A Thousand Plateaus

Saad Hariri bears something of a cursed hero from a Greek tragedy. Twenty-one years after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, Saad returns to a city that no longer quite resembles the one he left behind. The centers of decision-making have shifted. He knows this well. Saudi Arabia, which once contributed, under the leadership of Fahd and later Abdullah, to anchoring Rafik Hariri on the Lebanese stage, has for nearly a decade multiplied negative signals toward Saad. Saudi media outlets have widely expressed their dissatisfaction at the prospect of his relaunching his political movement after four years of suspension. Harirism, once the backbone of post-war Lebanese political Sunnism, now faces a question both simple and formidable: does it still have a historical function? The Rafik Hariri dynamic was born of a conjuncture that combined an economic project, a diplomatic wager, and an identity posture. He embodied a moderate Sunnism, backed by the Kingdom, open to markets, speaking the language of Western chancelleries, and presenting itself as the interface between Lebanon and the world. From the Oslo process to the post-September 11, 2001 configuration, Hariri was an absolute necessity for the Sunni Arab-Islamic world and for the West. The objective alliance of minorities, from Israel to Iran, viewed him, for its part, as the enemy. His assassination by the Damascus-Tehran axis triggered an unprecedented cross-communal sovereignist popular surge in Lebanon, anchoring Harirism as a symbol of Lebanese independence. This entire architecture, inherited by Saad, gradually collapsed. And not solely because of his poor political and business calculations, nor because of his highly questionable management of power. Saudi Arabia is no longer what it was in the 1990s, nor what it was in the aftermath of March 14. It no longer seeks to sponsor a Lebanese current as one maintains an outpost of influence. Instead, it reasons in terms of broad regional balances, strategic repositioning, and competition with Ankara and Tehran. In this new game, Saad Hariri is no longer a central piece. At best, he is a secondary actor in a scene being redrawn elsewhere. And despite his undeniable base in Lebanon, he knows it. The Sunni center of gravity in the Middle East has shifted. The emergence of Ahmad al-Chareh as a rising Sunni figure, endorsed by Riyadh and Ankara with a form of international blessing—irony of fate, to play the very role that Rafik Hariri was once asked to assume within the Oslo framework—profoundly alters the equation. For the first time in decades, the Levant is witnessing the affirmation of a non-Lebanese Sunni leadership capable of combining religious rootedness, political skill, and external recognition. Whether this synthesis proves durable and truly convincing matters less than the signal it sends: the symbolic monopoly of moderate and modern Sunnism no longer passes through Beirut. Within this configuration, Harirism now appears somewhat as the expression of a bygone moment. It was the child of an era in which the Arab world oscillated between military authoritarianisms and radical Islamisms, when it rightly presented itself as a third way. Today, the lines are being redrawn differently. The fall of the Syrian regime, the weakening of the Iranian axis after October 7, 2023, and the redefinition of regional alliances have opened a new space. That space no longer seems structured around a centralized Lebanese Sunni leadership, but rather around an areopagus of figures, notables, and dispersed political entrepreneurs. This, at least, appears to be what Riyadh desires, despite the manifest feeling of abandonment and marginalization experienced by Sunnis within the current Lebanese political equation—and despite Sunni grievances toward Saad Hariri and his management of power, particularly since 2016. Yet the crisis of Harirism goes beyond the regional question and touches upon its internal model. The Hariri project rested upon an implicit equation: economic development in exchange for a partial renunciation of sovereignty. As long as the Syrian tutelage locked the political field, the objective was to build within the interstices. After 2005, the attempt was to transform a sovereignist movement into a governing majority. The experiment ran up against Hezbollah’s violence, the divisions of March 14, and then unfortunate strategic choices, among which the wager on the Aoun presidency and a murky status quo with the Iranian camp remains the most emblematic. That wager broke something. It undermined the credibility of a current that had presented itself as a bulwark against Iranian hegemony and that found itself, through calculation or fatigue, endorsing an institutional architecture dominated by Hezbollah. Saad Hariri’s withdrawal from political life completed the dispersal of his ranks. His return therefore raises an existential question: can one return without reinventing oneself? The problem, moreover, does not concern Saad Hariri alone—even if other political forces, focused on forthcoming power struggles, do not seem to realize it. For the decline of Harirism is not isolated. It forms part of a broader erosion of the forces inherited from the war and the post-war period. Aounism consumed itself in the exercise of power. Hezbollah, despite its postures, faces an unprecedented and essential strategic weakening. Even other charismatic figures seem suspended in a temporality that is no longer theirs. Lebanese politics resembles a theater in which yesterday’s actors still recite their lines while the audience has changed plays. These forces founded their legitimacy within a political continuum that no longer exists, with the disappearance of the Assad regime and Tehran’s return to its proper dimension. The real question therefore transcends the fate of a single current. It concerns the perennial issue of elite renewal. Who could take up the mantle? Who could formulate a project that is neither a repetition of past compromises nor the illusion of a romantic clean slate? The advent of a president initially welcomed as a deus ex machina, followed by a prime minister praised for his probity and non-belonging to traditional elites, generated for a time a wave of enthusiasm, now dissipated, overtaken by local, regional, and international realities. The myth of the savior dies hard in Lebanon, where habit—or even voluntary servitude—continues to prevent the emergence of a political class capable of breaking with archaic patterns. The current electoral law, broadly designed to preserve the most rigid confessional balances, functions like a wax museum of the past, preventing the emergence of solid transversal forces, of a parliamentary majority, even of a government program. Within this context, Harirism has two options. It may attempt to reconquer its former status by relying on nostalgia and communal mobilization. That dynamic still exists—the memory of Rafik Hariri, even a certain loyalty to Saad as an anchor point in the current desolation, continues to operate. Or it may understand that it must reinvent itself in order to contribute to a collective project of refoundation. The first path may appear, on the surface, the most comfortable and safest—but beware of mirages. The second is the riskiest, because it requires a critical examination of past errors and a redefinition of the relationship between economy, sovereignty, and the state. Saad Hariri’s return—if it materializes concretely and if elections indeed take place within the prescribed timeframe—is, in this sense, more than ever a test. For him first: will he be able to read the moment without mistaking the era? For the political class next: will it understand that the near-general decline of forces born of the war opens a dangerous space in which the absence of credible elites may generate either chaos or a new authoritarianism disguised as stability? For the electorate, finally. It is not only Hariri who must ask “what went wrong,” but an entire system-society that endlessly reproduces itself through the same tropes—including its various oppositions. These lines may sound like the gentle utopia of a dreamer in a fractured world and a highly seismic region. And yet, even if the sky has not yet turned blue, Lebanon truly stands at a crossroads and must choose between rearranging the old world—redistributing cards among tired actors—or venturing into genuine renewal beyond the old patterns designed to soothe the anxieties of a pseudo-mimetic violence that exists only because of power appetites… of those who claim, through their authority as communal leaders, to contain that very mimetic violence. For such renewal to be possible, women and men must emerge—credible, transparent, authentic, measured, and capable of carrying a project greater than their community. The time of responsibility requires men and women for others— all others , without exception. It requires the promotion of openness and of a culture of connection in a world compartmentalized and terrified by reciprocity and alterity. It is the only way truly to make Lebanon, in the twenty-first century, a political and cultural exception.

