Articles

Will Donald Trump have better luck with Iraq than he has had with Iran? The question naturally arises after the exceptionally warm welcome the U.S. president extended to Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi in Washington. Trump lavished praise on al-Zaidi, overlooking the fact that, until not long ago, he owned a bank that had been placed under U.S. sanctions on charges of laundering money for the benefit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Trump received the Iraqi prime minister at the White House at a time when intermittent clashes between the United States and Iran have resumed, with particular focus on the Strait of Hormuz. The American president discovered, rather belatedly, that the memorandum of understanding he signed with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was, in reality, worth very little. A wide gulf still separates Washington from Tehran. Each side continues to interpret the memorandum according to its own interests. On the American side, the agreement had been negotiated by Vice President J. D. Vance, accompanied by special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. The renewed confrontation between Washington and Tehran is ultimately a reflection of Trump’s profound disappointment with the outcome of the Islamabad process and the failure of Pakistan’s mediation efforts.

Tensions in the region are continuing to escalate, increasingly resembling a volcano on the verge of erupting at any moment. Iran turned up the heat further on Thursday, once again wielding the Houthi card in response to American warnings. Meanwhile, in Lebanon, Hezbollah took its defiance of state institutions a step further, with some of its MPs launching a fierce attack on the President of the Republic to challenge the enforcement of Israel's partial withdrawal from pilot zones in the south of the country and the planned disarmament of the group. Just hours before the highly anticipated address by US President Donald Trump, scheduled for 1:00 AM GMT on the night of Thursday to Friday (4:00 AM Beirut time), Tehran announced that its military would target infrastructure across the region if the White House chief followed through on his threats to strike Iranian civilian infrastructure.

This series of articles is intended to shed light on the current situation through the lens of the past, far removed from passionate, ideological or romantic narratives that overlook the underlying realities. It is up to the reader to draw the appropriate conclusions. The previous eleven instalments revisited the events surrounding Hezbollah’s rise to power, from the Taif Agreement to the severely incomplete implementation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 in 2006. From the very first Israeli withdrawal in May 2000, Lebanese President Emile Lahoud (1998-2007) and Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah reached a fundamental understanding: the Lebanese state would legitimize Hezbollah, and in return, the movement would formally commit to respecting the country’s institutions and refrain from using its weapons in domestic political disputes. It would later become clear that the pledge was not only short-lived – it collapsed on May 7, 2008, when Hezbollah seized Beirut by force – but that its arsenal had, all along, exerted decisive influence over national decision-making.

For more than three decades, Lebanese politics has been closely associated with the name of Nabih Berri. Since assuming the speakership of Parliament in 1992, Berri has outlasted presidents, prime ministers, regional wars, international interventions, and profound geopolitical transformations. He has become far more than the head of the legislative branch. He established himself as one of the principal architects of post-Taif Lebanon and the undisputed political leader of the Amal Movement. Yet politics inevitably raises the same question whenever a leader remains in power for so long: what comes next?

As Israeli forces continue their intermittent targeted raids in southern Lebanon and systematically dismantle Hezbollah's infrastructure in the region, the sixth round of direct negotiations between Lebanon and Israel, which concluded Wednesday in Rome under U.S. auspices, appears to have officially and concretely launched the long and perilous process of the IDF's gradual withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Following two days of meetings on Tuesday, July 14, and Wednesday, July 15, in the Italian capital, both authorized American and Lebanese sources described the outcome of this sixth round of Lebanese-Israeli talks as "fruitful" and "positive." The U.S. Embassy in Beirut indicated that concrete measures had been agreed upon for the establishment of the first two pilot zones, which should allow the Lebanese army to deploy in sectors to be vacated by the Israelis.

Juvenis ad majora natus "Born for greatness." This is the motto of Saint Stanislaus, noted prophetically in the margin of Elias Boutros Howayek's booklet at the end of his theological studies. He was 27 years old at the time and had been in Rome since 1866, sent by Patriarch Boulos Massaad to complete his theological studies, which he had begun at the Ghazir Seminary in 1859, and to prepare for the priesthood. Marked by his keen intelligence and his meticulous adherence to the rules, this man destined for greatness would become no less than the 72nd representative of a long line of holy Maronite patriarchs, of whom he is undoubtedly one of the most outstanding figures. His greatest achievement was his battle for the birth of Greater Lebanon (1920).