Lebanon cannot be bombed into sovereignty

Brute force repeatedly altered the immediate balance while helping create the social and political terrain in which new armed legitimacy could emerge.

Lebanon has also been here before in another sense. Throughout its modern history, as one patron has weakened, another has moved in to fill the vacuum, claiming to champion Lebanese sovereignty on its own terms.

Today fits that pattern. Hezbollah and Iran are losing the sway they have held over Beirut for two decades, and Washington and Israel are moving to establish a new dominion. The language of sovereignty is once again doing work that sovereignty, in substance, is not.

Leaders without leverage

The government of Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and President Joseph Aoun, brought about with US-Saudi backing after the 2024 war with Israel ended, is the first national unity government to include Hezbollah and its allies while also clearly articulating a position on consolidating military power under the state.

Under this policy, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) began dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure south of the Litani River before the conflict reignited last month. Since then, the government has outlawed Hezbollah’s military wing, expelled the Iranian ambassador and ordered the authorities to identify, arrest and deport members of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Some of these moves were performative, some genuine, but all were limited by the current reality in which the Lebanese state has very little leverage, domestically and internationally.  That hasn’t stopped Salam and Aoun from trying.

The convergence at present with US and Israeli interests is temporary and will break the moment the question shifts from Hezbollah’s weapons to what Israeli troops are still doing on Lebanese land.

The reality is that Lebanon’s current deterrence arrangement cannot be broken militarily before it is replaced politically. Hezbollah’s arsenal is not just a military fact; it is also the hard expression of a political claim: that the Lebanese state, as it exists, cannot reliably defend parts of its population against Israel and therefore an alternative structure of deterrence is necessary. One can reject that claim and still recognise its force.

If Hezbollah is to be durably disarmed, Lebanon requires a credible replacement for the functions it has come to perform: military deterrence, political representation, social protection and the assurance that someone can absorb the costs of confronting Israel. Absent that replacement, military pressure, occupation and violations of international law will not settle the question. They will reopen it in harsher form.

What a durable settlement would require

A sequenced political process is the only plausible route to the outcome Washington says it wants. It should begin with reciprocity. Lebanon cannot be expected to move decisively on its most explosive internal issue while Israel retains open-ended military freedom inside its territory.

If communities in the south and the eastern Bekaa Valley are to see the threat environment changing, that has to mean a monitored halt to attacks, a timetable for Israeli withdrawal from Lebanese territory and a mechanism for adjudicating violations that does not reduce Lebanese sovereignty to an Israeli claim of necessity. The current agreement contains none of these. It contains the opposite.

A durable settlement would require a phased extension of state authority. The LAF can absorb responsibilities gradually, deploy, monitor and expand its role over time.

Even if Washington wants the LAF to fight Hezbollah, it is quite rightly neither willing nor able to do so, not least while Israel is pummelling the country and Washington is forcing it into unrealistic timelines as part of pressure-driven diplomacy. To ask the army to do that is not to strengthen the state; it is to expose its weakness and herald civil strife.

State sovereignty would require a national defence doctrine. If Hezbollah is to relinquish its claim to deterrence, the replacement has to be a doctrine backed by credible resources and diplomacy that can produce state-led deterrence against Israeli aggression.

Hezbollah’s endurance has never rested only on weapons. It grew inside zones of state failure. Strip its military infrastructure back while the state still cannot provide security, reconstruction and services, and the result would not be sovereign consolidation. It would be abandonment. And abandonment is the soil in which armed alternatives grow.

None of this can succeed without political guarantees. One need not celebrate Lebanon’s confessional system to understand that transitions fail when major communities conclude that the language of statehood is being used to rearrange power against them. If Hezbollah’s military role is to end, the Shia in Lebanon have to see a future for themselves inside a stronger state, not outside of it.

All of this would be a slow process. For Washington, it may be less satisfying than the language of decisive moments and offer no catharsis, no spectacle of history being settled through pressure and alignment. But Lebanon has rarely yielded to that kind of impatience. More often, it has exposed its costs.

Washington says it wants a stronger Lebanese state and a weaker Hezbollah. Perhaps it does. But its actions increasingly suggest something else: not the construction of sovereignty, but the management of fracture under Israeli military primacy.

That path is unlikely to end in neat annexation or orderly control. Lebanon has too many armed memories, unresolved scores and regional entanglements. What is more likely to yield is a conflict that proves far harder to stop once it is set in motion.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.