Articles

The threats issued by the Houthis in Yemen against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and maritime traffic serving its ports have neither political nor military prospects. It is simply impossible for the Houthis to carry out their threats to impose a blockade on Saudi ports. In reality, through their grandiose but hollow rhetoric, the Houthis have squandered the opportunity to become a full participant in Yemen’s political process, a process aimed at reaching a political settlement that excludes no party. By openly aligning themselves with the Islamic Republic, they have effectively removed themselves from that political process. They have demonstrated, quite simply, that they are Iranians rather than Yemenis, and that any hope they might regain even a minimum sense of national consciousness was always misplaced. Such expectations amounted to nothing more than a waste of time.

Since the end of the July 2006 war, Lebanese observers and foreign analysts alike have tended to measure Hezbollah’s strength by the number of missiles it possessed, the size of its arsenal, or its ability to threaten Israel. Today, however, events call for an entirely different yardstick. The question is no longer how many weapons the group still retains, but whether it remains capable of rebuilding the military strength it spent more than four decades constructing. This lies at the heart of the current phase. Following the meeting between Lebanese President General Joseph Aoun and U.S. President Donald Trump, the sustained U.S. diplomatic engagement that preceded and followed it, the negotiations underway in Rome, and the increasingly persistent discussion surrounding the expansion of the Lebanese Army’s deployment and the linkage between reconstruction and the restoration of the Lebanese state’s authority over security decisions, it has become increasingly clear that the international approach no longer seeks simply to disarm Hezbollah through political agreement or military action. Instead, it aims to make the reconstitution of its military capabilities increasingly difficult, if not impossible.

For more than 11 consecutive days, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been subjected every night to intensive U.S. strikes and raids targeting Revolutionary Guard positions, military infrastructure, and communication routes across several parts of the country. At the same time, the maritime blockade imposed by the U.S. military on Iranian ports is severely choking an economy that was already in an especially critical condition. To top it all off, the regime itself appears to be beset by deep internal divisions that threaten its very survival. Faced with such an increasingly entropic situation – one in which it has become mired as a direct result of its own expansionist and hegemonic policies, which recognized no limits – the authorities in Tehran are now seeking to “export” the conflict by extending it across the region, while carefully avoiding Israel. At the same time, they are attempting to exploit to the fullest a card they wield through methods characteristic of militias and organized crime: the threat of paralyzing international shipping lanes, thereby placing a substantial portion of the global economy at risk. This strategy of exporting its own crisis has translated into drone and missile attacks not only against the Gulf states, as has been the case since the conflict began in June 2025, but increasingly against Jordan, Iraq – where Iranian opposition groups have been targeted – and, most recently, Syria.

Was Patriarch Elias Howayek’s vision of a pluralistic Lebanon ever a viable historical project, given that the forces reshaping the Arab world throughout the twentieth century – decolonization, the rise of nationalism, the growth of political Islam, and the backlash against Western modernity – were largely moving in the opposite direction? Is Lebanon an “error of history,” as some have claimed while doing everything they could to make us lose faith in ourselves? Was the patriarch’s pluralistic vision a prescient recognition of the Middle East’s diversity, or a bold historical gamble gradually undermined by the major developments of the twentieth century?

Let us set aside, if only for a moment, the objections raised by the framework agreement, the political divisions it has generated, and the conflicting positions it has provoked. Instead, let us ask a different question, one that may prove even more important than the agreement itself because it concerns what comes next. If we assume that Lebanon is moving, sooner or later, toward bringing its state of conflict with its regional environment to an end, and that the Middle East is gradually entering a new phase in relations among states, does the Lebanese state have a clear vision of what it wants from this new chapter? Has anyone even begun to consider Lebanon’s future economic and political position should the regional order that has shaped the country for decades begin to change?

The summit between Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington marks a key milestone in the Lebanese government’s efforts to restore the authority of the state. Behind the summit lay a strategic objective that is part of the broader regional transformation now underway and that the United States fully supports because it also serves its own objectives: bringing an end to Iran’s influence in Lebanon. In practical terms, as is widely understood, that means resolving the issue of Hezbollah’s illegal weapons. The group continues to reject the authority of the Lebanese state and remains firmly opposed to the political course pursued by the president. For the Lebanese people and the international community, however, with the obvious exception of Iran, resolving the issue of Hezbollah’s weapons remains an essential prerequisite for restoring the state’s sovereignty.