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.

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.

Every twenty years, a gambler arrives, who stakes the country, its people, its inheritance, sunrises and sunsets, boys and girls, waves and sea on a poker table. Nizar Qabbani Thus, Naïm Qassem seeks to sacrifice Lebanon for Iran. After sending his followers to die for Assad’s Syria, after allowing the inhabitants of his revolutionary home to be atomized for Hamas, he now seeks to conclude in style, through a collective suicide, at a moment when the Iranian mother-house itself is under threat, facing the supposedly invincible armada deployed by Donald Trump in the waters of the Middle East. The latest statements by Hezbollah’s Secretary-General might almost pass for the bravado of a hardened strongman—and perhaps they still do for part of his flock, weaned on the myth of the Aryan Übermensch manufactured by Iranian clerics. Yet this so-called “bravery”—once acknowledged in the late 1990s by the vast majority of Lebanese when it came to defending Lebanese territory against Israeli occupation—has since degenerated into strategic suicide, even if the word “strategic” itself now sounds grotesque in this context. Planes dive over our heads. War is not won with dissertations, nor with metaphors, nor with adjectives. How many times have we paid, at a very high price, the tax of empty talk. The problem with Naïm Qassem’s rhetoric is that it is simply stupid. Where his predecessor, Hassan Nasrallah, was particularly skilled—wrapping his speeches in a political virtù acquired over decades, to the point of becoming a true mass hypnotist—the doctrinal guardian who was catapulted by default to replace him after the serial liquidations carried out by Tel Aviv among militia leaders possesses the charisma of a depressed crocodile. Nasrallah sought to justify his blind loyalty to Tehran, and its natural consequence—the conquest of power in Lebanon—through a blend of supposedly rational argumentation, political bluster, and formulas that oscillated between the ideological and the populist. He did so with the mastery of a historic leader. Qassem, for his part, is trying to sweep up the broken pieces—and he does so with the clumsy, caricatural ineptitude of those who fall victim to the Peter Principle. In other words, Nasrallah was a virtuoso of verbal sleight of hand. Even when he admitted, in moments of calculated lucidity, to being a soldier in the army of the velayat-e faqih , he did so from a position of strength, inscribing himself within an Iranian imperial logic sweeping across the region without any real counterweight—often even with Western complicity in practice. With Qassem, and his latest speech provides the clearest proof, discourse either descends into the delirium of a sect that has nothing left to lose, or into the crude display of muscle of a steroid-pumped wrestler destined for a certain knockout. This is no longer honest lucidity. It is homicidal irresponsibility. Homicidal recklessness. By asserting that any threat against Iran, and even more so against the Supreme Leader, constitutes a direct threat requiring Hezbollah’s intervention, the party’s Secretary-General is no longer merely raising his voice in a rhetorical escalation that has become familiar. He is openly designating the true locus of the sovereignty to which he submits. And that locus is not Lebanon. True, this comes as no surprise. The party-militia’s allegiance to the Persian revolutionary Internationale is an open secret. The problem lies in the persistence of blindness, to the point of forgetting that Hezbollah’s most recent adventure, in the service of Hamas, turned into a tragedy—not only for the party itself, but for the inhabitants of southern Lebanon and Beirut, for the Shiite community as a whole, and above all for Lebanon. Every twenty years, a complicated man arrives, his pockets full of detonators. Naïm Qassem once again formalizes the explicit subordination of Lebanon’s destiny to an external, confessional, transnational architecture of power, transforming the country yet again into a mere surface of exposure, a dispensable space, a sacrificial satrapy for a confrontation that transcends it. What this speech ultimately consecrates is the pure and simple abolition of collective decision-making. War and peace, life and death, future and ruin no longer stem from a national debate, shared institutions, or a political contract—however fragile it may be. They become the mechanical extension of an axis-based logic, of an ideological loyalty that recognizes no legitimacy other than that of the center it serves. In this vision, Lebanon is neither a state, nor a society, nor even a people in the full sense of the word. It is merely a relay. A pawn. Nothing more than a vulgar front among others, with little tin soldiers and an abundance of cannon fodder—one of the last still in service to the Iranian despot, along with Iraq. Every twenty years, a ruler arrives by decree, who leads the sun to the execution post. The image Hezbollah has assigned to Lebanon is inevitably that of a corridor-state, a frontline-state, a permanently martyred state, doomed to pay the price for the confrontations of others. A logic that has already destroyed the state, hollowed out institutions, fractured society, and turned sovereignty into an empty slogan. The paradox is cruel, almost obscene: Hezbollah today invokes sovereignty at the very moment it proclaims its negation; it presents itself as a shield while acting as a vector of maximal exposure; it accuses the state of weakness after having methodically stripped it of its fundamental attributes. This duplicity is not merely tactical. It is ontological. It stems from a profound inability to accept historical time, with its limits, its defeats, and its responsibilities. It is another name for delirium. Lebanon is not a myth to be nurtured nor a sacrificial stage to be exploited. It is a real, inhabited, fragile, plural country that can no longer survive a permanent economy of proxy war. Naïm Qassem’s discourse does not merely threaten external adversaries. It threatens the very idea that Lebanon might still exist as an autonomous political space—that is, as a place where collective decision prevails over imposed faith, and where the lives of citizens are not subordinated to an armed eschatology. Every twenty years, a man comes to slit unity in its bed and abort dreams. Once again, Hezbollah denies the country’s constitutive plurality. It erases all those who refuse to accept that a para-state