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The declaration, described as 'historic,' resulting from Washington negotiations on Thursday, was followed on Friday by unprecedented and decisive statements from Lebanon's top leadership. Declarations that appear to accelerate momentum toward the full restoration of Lebanon's sovereignty in the face of Iran and its armed wing, Hezbollah. On Friday, President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam issued stern warnings to Tehran, urging it to cease all interference in Lebanese affairs. 'This is not your country, it is ours (...) You have no right to intervene in our country,' President Aoun told Iran during an interview with CNN.

One increasingly hears voices lamenting their fate: why were we born in this corner of the world? For Lebanon's geographical position has placed it, today, in a situation that few would envy. Geography is not a blind destiny, and yet it constitutes a rigid framework that delimits the field of the possible and narrows the margin for error. In geopolitics, as Robert D. Kaplan reminds us in The Revenge of Geography , geography does not dissolve behind slogans; it reasserts itself whenever states choose to ignore it, and most acutely for small states situated on fault lines. Lebanon is one of them, caught between two powerful neighbours: one a vast military garrison housing one of the largest armies in the world, backed by the United States, and one that we helped restore to its occupation of Lebanon; the other having already exercised prolonged domination and a heavy-handed tutelage over Lebanon under the authoritarian Assad regime.

Among my distinguished colleagues gathered at this podium dedicated to the Lebanese Constitution, I am nothing but a novice in the company of experts; yet I am also a Lebanese citizen in a democratic and constitutional republic, sincerely and earnestly attached to his citizenship. I know my constitutional rights, hold fast to them, and refuse to surrender them to any confessional community or zaamat . For over the course of a hundred years, the one constant need expressed by the Lebanese citizen as an individual has been his need for the State, not for the sect, not for the zaim . The Blessed Patriarch Elias Howayek, who, together with his companions, kindled the flame of Greater Lebanon, gazes upon us now from a century's distance. His gaze carries within it what he sees: disappointment, bitterness, and sorrow. And with good reason: we celebrate the founder… while destroying what he and his companions built.

The fourth round of Lebanese-Israeli negotiations held Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington ended with a 'first': the publication, in the night from Wednesday to Thursday (Levant time) of a joint American-Lebanese-Israeli statement whose content itself constitutes another 'first'. Alongside the establishment of a ceasefire conditioned on the Hezbollah halting its fire against Israel and the creation of 'pilot zones' in the South under the sole control of the Lebanese army, the document emphasizes—and this is where the precedent lies—that 'the future of relations between Israel and Lebanon must be decided by the two sovereign governments'.

Which Donald Trump are we to believe, the one who understands, in his bones, what Iran represents under the regime established in 1979, or the one who seems to have drifted toward the illusions of Barack Obama, who was convinced that Tehran held the keys to every regional crisis and that its nuclear file contained them all? Obama went so far as to persuade himself that radical Shia Islam, embodied by the Revolutionary Guards and their proxies across the region, was fundamentally different from radical Sunni Islam, as represented by Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and before as after them, the Muslim Brotherhood. He never grasped that religious fanaticism, in whatever form it takes, Christian, Islamic, Jewish, or Hindu, amounts to nothing more than different faces of the same coin.

The second session of the fourth round of direct Lebanon-Israel talks resumed Wednesday at the US State Department in Washington. The discussions remain arduous and are being impacted by violence on the ground in southern Lebanon. They were due to resume after a lunch break. Beirut is still trying to secure from Tel Aviv a commitment to a lasting truce, while on the ground the ceasefire framework imposed by President Donald Trump on Monday, after Israeli threats to strike Beirut’s southern suburbs, continues to be tested. On Wednesday, Hezbollah showed little regard for threats issued by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz, who warned that the army would strike Beirut’s southern suburbs if the Iranian-backed group continued attacks on northern Israeli localities. Donald Trump firmly opposed such strikes.