to pursue its imperial enterprise. How much blood has been spilled over the past decade because of these naïve utopias stubbornly clung to by a handful of mythomaniacs or cynical actors devoid of any moral compass! More gravely still, such a negotiation would constitute a profound moral failure. A silent betrayal of all the blood that has been shed; of those who, for years, have taken to the streets of Iran knowing that the price of their courage could be death, torture, or erasure itself. A failure that will inevitably rebound upon those in the United States or Europe who still claim to defend humanist and democratic values—yet who have so often looked away in the past from the suffering of subjugated peoples. If a regime is no longer capable of governing its people except by crushing them, then it no longer possesses any legitimacy. Why re-infuse it? In the name of realism? By wielding the carrot and the stick in this manner, without fixed points of reference—namely, the primacy of human life and the freedom of peoples—Trump sends yet another paradoxical message about American power: that it is, in fact, a non-power, whose interventions oscillate, devoid of any values, between brute force (the abduction of Maduro, the handling of the Greenland affair), complicit silence (Gaza), weakness (Ukraine), and now, murky compromise (Iran). Certainly—and this is a fundamental flaw of the post-1945 international system—the UN “machinery” is more than ever confined to the role of a stunned spectator in the face of conflicts and massacres, indefinitely paralyzed by rival power interests. Bernard Kouchner’s famous “duty to intervene,” supposedly meant to operationalize it? According to which norms, which mechanisms, which tools? The mystery remains. American unilateralism, with its double standards and partial agendas? European multilateralism, which waited until 2026 to tentatively place the Revolutionary Guards on the sanctions list? The question itself breeds profound confusion… and yet more chaos. Be that as it may, and to remain firmly grounded in practical reality, the only possible “discussion,” the only one commensurate with reality, must concern the departure of Khamenei and his vast repressive, death-driven, martyr-obsessed apparatus, and the abolition of the vilayat-e faqih , the ideological and institutional matrix of this totalitarianism. The dignity of the victims of recent weeks demands no less. Anything short of this would merely constitute yet another episode in the same cycle of blindness, a repetition of history masquerading as realism. Worse still, it would offer the clerics and their regional satellites a new delirious Pyrrhic victory… at the expense of their own citizens, as usual. Trump and his companions would do well to remember this. The time Iran pretends to request is never a time of reform; it is always a time of predation, always that of a ticking time bomb. From Riyadh to Washington, one wonders whether cynical strategists have ever read the story of Little Red Riding Hood and her fatal fascination with dialogues with wolves disguised as grandmothers. And whether they have ever heard the grim refrain of Leonard Cohen’s testament-song, You Want It Darker : A million candles burning for the help that never came / You want it darker; we kill the flame.

When one delves into the evolution of the Iraqi situation since the spring of 2003, the date marking the fall of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist family regime as a result of an American war waged by the United States, one can then understand a specific stance adopted by President Donald Trump. It is a negative stance toward the return of Nouri al-Maliki to the post of prime minister, a position he was forced to relinquish in 2014. The issue is less about an Iraqi politician as such than about, on the one hand, the symbolism embodied by Nouri al-Maliki and, on the other, an American decision to reclaim Iraq from Iran. The American position must be understood in light of Iran’s retreat in the region. There is a reality that cannot be ignored: the “Islamic Republic” has lost all the wars it waged on the margins of the Gaza war, including the war in southern Lebanon and the war to preserve the Alawite regime in Syria. If one sets aside the Houthis in Yemen and their control over most of the country’s north, including Sanaa and the port of Hodeidah, Iran has no genuine leverage left other than Iraq. What, then, prevents the United States from reclaiming Iraq from Iran, after having handed it over on a silver platter twenty-three years ago? It appears that Trump seeks revenge for the American failure for which the administration of George W. Bush was responsible. A resounding failure, stemming from an administration that decided to invade Iraq without planning for the post-Saddam era and the consequences that would follow. The Bush administration failed to grasp that sectarian parties and militias loyal to Iran could not produce democratic systems capable of serving as models for the region. Ultimately, the Iraqi system established after 2003 has done nothing but drive a large segment of Iraqis to long nostalgically for the bloody and backward regime of Saddam Hussein. Saddam left no mistake uncommitted from the moment he monopolized power in the summer of 1979, when he eliminated his predecessor Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr and anyone whose loyalty to him