power—which has lost all legitimacy even within its own camp, to the point of being gradually abandoned by its closest allies; which has lost its strategic depth with the fall of Assad; which is confronted with a Lebanese will to restore sovereignty and the monopoly of legitimate violence across the national territory; and which, above all, is so exhausted by successive catastrophes that it can no longer bear the physical, material, and moral cost of yet another disaster—should continue to preside over the country’s destiny. Moreover, this is a militia power whose misdeeds, ranging from criminal violence to obstruction of justice and all manner of mafia activity, are innumerable. But worse still, Hezbollah now locks the Shiite community itself into a violent identity assignment, reducing it to a supposedly homogeneous bloc, ready to sacrifice itself unconditionally for a cause that, in its real diversity, does not command consensus. Lebanon’s Shiites have suffered persecution and political, social, and economic marginalization since the Ottoman era. Yes, it took Moussa Sadr, and then the Iranian Islamic Revolution, to change that context. Yes, Hezbollah, after Sadr’s disappearance, restored a sense of pride and dignity to the Shiite community. But it also enslaved it to its law, founded on brute force. It Basij-ized the community, “purified” it by liquidating intellectual elites who did not share its doctrine or its geopolitical and military alignment with Iran, and extended its political control, through the terror of arms, over the entire community—mortgaging it in the process. In a perverse and insidious way, it galvanized the community in the name of a hollow and illusory glory, assigning it a function of territorial resistance while simultaneously developing a social, political, and mafioso infrastructure network tied to Iran. Under the guise of resistance, it de-Lebanonized the Shiites in the service of Tehran. Every twenty years, a narcissist in love with himself arrives, claiming to be the Messiah, the Savior, the One, the Eternal, the Wise, the Omniscient, the Holy, the Imam. What Naïm Qassem’s discourse ultimately reveals is the ideological heart of the system: the sacralization of command, which renders any contestation illegitimate, any dissent suspect, and any criticism assimilable to treason. In this millenarian and totalitarian mental universe, the leader is not a political actor accountable to reality, but a figure invested with a transcendent mission. Such a construction is by nature incompatible with the state, which presupposes finitude, responsibility, the possibility of failure, and accountability. This is where Hezbollah’s current fragility lies, desperately masked by martial rhetoric. Behind the posture of firmness looms a profound anxiety: that of loss. The party has entered a phase of vulnerability it has never experienced to this degree. Totemic figures have been struck down. The regional axis is cracking. The imperial space that once gave coherence and depth to its power is contracting. And with it, Hezbollah’s very identity wavers. What is Hezbollah without its fallacious preaching of territorial resistance? What remains without its weapons? And above all, what future would it have if its directorate in Tehran, the IRGC (Pasdaran), and its ultimate referent, the velayat-e faqih , were to collapse? It is its very existence—indeed its essence—that is at stake. And faced with this erosion, the reflex is old, almost mechanical. Hezbollah does not know how to lose. It cannot conceive of itself in defeat, because accepting defeat would mean renouncing its status of exception, its symbolic monopoly, its founding narrative. So it shifts the stage of conflict. It expands the theater of operations. It turns local fragility into a cosmic issue. It attempts to reconstruct through words a centrality that reality is stripping away. It implodes into spectacular sacrifice, like a sect refusing to confront bitter reality after a messianic delirium of superiority and invincibility. After all, are not angels, prophets, and Hussein himself fighting at its side? To accept defeat would be to validate the failure of the doctrine. And for a theocratic party, the collapse of doctrine amounts to decompensation, derealization, a total dissociation from reality. Naïm Qassem’s objective, and that of his circle, is not merely to defend Tehran against the “Great Imperialist Satan”, its Israeli satellite, and its flotilla. It is to survive the absurd, the void—even if that must paradoxically be achieved through death. Lebanon, in this framework, no longer counts. It does not belong to the calculations or the mental space of a sect whose gurus and disciples have sunk into unreason. Naïm Qassem is, in fact, nothing more than another Jim Jones or David Koresh. Cornered, he will not hesitate to throw himself into the abyss, taking the Shiite community and the entirety of Lebanon hostage if necessary. It is not so much for his masters in Tehran that he would do this, but to prove that he was right. Every twenty years, writes Nizar Qabbani. Far less, tragically. But Lebanon’s time can no longer be that of sacrificial cycles. It is now the time of an unavoidable choice: to become a country again, with all that entails—limits, responsibilities, renunciations, neutrality vis-à-vis regional axes—or to disappear definitively as a political subject, dissolved in the convulsions of a disintegrating empire. And this time, no decree, no slogan, no empty talk will be able to delay the reckoning. This time, someone must stand in the way of Qassem and his kind, whoever they may be—not through their logic of violence and madness, but through the rule of law and through firm, clear-eyed dialogue, if some within Hezbollah can still hear reason and wish to avert collective catastrophe. And that someone cannot be the United States, and even less Israel. The cruel irony is that a new confrontation with the Hebrew state would only strengthen its influence, or even entrench its occupation in Lebanon. Better, then, not to provoke the beast—especially since it lies in wait, eager to be handed the scythe. In principle, it is the role of the Lebanese state to actively deter the pro-Iranian party. And if there still exists a Lebanese popular and political will concerned with acting in Lebanon’s own interest, it is time for it to express itself without reserve, sovereignly, through all democratic means, loudly and clearly against war—so as to prove that it still wants to live, far from the eternal return of madness-violence and all its demons.

