The world is returning to a 19th-century condition, making peace and international law appear outdated. As globalization and the international order collapse, a multipolar world emerges in their place. Thus, the United States is rushing to address its shortcomings and dismantle the globalization it once founded, brandishing its surplus brute strength to control the Middle East and secure resources, navigation, and transportation routes.
As our world becomes multipolar, international powers wage wars across the region. The American–Israeli alliance’s war has exposed the limitations of military power and its inability to change the strategic context, which will encourage powers that do not favor accepting an “American peace” in the Middle East.
For America’s rival poles, Israel can no longer be seen as an ally but merely a thorn in the side of international conflict. As competitors move to form new alliances in the region, Europe attempts to redefine its global and regional position. Despite its withdrawal to strengthen its standing in the international division of labor, the accelerating crises of energy, navigation, and liquidity have hastened its reevaluation of the Middle East. Meanwhile, China waits and observes, biding its time as Europe stands on the cusp of the Middle East.
Despite Israel’s excesses and harsh policies, it appears that it only needs a moment of intense pressure, condemning itself to remain on the edge of conflict and becoming increasingly captive to fluctuations in American policy.
Conversely, there is no doubt that regional powers will resist this Israeli arrogance, making Turkish–Israeli competition the central regional knot, and likely the main axis of regional conflict. Turkey has an interest in developing relations with Iran and many Arab countries, so it is likely that Turkey will reconsider its alignments after World War II, especially with the crumbling of the international economic system—the Bretton Woods system—and the cracking of NATO.
In this context, Lebanon suffers from structural weaknesses that leave it dangerously exposed and highly sensitive to regional and international polarization. After the ceasefire, what remains obscured in regional wars becomes visible in the Lebanese arena, turning the absence in discourse into flames on the ground. For nothing is more dangerous to Lebanon than war on its borders, except for a truce made around it but not extended to it.
War, in its severity, reveals the lines of fire. However, an incomplete, ambiguous truce is more cunning and far-reaching, as it is drawn to fit the major fronts, leaving margins suspended in interpretive voids. What is omitted from peace texts does not fall out of battlefield calculations but returns multiplied; what remains vague in the understandings of great powers costs subordinate arenas the ability to define their own security and sovereignty. Thus, Lebanon is placed in a position where it is trapped in a conflict whose beginnings it cannot decide, nor does it take part in its settlements.
This is a political reality with high costs. In a region where crises are managed in installments, major fires are often extinguished by pushing the embers to the peripheries. Lebanon, by its location and composition, has long been a recipient of displaced fires. Regardless of causes that do not reach the core issue, the decisive factor is not geography but rather the rent-seeking economic model and corrupt power-sharing within the Lebanese political system. This results in a state that is recognized yet unable to enforce its sovereign decisions, leading to compounded fragility, foreign interference through its cracks, and the blending of the national with the regional.
Yes, Lebanon cannot remain a mere delicate balance among contiguous groups, linked by the name Lebanon and divided by fear and distrust, while the political system and its elites inevitably fail to resolve it.
In times of peace, this arrangement gave Lebanon rare vitality, but alas, it also burdened it with a structural susceptibility to fracture whenever regional balances shift and references become entangled, turning it, after every storm, into a hostage of the next one. Lebanon’s absence from the ceasefire is not a technical or linguistic issue but lies at the very core of the matter. When the dispute intensifies, the field is tasked with interpreting the narratives, and power defines the conflict in its own way.
Hezbollah faces a highly complex equation, moving either toward acceptance of political retreat or suicide in the trenches. At that point, the explosion is no longer dependent on a major strategic decision; it is sufficient for each party to misjudge the limits of the possible. Thus, Lebanon shifts from a confrontation arena to an arena of exploitation. Here lies the danger of “excluding” it from any regional settlement, making it practically a hotel for small wars, chosen by major powers to move from one partial calmness to another instead of a logic of comprehensive settlement.
And when navigation is disrupted, energy markets fluctuate, or the priorities of Europe, China, and the Gulf shift, Lebanon feels the impact in a magnified way. How do we protect it amid a weak economy and a society drained by migration and displacement, with a state that manages risks without the means to do so, turning survival into a personal or factional matter, and communities into both psychological and material shelters at the same time?
I leave the answer to Lebanon’s national youth; Lebanon still holds a substantial amount of historical vitality, which slows the collapse and opens space for reflection and sensibility. But this is only possible by redefining Lebanon’s position within any regional peace framework, and by moving Lebanon out of the condition of deferred salvation.
What has harmed Lebanon is not a lack of sympathy, but the abundance of rhetoric about it, which conceals the defects of reality. A state that does not fortify its foundations turns its uniqueness into mere chronic weakness.
The most dangerous challenge Lebanon could face at this moment is not just war, but the organized vacuum between war and truce, where boundaries become blurred, intentions are confused, calculations are altered, and the entire country becomes prone to remaining a pressure valve for the region, a stage for message exchange, and a depot for surplus violence that finds no outlet on the major fronts.
Thus, the question is no longer “Has Lebanon been affected by what’s happening?” but rather “To what extent has it been left alone to bear the consequences?” And if there must be a truce in this region, the worst truces are those that ease tensions on the major fronts while leaving Lebanon at their mercy.
In the end, Lebanon is not a field for burying the waste of conflicts, but a precise mirror of the wider Middle East’s structural flaws: incomplete sovereignty, partially implemented settlements, and wars that change names while retaining the same underlying maladies—the nation-state and regional peace.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the writers are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Annahar.
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