he even remotely questioned. Despite this, there are those today who lament Saddam Hussein, who did not content himself with fighting the eight-year war against Iran, which had assumed he would be an easy target. In fact, by declaring war on the “Islamic Republic,” Saddam fell into an Iranian trap, as Ayatollah Khomeini in 1980 was seeking an external enemy through which to rally Iranians around national solidarity. Time passed, and Saddam committed another fatal error by invading Kuwait in the summer of 1990. That, however, was not sufficient reason for George W. Bush to decide to hand Iraq over to Iran, under the pretext of the September 11, 2001 attacks carried out by Al-Qaeda under the leadership of Osama bin Laden. Yet the logic of illogic embraced by the Bush administration led it to Iraq, despite the absence of any link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. It was logical for America to pursue Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, where bin Laden was based. Conversely, it was illogical to go to Iraq, in a gamble that cost the United States dearly. Does Trump, in 2026, seek to correct the misguided course taken in the aftermath of September 11, 2001? From this starting point, namely the invasion of Iraq in a war whose sole victor was Iran, Donald Trump has decided to put an end to Iran’s expansionist project. The American invasion of Iraq was the new launchpad for that project. Consequently, Trump has no option but to reclaim Iraq from Iran if he is to achieve his objective. This is the meaning of his opposition to Nouri al-Maliki returning as prime minister, the most powerful man in Iraq under the system that has governed the country since the 2003 earthquake and the constitution it produced. There is no joking with Donald Trump since he tore up the nuclear agreement with Iran during his first presidential term in 2018, followed by the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, in Baghdad at the beginning of 2020. Soleimani was not a marginal figure; he was the de facto ruler of Iraq, whose orders were not open to debate. It is becoming increasingly clear that Donald Trump is not Barack Obama, who in 2010 struck a deal with Iran that kept Nouri al-Maliki in the prime minister’s post, even though the largest parliamentary bloc resulting from that year’s elections was that of Iyad Allawi, generally accepted in the Arab world. Iran sidelined Iyad Allawi, despite his constitutional right at the time to become prime minister. In 2026, it is natural for Iraq to seek a new prime minister who reflects the new regional reality. It is even more natural that this prime minister be of a different kind altogether, far removed from Nouri al-Maliki and his sectarian zeal, or from Mohammed Shia al-Sudani. Al-Sudani has never managed to be a prime minister equidistant from all Iraqis, regardless of sect, community, or ethnicity. In other words, regional developments compel Iraq to emerge from Iranian domination, just as Syria did at the end of 2024. Is it too much to ask that Iraq have a prime minister for all Iraqis, Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Shiites, Sunnis, and what remains of Christians and Yazidis? Has the existence of such a prime minister become an Iraqi dream? That dream may not be far-fetched, especially if Donald Trump completes the task of ending Iran’s grip on Iraq, and if he remembers that those who rule Iraq today would never have reached their positions were it not for the American tanks.

Analytical focus on the war in Sudan which, since 2023, has already resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and millions of displaced people, with a particularly overwhelming human cost in Darfur, where mass violence, sieges and forced displacement have taken on a dimension that many international actors now qualify as genocidal. Analyzing the Sudanese war according to the parameters of a conflict confined to the national territorial space would be aberrant, as the country's geography is a structuring factor. A Red Sea littoral state, backed by the Horn of Africa and located in immediate proximity to the Arabian Peninsula, Sudan occupies a strategic position that makes it particularly vulnerable to regional power projections. For a decade, the Red Sea has become an area of active competition again. Trade routes, maritime security, control of migratory flows, ports, military and logistical bases overlap there. The Yemen conflict, for example, is one of its most manifest expressions. So is the Sudan crisis. In this narrow but decisive space, the growing rivalry between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, long masked by a rhetoric of strategic coordination, has gradually crystallized. Sudan is one of the theaters where this rivalry takes a particularly brutal form. The Emirates have favored an indirect approach, based on networks, non-state armed actors, parallel economic circuits, and logistical hubs. Repeated accusations of supporting the RSF, which Abu Dhabi officially denies, are part of this logic. The trade in Sudanese gold, the routes passing through Chad and eastern Libya, access to Gulf markets and infrastructure form a coherent whole that allows the RSF to maintain their war effort despite sanctions and international condemnation. This approach does not necessarily aim for the military victory of the RSF, but for their ability to endure, to remain an indispensable