If basic decency prevents us from rejoicing even at the death of a monster, it does not prevent a certain sudden lightness from being felt, or even a fleeting sense of relief, upon hearing the news. Rifaat al-Assad is dead. Faced with the retrospective and retroactive feeling of powerlessness and desolation in the face of the worst atrocities in history, one consoles oneself as best one can. Assad takes with him a part of the darkest memory of the contemporary Levant: cities crushed for having screamed too loudly against barbarity, neighborhoods razed to serve as examples. One need only read the testimony of Michel Seurat, who paid for it with his life, to grasp with dread how Hama and Homs, in 1982, became laboratories for Assad’s almost clinical experimentation with death. Lebanon too, from Tripoli to its humiliated margins, paid the price for Rifaat’s inhumanity through his militias, the so-called “Red Knights.” Hafez’s brother was the regime’s designated executioner, its chief butcher, its most brutal and authentic face. A role later assumed with the same feral passion for cruelty by his nephew Maher. This was before France offered Rifaat a gilded exile, and before certain officials honored him with lavish and scandalous dinners. Rifaat’s descent into the dustbin of history strangely coincides with a moment when Syria once again seems tempted by an authoritarian rewriting of its unity, this time under the banner of a territorial “reconquest” led by the regime of Ahmad al-Chareh. After the Druze, after the Alawites, the Kurds are now designated as the next obstacle on the road to a state rebuilt through force and coercion, as though Syrian history, cursed as it may be, were incapable of producing unity except by crushing otherness. The term reconquest is far from neutral. It conveys a vertical conception of sovereignty, in which territory precedes people, and geography and borders disregard the ultimate purpose of the human person. In such a logic, diversity is no longer perceived as a political wealth but as an anomaly, a fundamental defect to be corrected by any means necessary. Syrian Kurds cease to be citizens to be convinced and become a problem to be dealt with, by force if required. This does not mean one should accommodate militias or para-state armed groups. There are clearly parallel agendas seeking to destabilize the new Syrian regime, whether under Israeli, Iranian, or former Assad-loyalist influence. All militias, moreover, commit abuses. But none of this can justify abuses against the civilian population. That distinction is what, in principle, separates authority seeking to restore the state from the arbitrary power of militias. In principle. It must be stated plainly: the crushing of the Sunni majority under Alawite Baathism, with varying degrees of minority acquiescence in the name of a hollow alliance, will not be redeemed by even a tacit revenge against those minorities under the banner of Islamism. What is built on injustice and repression can only produce more injustice and repression. It cannot lay the foundations of legitimate power or true authority. That this orientation pleases Ankara is hardly surprising. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan openly welcomes a Syria that reasserts control over its Kurdish peripheries. The convergence is almost mechanical: a Syrian state recentralized through coercion reassures a Turkish power obsessed with any form of Kurdish autonomy, from Qamishli to Diyarbakir. The alignment is not merely ideological; it is also security-driven. And that is precisely what makes it dangerous. Recent Syrian history has already shown where such shortcuts lead. The Assad regime, father and son alike, not forgetting the “trigger-happy uncle,” endlessly proclaimed national unity while governing through fragmentation, fear, and collective punishment. The “stability” it claimed was that of silence imposed by shabbiha militias, tanks, torture, and camps. Prisons, disappearances, and massacres were its sole source of legitimacy. Here the specter of Rifaat al-Assad returns as a warning. He embodies that moment when a power convinces itself that violence is not only effective but foundational, when the state is reduced to its repressive apparatus and sovereignty to the mere capacity to crush. Syria paid the price for decades. It is time for this to end, without the so-called international community once again looking away. A warning must therefore be addressed to Ahmad al-Chareh, almost as a philosophical reminder. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that one must beware, when fighting monsters, of becoming one, and that whoever gazes long into the abyss will have the abyss gaze back. Governing a shattered country like Syria exposes one precisely to this vertigo: the belief that the end justifies the means. Yet order cannot replace justice, nor can unity be forged at gunpoint. Turning Syria into a new gulag, whether Islamist, Arab-nationalist, or recycled from Baathist reflexes, would be yet another betrayal, added to the many that have marked the country’s modern history. Forced fusion (insihâr) has never produced lasting nations. It produces only anxious states, haunted by their margins and obsessed with their minorities. One need only look at the ruins of the Arab world today to see this. There is in this grim spectacle a moral dimension that cannot be avoided. Since 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed, tortured, or exiled for demanding something disarmingly simple: dignity. These civil revolutionaries, crushed between regime brutality and subsequent radicalizations, demanded neither partition nor revenge. They demanded a modern state governed by the rule of law, one that would recognize them as full political subjects. Their deaths are not background noise to be drowned out by new discourses of order and sovereignty. Their ghosts today listen and watch. They observe every decision taken in their name, every compromise sealed without them, every “reconquest” that forgets why the country rose up in the first place. Syria did not implode from an excess of pluralism and freedom, but from their negation in the name of tyrannical terror. Unifying Syria may indeed be a historical necessity. But there are two ways of doing so. One repeats old mechanisms under new flags: brutal centralization, denial of differences, tactical alliances with regional powers at the expense of internal rights. The other is slower, more fragile, less spectacular. It passes through dialogue with Kurds, Druze, Alawites, Sunnis, Christians; through recognition of their fears and rights; through the construction of a state that protects before it coerces, and perhaps through new internal administrative arrangements, internationally guaranteed against interference by neighboring regimes invoking “strategic necessities” or “vital spaces.” In death, Rifaat al-Assad may finally serve a purpose other than shedding the blood of others. May his disappearance remind us that a new Syria does not need new executioners convinced they act for its good, but leaders capable of resisting the temptation of the abyss. May monsters belong to the past. And may Syrian history finally be written in something other than letters of blood.

Has obscenity become the driving force of History? A careful observer, following the thread of events, might well conclude that it has. For there is indeed something obscene in the way the contemporary world continues to celebrate its simulacra of order, even as the dikes— all the dikes—are collapsing on every side. True, the logorrhea remains; institutions proliferate. Grand speeches have perhaps never been so abundant. Yet they now drift in a disturbing void, ringing irredeemably hollow—when they are not swallowed by the formless mass of disinformation and the nauseating tropes of populism and identitarianism. Thus, we continue to speak of law, sovereignty, legitimacy, collective security, as though these were the worn-out vocables of a profane and nihilistic litany… all while almost fatalistically accepting that violence has once again become an acceptable variable of history. The architectures born from the ruins of the twentieth century—those that sought to contain force, discipline it, inscribe it within a minimum of shared rules—are today being methodically dismantled. This is not so much the result of ignorance as of a Mephistophelean will, a predatory and destructive premeditation. They are deemed too slow, too moral, too constraining for a world that once again claims permanent exception, unbridled power, identity as ultimate justification. The system born of San Francisco and Bretton Woods is deliberately and systematically hollowed out, reduced to a piece of diplomatic stage scenery. Consequently, freed from all inhibition, calls for empire multiply, in diverse yet convergent forms. Whether draped in the garb of nation, civilization, security, or faith matters little: the logic is the same. That of a world fragmented into spheres of influence, where the rule applies to others; where force becomes political language; where the human being is relegated to collateral