Analyze

Nuclear weaponry is no longer a mere military instrument. It has become the symbol of a deeper question, that of state security in a world where the effectiveness of international guarantees keeps eroding. The war in Ukraine, the persistent tension surrounding Iran, and North Korea’s survival despite its isolation all bring the same question back to the forefront: how can states still protect themselves within an increasingly unstable international order? Ukraine, or the Lesson of Abandoning Deterrence Ukraine represents the most debated case. Having relinquished its nuclear arsenal in exchange for international security guarantees, it found itself confronted with the Russian invasion. Since then, the question has resurfaced with even greater force: do political guarantees alone suffice to protect states against major threats?

In a country burdened by an unprecedented economic collapse, a persistent financial crisis and a crumbling infrastructure, the resurrection of Kleyaat airport in northern Lebanon has the feel of a project carrying as many ambitions as questions. But beyond the political and media enthusiasm that has accompanied this initiative, a more fundamental question demands to be asked: does Kleyaat truly represent the most viable option for Lebanon, or has the real debate around a second airport in the country not yet begun? This is not about opposing the project as such. Having a second airport in Lebanon is no longer a luxury, but a national, security and economic necessity. The experience of recent years has shown with stark clarity how exposed the country becomes when it depends on a single airport, whether in times of war, security crises, or under the mounting operational pressure bearing down on Beirut airport. The principle commands near-universal agreement. The disagreement starts with a different question: why Kleyaat? And why now?

When Hezbollah, or those orbiting within its sphere, are questioned about their practice of recruiting children — a category that UNICEF defines precisely, through the Convention on the Rights of the Child, as any human being under the age of eighteen — the answer invariably moves between a few registers: they claim the children want it themselves, that they are mature enough, or that it is perfectly normal and consistent with the practice of every revolution in history. A rosary of references then unspools, carrying us back several centuries. We find ourselves, at once, mired in countless fallacies.

The Middle East is sinking into wars and upheavals that show every sign of worsening, more malevolent than at any previous moment. This alone is reason enough to devise solutions that might allow the world to escape its predicament — through diplomacy, through acting with sound judgment freed from instinctive reflexes, through demonstrating the limits of military power, or through some combination of these factors — including by curbing the defiance of laws and the recklessness that now prevails in the conduct of war, under what might be called the “law of the authority of the killing machine.”

When I recalled the substance of George Orwell's 1984 and Albert Camus's The Stranger , I sensed a certain thread connecting their respective descriptions of the instrument of control — or rather the general framework of domination — and what has been unfolding in Lebanon, particularly in recent years, since power consolidated itself in Hezbollah's hands and under its command. There is a strange convergence between the worlds of Orwell and Camus, despite their apparent differences: the world of external oppression in Orwell, and the world of absurdity and existential detachment in Camus. In Orwell, the individual is subject to absolute external surveillance. Big Brother does not merely monitor behaviour; he attempts to seize control of consciousness itself. The objective is not simply compliance, but the erasure of any possibility of internal dissent. Freedom is threatened from without, and the individual — Winston — seeks to reclaim his own selfhood through rebellion.

What would an indicted or accused person not do to save his own skin? Brought before a court of law for crimes against humanity or war crimes, what would a former Syrian mukhabarat officer not say if called upon to answer for his misdeeds? The Fingernails Torn from the Children of Daraa The first defendant to appear before the “Damascus Trials” was Atef Najib. We followed his testimony on social media: he answered the Criminal Court’s questions in a cold and detached tone, as though he had no concern for the fate of the teenagers whom he had consigned to the worst forms of torment. To be sure, he acknowledged the facts for what they were: around fifteen schoolboys who had scribbled anti-Assad slogans on the walls of their school had been detained for more than a month and subjected to severe abuse, including beatings and the tearing out of their fingernails.

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.

We all see it: the world is becoming increasingly brutal, as if devoid of faith or law. Even if the wars in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, Syria, Sudan, and Iran are not fundamentally more violent than those of the 20th century, what strikes the observer is the complete lack of inhibition among protagonists in their use of force. None of the actors involved seeks to burden themselves with moral or legal justifications beyond mere formality. This absence of pretense illustrates the predatory logic that now prevails everywhere. It seems that the only question that matters is: how to gain advantage or avoid losing too much with these new rules of the game? As Donald Trump claims with his talent for sensing the zeitgeist: "No more mister nice guy."

The publication of two appeals launched by activists in Tyre and Nabatiyeh, addressed to the Lebanese State calling for the protection of these two ancient cities from the Israeli threat to erase them, for the deployment of the army and security forces within them, and for their designation as open, demilitarised cities, constituted the first public and organised act of resistance from within the Shia milieu. A milieu whose voices calling for the overcoming of fear and the raising of dissent have multiplied in recent times, against those who have confiscated its history, its present, and its future in vengeance for Khamenei. These activists were subjected to a campaign of threats, denunciation, and character assassination that led some to withdraw.

The shadow of war and politics — in the Middle East, in Ukraine, under the pressure of an increasingly threatening geopolitics — weighed heavily on the closing ceremony of the Festival's 79th edition. The most remarked-upon political address was that of Andrei Zvyagintsev, whose film Minotaur , a portrait of the Russian invasion of Ukraine seen through the disintegration of a family, was awarded the Grand Prix. The Russian director, living in exile in France, spoke directly to President Vladimir Putin: "Stop this farce. The entire world is waiting for the massacre to end, with millions of men facing each other on either side of the front line, dreaming of nothing but an end to a war that has lost its appeal on both warring sides." His words carried the distant echo of the address that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had delivered from that same stage on 17 May 2022.