actor, and to prevent any stabilization that would not go through their networks. War thus becomes a lever of influence and a means to weigh on the regional architecture without exposing oneself frontally. Conversely, Riyadh favors a more classic logic of state stabilization. Support for the Sudanese army, often coordinated with Egypt, aims to contain the collapse of a Red Sea littoral state, to secure maritime routes, to limit uncontrolled migratory flows, and to prevent a lasting space of chaos from settling opposite Saudi coasts — because Cairo also supports the SAF with the aim of maintaining a state lock to the south against armed fragmentation dynamics and competing interferences — notably Emirati and Iranian — likely to challenge the security of the Nile and the regional strategic balance. A regional festering sore But if this approach is less flexible and more institutional, it is also more politically costly. The divergence between these two doctrines thus directly fuels the entrenchment of the conflict. Each Sudanese camp becomes the local relay of a distinct regional rationality, without either of the patrons having an interest in a clear victory likely to reconfigure the general balance. The Sudanese conflict then becomes a management file, not a problem to be solved. A kind of regional festering sore. To this regional rivalry is added a more discreet but decisive layer: that of Russia and China. Certainly, neither Moscow nor Beijing play a direct patronage role in the Sudanese conflict. Their influence is exerted elsewhere, in the background of the international system, by creating the conditions for a lasting entrenchment. Russia adopts an opportunistic stance. Without engaging frontally, it benefits from a weakening of the international normative framework. Every blockage in the Security Council, every watered-down sanction, every legal debate without operational translation contributes to establishing the precedent of an international order incapable of producing binding effects. China, for its part, favors a silent and economic approach. Sudan remains for Beijing an area of long-term interest, both for its resources and for its position on maritime routes connecting Asia, Africa, and Europe. True to its doctrine of non-interference, China avoids any strong political condemnation and accommodates a conflicting status quo as long as its essential interests are not directly threatened.   This Russo-Chinese positioning neutralizes any prospect of real international constraint. Legal qualifications, including that of genocide recognized by the United States, thus remain without operational translation. International law exists, but it no longer produces strategic rupture. Welcome to the global disorder of the 21st century. Read also on the same topic:  The Collapse of Sudan: The War for War (1/4)    Next article - Iran and its indirect war in Sudan (3/4)

Lokman Slim was not an opponent in the conventional sense, nor a partisan activist seeking power or position. At the core of his experience, he was an intellectual who chose to pay the full price for his convictions, confronting the system of oppression not from outside, but from within its social environment, through its prevailing narratives and the rhetoric it sought to claim as its own. His assassination thus appeared, from the very first moment, as a symbolic killing before it was a classic crime, a political message before it became a personal liquidation. Lokman Slim was born into a Shia environment from which he never detached himself. Yet he refused to allow it to become an ideological prison or a reductive identity. Early on, he understood that the true danger to a community does not come so much from outside as from the suppression of its right to critique, and the transformation of that community into a closed bloc governed by fear and enforced loyalty. His conflict with Hezbollah, therefore, was not a mere political disagreement, but an existential clash between those who see politics as an open space for debate and accountability, and those who regard it as a closed doctrine, protected by arms. Together with his sister Rasha, Lokman Slim founded Dar al-Jadid publishing, and with his wife Monika Borgman, the UMAM Documentation and Research association, placing memory at the heart of his struggle. He had long recognized that domination is exercised not only through military force, but also by controlling narratives, neutralizing inconvenient facts, and rewriting history to serve an authoritarian present. This is why he devoted himself to documenting the civil war, violations, and assassinations – not to exhume the past, but to protect the future from a repetition of the same violence under new names, particularly under the guise of reconciliation with memory. Lokman Slim stood out as an exception in the Lebanese cultural scene, accustomed to equivocation. He did not hide behind a polished discourse, follow prevailing opinion, or seek semantic compromises. He stated clearly that weapons outside state control were a national disaster, that linking Lebanon’s fate to an Iranian-led regional project was political suicide, and transforming the Shia community into a “resistance” bloc violated its members’ right to dissent. In an environment governed by accusations of treachery and political heresy, these positions made him a constant target of threats and defamation, before ultimately leading to his