damage. All ideological differences fade behind a shared brutality. In such a framework, the rise to extremes becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, justifying each actor’s conduct. The serpent devours its own tail—until nothing remains, neither of the serpent nor of what surrounded it. In such a landscape, it must be acknowledged that peoples count for very little. Beyond opinion polls, they are invoked, instrumentalized, sacrificed to higher designs that largely escape them. Some more visibly than others. Iran today crystallizes this moral collapse. An entire society—aware, courageous, culturally dense—faces a repression of cold, repetitive, almost industrial violence. And in response, the world watches, expresses intermittent outrage, then accommodates—quietly. The diplomatic prudence of some serves as an alibi; the strategic calculations of others override any ethical imperative. As though freedom could wait. As though certain lives were worth less than regional balances or energy interests. Yet what is unfolding in Tehran, as in Ukraine or Gaza, transcends a regime, a crisis, a single country. It raises once again the question of the very meaning of international order. What is a system worth if it no longer protects those most in need? What does the rule of law mean when it fades the moment it becomes costly? At what point does universalism cease to be a principle and become a conditional discourse, subject to power relations and the moods of the mighty? How can the order of the human—freedom as constitutive of the human person—be restored without further shattering what is already broken? These questions are as old as the world. But in a system stripped of all safeguards, they become obsessive. The reality is that we may have entered that dreaded moment when culture continues to produce forms, images, and discourse, while civilization itself ceases to believe in what it proclaims. A “end of culture,” to borrow George Steiner’s expression, which—though not yet spectacular, for evil often manifests itself through banality—is nonetheless pervasive. Moral fatigue deepens; reference points blur; criteria collapse; language is hollowed out within a continuous flux of images, slogans, and selective indignations. Reason wavers. Has it been defeated, or has it simply withdrawn for lack of defenders? It hardly matters. The outcome is the same. In this void inhabited by monsters—and how long this long night of emptiness has become—identities harden, violence legitimizes itself, fear becomes the foundation, the matrix of politics. The world rediscovers, with horror—or perhaps with weariness—the old reflexes it believed buried: withdrawal, hatred, fascination with strongmen, contempt for freedoms in the name of security. Globalization has not produced the universality once hoped for; it has often accelerated fragmentation, atomization, the erosion of social bonds. Everywhere, societies struggle to generate shared references, without which there can be neither living culture nor coexistence. If the nuclearization of power relations is once again in vogue, the nuclearization of human relations and minds has already occurred. There has been no balance of deterrence here. From Washington to Moscow, from Tel Aviv to Tehran and Ankara, the race toward the atomization of humanity is unanimous. Faced with this failure of states—largely rooted in increasingly narcissistic and paranoid collectivities—a new responsibility asserts itself, whether we like it or not: that of a transversal global public opinion. Not an emotional crowd. Certainly not. Nor a trinket morality. But a consciousness capable of crossing borders, rejecting implicit hierarchies of compassion, naming the unacceptable wherever it occurs. A public opinion that does not merely comment, but restores accountability, reality, an ethical framework for international relations. One that reminds us that not everything is equivalent. That not everything is negotiable. That a scale of values still presides over the destiny of this planet—even if it struggles to exist. Or else that humanity has decided it no longer wishes to live together in peace within a shared space, and must therefore destroy the principles that bind it, in the name of petty differences and anxieties. This may sound like naïveté. Yet it is not utopianism. In any case, what is left to lose, before the entire world becomes, as at the dawn of the twentieth century, a vast field of ruins, a gigantic mass grave? Inventing a new order does not mean dreaming of a pacified or reconciled world. It means reintroducing limits, restoring a cost to violence, reaffirming that human dignity is not an option but a vital requirement. It calls for a civilizational awakening—fragile, conflictual, imperfect, yet necessary. Not to promise paradise, but to prevent the banalization of hell. Otherwise, the moral cost of silence and inaction will be too high—for everyone. The fall into violence is never a historical inevitability. It is always a choice. So is renewal.

The now-iconic image of a young woman setting fire to the portrait of Ayatollah Khamenei to light her cigarette says it all, symbolically speaking: the Iranian theocracy is dead and buried. It is only a matter of time. Admittedly, the Iranian authorities can still repress, arrest, torture, rape, execute, and massacre with impunity, as they have done repeatedly since the Green Movement of 2008. Yet the wall of fear has definitively collapsed this time, as evidenced by the regime’s loss of control over several cities, an unprecedented development since the Islamic Revolution itself. The clerical regime is drawing its last breath. The narrative that sustained it since 1979 has been drained of all substance, and the power derived from it had long survived only through coercion, fear, and the mechanical invocation of a mythologized past in which almost no one still believed, save perhaps a handful of Qassem Soleimani’s devotees in Lebanon and Iraq. What the world is witnessing today is nothing less than the exhaustion of a political model that has ceased to generate meaning for decades. The contradiction is now frontal. On one side, a power structure irreversibly entrenched in an increasingly dictatorial logic, frozen in a political theology reduced to a purely instrumental function, serving as a cover for a system of corruption coupled with rigorist hypocrisy. Perversion elevated to a governing creed. On the other, a society in motion, driven by a youth that no longer sees itself as the heir to a revolution, but as the captive of a regime. Vitality on the march. The more the world became modern, connected, and porous, the more the Islamic Republic retreated into an authoritarian and archaic understanding of politics. This youth, eviscerated decade after decade, uprising after uprising, endlessly sacrificed on the altar of the revolution and its exportation, now aspires to something else. And nothing can obstruct its hunger for progress. The gap had become irreducible. All appeals to the sacrosanct “unity to preserve the revolutionary achievement,” long the regime’s survival mantra, could no longer suffice. That so-called unity no longer functioned as a higher principle capable of justifying sacrifices imposed in the name of nation or Islam. When severed from freedom, unity ceases to be a binding force and becomes an empty injunction, even a form of symbolic violence. Iranian society is no longer willing to indefinitely suspend its aspirations in the name of an order that guarantees neither justice, dignity, nor a future. Yet the regime continues to operate as though the revolution remained an unquestionable absolute. It persists in denying social reality in the name of revolutionary primacy, as if the founding act of 1979 were sufficient to legitimize power forever. In truth, long ago, by refusing to confront reality, that revolution had transformed into a dogma, then into an apparatus of domination. The rupture is now complete, even if a monolithic regime like the one in Tehran will never be able to grasp it. What initially gave Khomeinism its strength was not so much the promise of an Islamic order as the denunciation of a power perceived as illegitimate because subordinated to the West. The Shah’s alliance with Western powers provided the revolutionary movement with a clearly identifiable adversary, allowing heterogeneous ideological and social currents to rally around a common rejection. The revolution thus presented itself as a reclaiming of national sovereignty. Before Khomeini decided to turn it into a gulag. That lever is now inoperative. The West is no longer the symbolic anchor of the conflict, as it had been designated in 1979 to mobilize opposition to the Shah’s repressive regime. It is neither a model to emulate nor a structuring enemy. The Iranian regime is defective without it. It is defective in and of itself. By relentlessly accusing the West of orchestrating the current protests, the authorities commit a double error: they deny the political autonomy of their own society, and they paradoxically reveal the extent of their internal bankruptcy. In doing so, they accelerate