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A significant new step was taken on Wednesday, April 16, towards restoring Lebanon's autonomy in decision-making, free from any regional dictates. A ten-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon (including Hezbollah) came into effect at midnight on Thursday night, following two telephone conversations that President Donald Trump held in the late afternoon with President Joseph Aoun and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The White House chief himself announced the ceasefire in the early evening during a casual conversation with press correspondents. The announcement of this ceasefire under the auspices of the Trump Administration carries twofold strategic importance: firstly, it consolidates at the highest level the separation of the Lebanese and Iranian aspects of the ongoing conflict, as Tehran has insistently attempted in recent days to place any ceasefire agreement between Lebanon and Israel under its control, with the aim of controlling Lebanon; and secondly, it largely legitimizes and reinforces the Executive's decision to engage in direct negotiations with Israel, with the prospect of a peace agreement between the two countries. President Trump also indicated, after the ceasefire announcement, that he had tasked Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Razin Caine with working towards achieving a lasting Lebanese-Israeli peace. The US president also emphasized his intention to invite President Aoun and Mr. Netanyahu to a meeting at the White House within two weeks.

The United States decision to launch a major military campaign against Iran was driven by a confluence of pressures. Hawkish figures in the national security establishment had long advocated for decisive action. Pro-Israel lobbying pressed hard for intervention, especially after the June 2025 strikes failed to produce lasting deterrence, and Israel itself had spent months pushing Washington toward a more maximalist posture. These factors created the political conditions for war. Yet the most strategically decisive driver was arguably a logic like the one applied in Venezuela. President Trump’s core objective is not simply to degrade Iran’s military capacity, but to reshape the architecture of global oil transactions — controlling not just who sells crude, but who buys it and under what terms. By sustaining and deepening sanctions pressure on Iranian oil exports, Washington seeks to constrain China’s access to subsidised or discounted crude at a moment when that access constitutes a meaningful input into Chinese industrial and military growth.

Approaching the negotiation process that concluded in the capital Islamabad as one component of the conflict the two sides wage against each other in multiple forms spares us from evaluating it through the binary of success or failure. The event can instead be illuminated from the angle of the first direct meeting between the Islamic Republic and the “Great Satan,” after nearly half a century of a rigidity that was calculated, and not merely ideological. Whatever the case, the most significant achievement for both sides was the smooth descent from the top of the tree, and the ending of a war that has been devastating for Iran and costly for America.

Ruling Hungary with unchallenged authority since 2010, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has now been defeated at the polls, swept from office by public fatigue over corruption and perceived assaults on the rule of law. Now 62, he asserted himself on the international stage through repeated clashes with Brussels and his overt ties with U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Orbán also shocked with his indulgence toward far-right ecosystem and the broader autocratic network in Europe and around the world. Viktor Orbán received by Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street in January 2002, a year before the ill-fated invasion of Iraq built on spurious claims. According to Voltaire, “Politics is the art of lying at the right time.” (Gerry Penny/AFP)

In seeking to understand what is happening to us, to understand myself and to recover some equilibrium in the face of what we are living through, I turn to books and novels about peoples who have known the ravages of war as we know them. Japan, with what it endured during the Second World War and in the aftermath of the atomic bombings, offers in this regard a model that may help us locate our own pain. Let us note, in passing, that the quantity of weapons poured onto Lebanon over the years now amounts to more than the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Two works stand out here, Urashimasō and The Silent Cry . The first was written from within the event itself; its author witnessed the ruins with his own eyes, bearing testimony and describing the tragedies, the mutilations and the wandering he observed. The second was written after Japan’s defeat, and bears witness to the inner devastation of the human being. Comparing what they describe with what we live through, I found that the Lebanese situation brings together both sufferings simultaneously, with no separation between them and no temporal interval of any kind.

Caught between two rogue states, Lebanon has no choice but to appease the one closest to it geographically, the one on its border. It is the art of peace, as dictated by common sense. One need not be Sun Tzu to understand this, nor to understand that Lebanon belongs to the Arab world, not the Islamic world, and that, in this respect, it can rely on an Arab solidarity that has no equivalent in Iran’s militant Islamism. The Palestinian cause is, of course, sacred, and the dispossession of Palestine will remain a stain on the Arab world’s conscience. But this is no reason to sacrifice another sacred cause: that of Lebanon itself – this magnificent geographical and cultural jewel, this promise of religious freedom offered by history to the Maronite Church and, through it, to all Lebanese communities, the loss of which would be a sacrilege or, in the words of John Paul II, “one of the world’s regrets.”