assassination. In this context, his engagement in structured political action was neither a luxury nor a departure from his cultural role. It stemmed from his understanding of the limits of words alone and the need to embed them within a collective framework capable of protecting them and turning them into concrete action. This led him to found the Lebanese Democrats’ Coalition, an attempt to establish a sovereigntist, cross-confessional democratic opposition that rejects both the logic of weapons and that of clientelism, and which links the concept of the state to justice and accountability rather than to sectarian power-sharing. After his assassination, the coalition did not become a mere symbolic memory. Since I assumed its leadership, it has entered a challenging phase of consolidating its political action. Efforts were thus made to embed this political choice as an organized action, rather than reducing it to a moral slogan. As president, I have sought to translate Lokman Slim’s intellectual legacy into a clear political program: a sovereigntist and democratic discourse, uncompromising on the question of weapons, rejecting populism, and addressing Lebanon’s collapse with a view to rebuilding the state rather than managing disaster. Lokman Slim’s assassination did not mark the end of a process, but a moment of truth. It highlighted the scale of the violence inherent in the informal system that governs Lebanon, as well as the fragility of the state and its inability to protect its citizens in all their diversity. It also showed that attempts to silence a voice do not erase the idea it carries, but place those who defend it under the responsibility of ensuring its continuity by other means – this time political and organizational – as the coalition sought to do since the assassination. In his struggle, Lokman Slim was never an isolated, elitist voice. He constantly sought to bridge the gap between thought and politics, culture and society. He did not address the West in search of legitimacy, nor did he adopt a condescending tone towards his own community. On the contrary, he confronted it from within, asserting its right to be more than a mere human reservoir for others’ projects. This is what made his struggle so painful for his adversaries: it stripped them of their claim to exclusive representation and exposed the fragility of their discourse when confronted with argument rather than slogans. Years after his assassination, Lokman Slim cannot be reduced to the image of a victim or martyr. His true value lies in the model he embodied, that of the uncompromising intellectual who refused to separate ethics from politics and who would not remain passive in the face of his country’s collapse. He left us a heavy legacy, not only in his books and archives, but also in the questions that remain: can a state be built under the threat of weapons it does not control? Can pluralism be preserved in a climate of fear? And can memory itself constitute a form of resistance? Lokman Slim may not have achieved victory in his lifetime, but his struggle made defeat harder and silence impossible. He opened a rift in the narrative of power – a rift that no attempt at denial could ever heal. In itself, this constitutes a form of victory.

Fourteen years ago, on February 1, 2012, former MP and minister Nassib Lahoud passed away. In these times when populism is wreaking havoc across the world, and Lebanon seems, once again, to have been a forerunner of the current wave, it feels necessary to evoke the memory of a man who, over the last three decades, carried and defended another vision, another practice of politics. All the more so in Lebanon, where gregarious passions naturally propel either the exalted “historic leader” or the disenchanted utilitarian fox draped in the rags of sectarianism, rather than composed statesmen with modern ideas and a deep, strategic understanding of public affairs. Everywhere, in the Old World as in the New, a traditional leadership rooted in fear, enclosure and ethnocentric identitarianism now prevails over the language of openness, moderation and adherence to the values that once underpinned both the dignity of the human person and the very idea of an international community animated by the ideal of an order not founded on brute force, but on solidarity, justice, law and peace. How utopian all of this appears today. In the Land of Cedars, the regression is even more spectacular, given the forms of pre-state allegiance, from clanism and feudalism to theocratic militia rule, all of it seasoned with the necessary dose of communitarianism meant to soothe the ontological anxieties of one and all. Duplicity dominates everywhere, including among the narcissistic predators who piously claim the banners of modernity and progressivism while merely reproducing, beneath their pseudo-reformist discourse, the familiar patterns of a traditionalism ossified in the sclerosis of nepotism, complete with its ancestral cargo of corruption, vices and lies. The habit does not make the monk, still less the statesman, and political babble still has bright days ahead. In this long, very long political night, far from fading among the ghosts of memory, a figure like Nassib Lahoud, with his calm, lucidity, measure, rigor, institutional sense, panache, elegance and nobility, continues to shine brilliantly and to show the way. For Nassib Lahoud was not a political leader like the others. He