their own downfall by displaying a total disconnection from reality, exactly the mistake Assad made in 2011 at the outset of the Syrian revolution. Today, the Iranian regime is confronting Iran’s new reality. Its name is freedom and modernity, though not necessarily in a Western mold, despite the regime’s crude attempt to portray it as such in order to fabricate a pseudo-unity against the protesters. Khamenei and his acolytes seem to ignore that Iran’s history long predates 1979, and that Persia is far too proud to adopt ready-made models. It will forge its own path to modernity, far removed from the perverse and criminal obsequiousness of the clerics and their absurd anathemas. Moreover, the accusation of “collusion with the West” does not bolster the regime’s legitimacy. It further erodes it. It amounts to admitting that the authorities are incapable of generating endogenous consent and survive only by inventing imaginary enemies to mask their radical disconnection from real society. Demonizing the youth, portraying it as manipulated or alienated, is an implicit acknowledgment that the bond between rulers and ruled has been severed. This rupture is also moral. The Iranian authorities long ago abandoned the principles that grounded legitimate sovereignty in both Persian tradition and classical political thought: dâd o dahéch, justice and generosity. In abandoning them, they necessarily undermined âbâdâni, prosperity, and lost khérad, wisdom. A power deprived of justice, generosity, and wisdom is, sooner or later, doomed to be overthrown. It has succumbed to the inflation of its own ego to the point of madness. It must fall. Indeed, excess has become the norm. Repression is now a mode of governance; security obsession has replaced any political vision. Violence, exercised without restraint, reflects not strength but profound fear: that of a regime that knows its authority no longer rests on consent, but on inertia and coercion. The vilayat e-faqih retains no legitimacy outside the corrupt or ideological circles it governs, or a few bands of indoctrinated Arab Shiite populations at the heart of the ruined satrapies of the Middle East. In this context, freedom, âzâdi, ceases to be an abstraction. It becomes a vital necessity. When justice is no longer guaranteed, revolt ceases to be disorder and becomes salutary. The level of injustice reached in Iran is now too high for the demand for order, long privileged at the expense of freedom, to continue functioning as a stabilizing principle. Order without justice is no longer perceived as protective, but as oppressive, unstable, deficient. The ongoing de-Khomeinisation does not necessarily imply the disappearance of all religious references from Iran’s public space. It signifies the end of a model in which religion, instrumentalized by power, claims to govern against society. What is collapsing today is the revolutionary utopia itself. Under the weight of economic regression, costly imperial adventures, systemic corruption, and ideological totalitarianism, political Islam, transformed into a project of hegemony over the individual, the community, and society, has lost its ability to respond to the expectations of a complex, educated, and connected population. It no longer produces cohesion, only resentment. It no longer inspires dreams or exaltation. It has been reduced to its simplest form: a hideous vampire feeding on the blood of a community in the name of a personal power project. That insatiable Nosferatu is the vali e-faqih. And it is high time it ended up in the dustbin of history. Or better yet, that it disintegrates into smoke under the gaze of its worst nightmare: the rebellious, free smile of unveiled Iranian women.

There is, in the image of Nicolás Maduro paraded in New York like a petty drug trafficker, something that echoes Vercingetorix being displayed as a war trophy in Rome before Julius Caesar in September 52 BC, after the siege of Alesia. No one is suggesting shedding crocodile tears for a populist dictator at the helm of a defiant state. Maduro, moreover, is neither Lumumba nor Che Guevara. He is simply one of those figures Latin America has always known how to produce in its darkest hours: characters straight out of The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez, whose outward flamboyance masks a total absence of grandeur. Spectral. Ridiculous. Through this show of force, Donald Trump clearly sought once again to demonstrate the supremacy of the American empire, just as George W. Bush did twenty years ago by sending Saddam Hussein to the gallows after the Iraq expedition. Yet, despite the striking nature of the U.S. operation, it is not necessarily a sign of strength. On the contrary, it acts as a brutal revelation: the return, unspoken, to a world governed by spheres of influence, close in spirit to what was formalized between the USSR and the United States in the Helsinki Accords of 1975. But with one crucial difference. Since the end of the Cold War, the international order has sought to present itself as universal and normative, grounded in law, democracy, and the sovereignty of peoples. In reality, this narrative long concealed a selective interventionism, often justified by the fight against terrorism or against so-called “rogue” regimes. The new world order was American. An “hyperpower,” as Hubert Védrine famously put it. For two decades, the United States targeted figures operating outside the classic framework of statehood: the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Qasem Soleimani. Even Saddam Hussein, a notable exception, was absorbed into a broader narrative of proliferation and systemic threat. With Maduro, the logic shifts. This is no longer about neutralizing a transnational actor, but about intervening directly against a sitting head of state, in a region historically viewed by Washington as part of its natural strategic sphere. The gesture is less ideological than geopolitical. What is emerging increasingly resembles an informal Helsinki, without negotiation tables or solemn signatures. A tacit rule now prevails: each major power acts as the enforcer of its vital space, carefully avoiding direct confrontation with others. Israel imposes “its” regional security order in the Middle East through preventive deterrence and targeted military action; Turkey redraws its red lines from Syria to the Caucasus; Saudi Arabia manages its immediate neighborhood through an existential reading of security; the United States reinvests in the Western Hemisphere in an explicitly Monroeist spirit; Russia acts in Ukraine (and previously in Syria) in the name of strategic depth; China insists that Taiwan is a non-fragmentable red line; India and Pakistan revert to their familiar refrains… without even mentioning the Horn of Africa and its endless intrigues. With the collapse of the Yalta order, the world is no longer governed by universal norms, but by localized balances of power. Here is where the analogy with Helsinki reaches its limits. In 1975, mutual recognition of spheres of influence operated within a strict bipolar framework. The nuclear arms race followed a paradoxically stabilizing logic: deterrence. Each side knew the other’s red lines. The existential risk of nuclear annihilation acted as an ultimate brake. Competition within coordination was the rule. Today, that framework has vanished. The world is multipolar, fragmented, crossed by middle powers, hybrid actors, militias, failed states, and disruptive technologies. Nuclear weapons still exist, but they no longer structure the entire system. They coexist with prolonged conventional wars, targeted strikes, covert operations, cyberattacks, and proxy conflicts. Deterrence is no longer a shared language. As for coordination… one might ask the judoka Putin what he thinks. This return to regional policing produces a world that is more legible for major powers, but infinitely more dangerous for gray zones. States too weak to impose sovereignty yet too strategic to be ignored become permanent theaters of contained tension. Above all, the absence of a credible global framework introduces an unprecedented risk: miscalculation, a localized escalation spiraling out of control, in a system where no one truly believes in the rules they invoke. That is another name for chaos. And it will not be “constructive.” Helsinki froze the world through fear of mutual annihilation. Today’s world advances without a safety net, convinced that local force can solve everything, while forgetting an essential truth: brinkmanship always carries the risk of falling into the abyss. Perhaps that is the real omen for tomorrow: an international order less “hypocritical,” but more unstable; more honest in its brutality, yet stripped of safeguards. A world where everyone polices their own backyard, until the borders between those “backyards” once again fail to hold. “I’ve seen the future, brother, it is murder,” sang Leonard Cohen after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the bipolar order. He was right. Between dreams of freedom and democracy and the nightmarish disillusion of unbounded violence, there is often only a single step.

Probably the most overused concept in Lebanon, freedom is nevertheless neither a luxury nor a slogan. It is our very condition of possibility—the discreet breath that has allowed this improbable country to stand upright between sea and mountains, between languages, rites, memories, and wounds. Without it, only a fractured territory of armed tribes remains. With it, Lebanon becomes a space—fragile, conflict-ridden, yet alive—where an attempt is still made to allow worlds that elsewhere turn their backs on one another to coexist. Today, that freedom is under threat. Everywhere. On one side, it is undermined by real or self-proclaimed “minorities” who, in the name of legitimate recognition, slide toward the outright negation of the other—toward cancel culture, the policing of words, works, and nuance. Emancipation then turns into a permanent tribunal, debate into an inquisition, criticism into blasphemy. On the other side, freedom is besieged by populisms, fundamentalisms, and authoritarian nationalisms bearing names such as Trump, Putin, Orbán, and their local avatars—cardboard strongmen who promise order and deliver only fear. The malady of our time is not merely the “rise of fascisms” and other self-loving “isms” so often denounced by Pope Francis, nor simply the “decline of morals.” It is dogmatism in all its forms. It is the claim by every camp to embody Truth, to seize the center, and to expel from political humanity all that does not resemble itself. Here, in the name of God, censorship, bans, and threats prevail. There, in the name of Progress, people are erased, “deplatformed,” reduced entirely to a single misstep. In both cases, the same gesture is at work: closing the shared space, banishing doubt, forbidding fruitful disagreement. Girardian mimicry in all its splendor—and decay. Lebanon is not immune to this plague; it is, in fact, a laboratory for it. We have known the Second Bureau, militias, Israeli and Syrian occupations, Iran’s long shadow, visible and invisible tutelage. We know all too well the security reflexes, the summons over a post, a joke, an opinion. We know what it means when a military tribunal claims the right to judge civilians, when security services raid a professor’s home as they would a criminal’s, when censors decide for everyone what may be seen, read, or heard. And yet none of these police regimes—not even the sprawling system of Syrian-Iranian tutelage—has ever fully taken root. Because this country, by its very composition, resists tyranny. It may endure it, adapt to it temporarily, negotiate with it out of fatigue or fear; but it always ends up cracking it, bypassing it, mocking it. Lebanon’s heterogeneity—religious, cultural, social—never allows itself to be fully enclosed within a single apparatus of domination. This is our curse, but also our chance. Contrary to the recurring fantasy of popular discourse—“we need an Atatürk or a Nasser to impose secularism,” “an MBS to fight corruption,” “an Assad to crush Islamism,” “a Sharaa to discipline minorities,” “a Bachir to secure a Christian reconquest,” “a general to put everyone in line”—Lebanon will never be saved by a strongman. Past experience has shown what our “strong presidents” and charismatic leaders produce: suspension of the Constitution, abolition of accountability, personality cults, and then total collapse—moral, institutional, urban. Lebanon’s problem is not the absence of leaders. It is the absence of citizens. For too long, we have confused political legitimacy with the cult of the za‘im, the sect, the flag. To borrow Weber’s terms, we have remained stuck between the traditional legitimacy of tribes and communities, and the charismatic legitimacy of “saviors”—pseudo-saints, generals, or warlords. We never completed the transition toward the only legitimacy that emancipates: rational-legal legitimacy, that of the state, the law, institutions, and shared responsibility. Freedom, however, is not an extra layer added once order has been restored. It is the starting point. It is ontological: it constitutes the person prior to any affiliation. This is what Spinoza expressed through the desire to persevere in one’s being; what Michel Chiha affirmed when he made the person and property the pillars of a Lebanon open to the world; what Benedict XVI recalled in Baabda when he insisted that human dignity presupposes free choices, “not under the effect of purely external constraint.” It is what Mohammad Mahdi Chamseddine, Samir Kassir, Gebran Tuéni, Ghassan Tuéni, Hani Fahs, Samir Frangié, Nasrallah Sfeir, Hassan Rifa‘i, and so many others repeated daily until their last breath. Without this primary freedom, there is no citizenship, no responsibility, no justice—only pack reflexes, primitive hordes, dogs and wolves. This is why censorship in Lebanon is more than an abuse: it is a betrayal of our vocation. Every time a group vetoes a concert, a film, a play, an article; every time a church, a party, or a militia brandishes the threat of the street to bend the state; every time an intelligence service summons a citizen over a word, a drawing, a sarcastic remark—another piece of the Lebanese soul is amputated. Fear is cultivated, self-censorship is produced, violence is prepared. Little by little, the very possibility of becoming a people of citizens is destroyed. The soul, the essential singularity of this country, is eroded. The choice before us, a century after the birth of Greater Lebanon, is simple, brutal, and irreducible: either we continue to dream of a Leviathan that will settle our disputes at the price of our freedoms, or we finally accept the risk of democracy. That risk is not anarchy. It is the demanding learning process of pluralism, separation of powers, oversight of security apparatuses, and the imposition of limits on every form of the sacred—religious or identitarian—whenever it seeks to become a censor. It is respect for the Constitution and the norms of jus cogens that frame it. Once again, Lebanon does not need a new enlightened despot. It needs men and women of state willing to burn themselves out in service rather than exploit office; judges who protect freedom as a norm, not as a tolerated exception; armed forces that see themselves as the last bastion of the Constitution, not as the armed wing of a regime or a clan. Above all, it needs citizens freed from voluntary servitude—refusing to delegate their thinking to a leader, a sect, or a foreign power. This requires overcoming fear of the other and trusting one another to build a shared future founded on a culture of connection. Memory and the past matter, but they cannot remain frozen; they move forward, and their role is to evolve, not to regress. In a world where walls are rising again, where algorithms lock each individual into a mental enclosure, where extremes feed off one another until moderates are crushed, Lebanon could still offer something other than ruins. It could become once more what it should never have ceased to be: a space for experimenting with freedom, a laboratory of coexistence, a risky wager on humanity’s capacity to extend a hand without denying itself. This is not a utopia—it is a daily act of will and life. But this wager will not be won through incantation. It requires concrete choices: abolishing prior censorship; removing all civilian cases from military courts; placing security services under genuine civilian oversight; educating, from school onward, in pluralism, doubt, and responsibility; protecting freedom of expression to the point of scandal—especially when it unsettles our religious, political, or moral certainties. Killing within ourselves servility and the cult of the leader. No one is perfect. No one is above criticism. Everyone is fallible, from cassock to camouflage. Freedom is not an intellectual whim. It is our last frontier before chaos. If Lebanon renounces what makes it singular—this impossible blend of pluralism and freedom—it will have nothing left to oppose the empires surrounding it or the dogmas inhabiting it. It will become just another parcel on the map of domination: trapped in the past like mosquitoes frozen in Jurassic amber, or the inhabitants petrified in the lava of Pompeii—remnants of history, dead yet still tangible, before dust eventually carries them away. Taking freedom seriously again means restoring a soul to the Republic—and perhaps giving our shared history a chance. That, ultimately, is our salvation—our true redemption.