belonged to that exceedingly rare category who represented a model, a project for the future. A genuine wager in a country that prefers to surrender to a cynical political realism, dismissing as unrealistic all those who refuse to confuse politics with cunning, power with brutality, and the state with its simulacrum. And yet, Nassib Lahoud was no dreamer. No more than Raymond Eddé, Albert Moukheiber, Fouad Boutros, Samir Frangieh, Hassan Rifai or Michel al-Khoury, to name only a few. His fundamental defect? He escaped the “political norms” inherited from the dislocation of the Lebanese state, from war, and from a voluntary servitude to the strongest, or the highest bidder. He needed no spectacular outbursts, no sonic occupation of the public sphere, no hordes of supporters eager to surrender body and soul in order to fill a pathological craving for power and recognition. Nassib Lahoud was a dense presence, never invasive; an authority that did not seek to impose itself, because it had nothing to prove. His values spoke for him. His view of the human being, his ambition to restore the state, and his understanding of leadership as commanding by serving citizens rather than dominating them, made him a natural leader. He did not need to ground his legitimacy in feats of war, in tasteless little glories stained with blood. It is worth recalling this at a time when the past and its demons continue to poison the Lebanese political discourse, as though authority could be established in no other way than through fragmented, disjointed memories. Yes, Nassib Lahoud belonged to that rare breed of men for whom politics was not a theatre, but an inner discipline. A stance. A restraint, even. Against loud virility and martial posturing, he embraced the path he had chosen: measure as strength, slowness as virtue, precision as morality. Each word was weighed out of a sense of gravity and responsibility. In truth, Nassib Lahoud respected the political space because he respected others. He respected his country too: its fragilities, its unstable balances, its irreducible pluralism, its sovereignty, its freedoms. The experience of war taught him, early on, that Lebanon would not survive men in a hurry, nor men intoxicated with certainties, nor venal sellers of the homeland, weak and corruptible; still less men convinced they embodied destiny. Lebanon, to endure, needed arbiters more than chiefs, guardians more than conquerors. It needed a state capable of saying no, even to its own camps, and a unifying presidency, able to govern and arbitrate with the authority of the Constitution, without apoplectic displays, without power games. That is why Nassib Lahoud was a statesman in the full, almost classical sense of the term. He belonged to that minority in Lebanon who could think sovereignty without hysteria, reform without resentment, identity without rigidity. His “Lebanism” was neither incantation nor fetish. It rested on a goldsmith’s equilibrium between freedom and rule, diversity and unity, Arab openness and national autonomy. A mature Lebanese identity, freed from complexes and fantasies, delivered from the fevers that had eaten away at the national being for decades, to the point of destruction, subjugation, shame… almost to disappearance. In that sense, his political “failure”, should it be considered as one, was not merely his. It was the failure of the “system” which, at every decisive fork, chose to heed the sirens rather than common sense. How could it have been otherwise in a country where emotional mobilization has inevitably been favored over institutional construction, and where force, tempered with hypocrisy, has always been the means by which each community, and behind it each individual, exists in the face of another, real or imagined? Nassib Lahoud was not pushed aside because he lacked clarity. He simply had too much of it for a political class already engaged in its own moral abdication. From a distance, his figure may appear almost anachronistic. And yet it is searingly topical. At a time of generalized collapse, state disintegration, and institutions devoured by pre-state or predatory logics, we miss Nassib Lahoud precisely because he offered no miracle solutions, but a compass: an ethics of decision, a demanding idea of public office as service. Reference points. Lebanon today suffers from a deficit of character and values. That is the endemic disease. Nassib Lahoud belonged to that rare lineage where politics is precisely a matter of character, in the almost ancient sense of the word: coherence between what one thinks, what one says, and what one does. In other words, a fidelity to oneself that is not narcissistic or pathological, but structuring. It has often been said, after his death, that he was “the president Lebanon never had.” That is true. But it is more serious than that. He was the kind of president who terrified everyone: the mob, the warlords, the gutter-politics crowd, and the great “realists” who, out of convenience, prefer to anoint mediocrity. And perhaps that is, in the end, our heaviest collective responsibility. Be that as it may, Nassib Lahoud leaves us this silent, almost severe lesson: that of a man who preferred to lose rather than betray his idea of the state. In a country where one too often wins by renouncing oneself, that lesson, the finest of all, the lesson of the “beautiful loser,” continues to unsettle. And so much the better.