Contrary to popular belief, the Palestinian question is not trapped in a stalemate by historical inevitability, nor by an irreconcilable, atavistic hatred. It is methodically neutralized by a convergence of interests between extremes who, while clashing in bloodshed, share a common obsession: preventing the emergence of a political solution based on mutual recognition and equal rights. On one side, an Israeli power captive to an absolute security logic, transformed over the years into a governing ideology. On the other, Islamist movements that thrive on the collapse of politics, the sacralization of violence, and the hijacking of the Palestinian cause for the benefit of regional agendas. Caught in the middle, a population held hostage, and a prospect of peace deliberately sabotaged. We must start from this point: radicalization is not the primary cause of the conflict; it is a symptom. As leading Palestinian and Arab intellectuals critical of closed nationalism and armed Islamism have long demonstrated, extremism thrives primarily on the absence of a credible political horizon. Where sovereignty is rendered impossible, violence becomes the substitute language. Similar work has been undertaken by enlightened minds in Israel. However, for more than two decades, the strategy of the Israeli hard right has consisted of emptying any solution based on the existence of two states of its substance. Not by rejecting it outright—which would have a diplomatic cost—but by rendering it materially unfeasible: continuous settlement activity, territorial fragmentation, and the methodical destruction of any Palestinian political continuity. This strategy has a corollary, namely, keeping Palestinians trapped in a deadly binary choice: submission without rights or resistance without a future. In both cases, the Palestinian state disappears as a genuine project. And with it, the possibility of moderate, responsible political leadership, capable of governing, negotiating, and responding to the aspirations of its people in ways other than the sanctification of sacrifice. It is here that the symmetry of extremes becomes evident, to borrow the frameworks developed by René Girard. Palestinian Islamist movements do not represent a break with this logic: they are its product and, paradoxically, one of its best alibis. By presenting themselves as the sole force of resistance, they hijack the Palestinian cause, delegitimize any political alternative, and offer the Israeli camp the ideal pretext for equating any Palestinian national claim with terrorism. The contemporary Palestinian tragedy lies in this: each extreme camp needs the other to survive politically. One justifies the perpetuation of occupation and domination, the other justifies the perpetuation of war in the name of a liberation without contours or deadline. Peace, for its part, becomes the common enemy. In this hall of mirrors, the figures of peace—those who attempted to conceive of mutual recognition as a historical necessity, not a moral concession—have been eliminated, marginalized, or discredited. The political and symbolic assassination of this generation has paved the way for governance by fear, resentment, and identity-based radicalism. But let it be clear: pursuing this logic leads to a complete strategic dead end. No people disappears under military pressure, no national identity dissolves by decree, and no lasting security can be founded on the planned erasure of the other. The Palestinian question is not a humanitarian problem to be managed, much less a security anomaly to be contained. It is an unresolved political problem. And as long as it is treated as such, subcontracted to the logic of force, it will inevitably produce only violence, cycles of radicalization, and regional explosions. The only credible alternative lies in a return to politics. This means recognizing that Israel's security cannot be sustainable without Palestinian sovereignty, and that Palestinian sovereignty can only emerge free from the logic of militias, regional tutelage, and armed messianism. This implies a clear choice: a two-state solution, not as a diplomatic slogan, but as a concrete political architecture. A viable, continuous, sovereign, internationally recognized Palestinian state, led by political forces capable of governing, being accountable, and breaking with the logic of perpetual war. This choice is not a concession to the Palestinians at Israel's expense. It is a condition of political survival for both peoples. The alternative is well known: either a regime of structural inequalities and permanent domination and chronic violence, which amounts to an imperfect, fragile, yet open mutual recognition, suggesting a possible future. International responsibility is central here. The incantatory repetition of international law, without binding mechanisms, has emptied this law of its credibility. Inaction is not neutrality: it is a form of passive complicity with the logic of extremism. Finally, we must break with the dangerous illusion that time is on the side of the status quo. Historical experience shows the opposite: the more a conflict is frozen in injustice, the more radicalized it becomes, the more it spills over, and the more it poisons its entire regional and global environment. Peace is not a naive ideal. It is a courageous political choice, always a minority one in the short term, but the only one capable of preventing general collapse in the long term. In Palestine, as elsewhere, it begins with a simple truth: no future can be built on the denial of the other. The two-state solution, reiterated by the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, is the only non-toxic framework for the future, not only for the Middle East but for the entire world, given how deeply the consequences of the conflict inflame identity and religious passions within every society. The logic that considered the conflict to be geographically "elsewhere," and therefore treatable as a political, diplomatic, security, or humanitarian issue detached from the vital strategic choices of any given country, no longer holds true. The Israeli-Palestinian question now operates like a malignant tumor within national borders. There is a real danger of implosion, no longer confined, as in the 1970s and 80s, to terrorist attacks. The very survival and security of a world that is itself increasingly sliding towards extremism are at stake. As long as this truth remains unacknowledged by the leaders trapped in these extremes, the region will remain imprisoned in an endless war, and the entire world will be shaken by its consequences, as demonstrated by the recent massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney. Peace agreements forced upon the Israeli state will not resolve the underlying problem. Fire and bloodshed guarantee no lasting peace. On the contrary, they only fuel an endless prolongation of the conflict. It is time to break the cycle of violence and take foundational steps toward peace. A first step in the right direction, awaited for decades, was taken on the sidelines of the 80th United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 22, 2025. But it must be followed by concrete action, which means definitively cutting off Iran's influence in the region, but also—and this is the real crux of the matter—ceasing to consider Israel as a privileged state, above international law, enjoying total impunity in defiance of all conventions and general principles, possessing a fantastical claim to a "promised land," and wielding the power of life and death over the Palestinians. A historic and strategic choice must be made against hatred and the culture of exclusion and death. It is high time to make it, even if 77 years too late. Hundreds of thousands of lives in the region and across the globe have already paid the price of this conflict. This needless bloodshed must end before it engulfs everyone. Isn't it through genuine acts of peace, far removed from trophies and trinkets, that true global leadership is asserted?