“There will be no security, no stability, no prosperity for Lebanon if there is not the beginning of a process of disarmament of militias.”– Jean-Yves Le Drian, French Presidential Envoy to Lebanon, following meetings in Beirut, December 2023.

The sentence lingered in the political air like a chemical agent – odorless, pervasive, toxic. It was not pronounced in the heat of battle, nor chanted in the adrenaline-charged theatre of street protest. It was calibrated for the quiet after ceasefire, the suffocating calm Lebanon knows too intimately: the stillness in which the next storm gathers its force.

Europe’s proposal arrived not as an ultimatum, but as a gift, wrapped in the familiar language of partnership and institutional support, that antiseptic vocabulary of “capacity-building,” “rule of law,” and “state sovereignty.” It offered training, funding, and expertise for Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces, presented as a lifeline to a state hollowed by war and collapse. But gifts are never neutral. Beneath the polished communiqués lies a design as calculated as any military plan: a restructuring of Lebanon’s security architecture that frees the army from guarding borders so its power can be redirected inward, toward internal disarmament.

This is the project’s core. It is not the defense of Lebanon, but its re-engineering. The military is relieved of the frontier so its force can be turned against the very communities that held that line when the state receded. At its center is the neutralization of the resistance axis, the only formation, alongside Iran and allied forces, that has ever presented Israel with a cost too high to pay.

All this unfolds in a country still breathing smoke. Israeli warplanes continue to strike southern villages and Palestinian camps long after the ceasefire ink dried. Fields are burned to the stalk, roofs collapse into courtyards, and children sleep beneath the cracks left by bombardment. It is amid these ruins of a manufactured “peace” that Europe speaks of stability.

Lebanon recognizes these promises. They came after Taif, after 2006, after every lull that masqueraded as an ending. Each time, the mantra was “normalization.” Each time, the invoice for normality was delivered to those who had defended the land when no one else would.

The question Lebanon now faces admits no diplomatic evasion. Is this the fortification of a state, or the disarmament of a nation? Is sovereignty being restored, or is resistance being dismantled with international consent?

The New “Security Project” for Lebanon

“The state, and only the state, should have the monopoly over the use of force and the possession of arms on all its territory.” – President Michel Aoun, in a speech to the Lebanese Armed Forces, August 4, 2020.

The statement was delivered with the serene authority of a universal truth, the kind of declarative sentence that, in a vacuum, admits no dissent. What sane society would dispute it? Who would argue against the state’s singular right to bear arms? Yet Lebanon exists in no vacuum. Here, sovereignty has never been a synonym for security; the state has never stood as the sole guardian at the gate. In this context, the principle warps, acquiring a radically different, more operational meaning.

On the very day President Aoun’s words echoed through the military barracks, a parallel discourse was being threaded through the corridors of Brussels. European Union diplomats circulated a confidential framework: a blueprint for diverting security assistance from the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) toward the country’s police apparatus. The proposal was a study in bureaucratic reallocation: internal security would be ceded to the Internal Security Forces (ISF), thereby “freeing up” the national army to pursue its core, newly emphasized mission: enforcing the state’s monopoly on violence. The language was sterile. The ambition was surgical.

What Europe formally offered, phrased as “advice, training, and capacity-building, possibly with equipment,” reads as anodyne, the well-rehearsed vernacular of donor conferences in a continent built on institutional paradigms. But Lebanon is no laboratory for benign reform. A European scoping mission is already calendared for early 2026. This timeline is not incidental; it is explicitly tethered to the anticipated end of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) mandate and the planned withdrawal of peacekeepers thereafter. The calculus is breathtaking, because at the precise historical moment Lebanon is expected to assume full security control over its volatile South, Israeli warplanes continue to shred its sovereignty from the skies. The plan arrives, therefore, not in a climate of peace, but under the permanent whisper of drones; it is offered not as a reward for stability, but as an architecture built for absence.

Europe stages this intervention as state-building. The optics are impeccably curated – the strengthening of institutions, the professionalization of a modern constabulary, and the warm handshake of international partnership. Peel back this façade, and a simpler, starker logic emerges. The project is engineered to cultivate a security state purged of resistance. It is not proposed as a shield against external threats but legislated as a precondition for internal pacification. In this elegant inversion, the promise of sovereignty is transformed into the currency of surrender.

So Why the Push Now?

To understand the urgency, one must dissect the fragile architecture of control that has governed and contained Lebanon since the 2006 war. United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701 ended the conflict by imposing a brittle equilibrium: the South was placed under the joint stewardship of UNIFIL and the Lebanese Armed Forces, its territory theoretically sanitized of any weapons not under state control. The resolution was an exercise in political alchemy, attempting to marginalize the resistance on paper while tacitly admitting it could not be erased from reality. For nearly two decades, this uneasy compromise continued, not because it was just, but because it was necessary – a functional fiction sustained by the ever-present specter of invasion.

In 2024, a ceasefire between Hezbollah and the Israeli military halted large-scale hostilities. But a ceasefire is not a peace; it is a ledger of suspended violence. Full withdrawal never materialized, airstrikes continued as punctuation, and border incursions persisted as grim footnotes. In the southern suburbs of Beirut, families swept crescents of shattered glass from their courtyards as the acrid perfume of spent munitions clung to the streets. The truce was never an end. It was merely a drawn breath between assaults.

Then came the pivotal, bureaucratic turn. In August 2025, the Lebanese cabinet formally tasked the army with drafting a definitive plan to ensure the “state monopoly on arms.” The phrase propagated through official channels with the assured, sterile confidence of an immutable principle. Yet beneath this technocratic veneer lay a blunt euphemism: the operational disarmament of the resistance. A surge of American funding followed, approximately $230 million, strategically partitioned between the Internal Security Forces and the army, with explicit strings attached to verifiable progress on arms collection. Europe, observing the chessboard, then advanced with its own crucial piece of the planning.

With UNIFIL preparing for its staged withdrawal, the Western proposal to reconfigure and reinforce the ISF has shed all pretense of incidental aid. It has been crystallized as the linchpin of a concerted geopolitical project. The objective is no longer opaque: to transmute Lebanon into a polity where internal security is administered by foreign-trained police, where the national army is repurposed as an internal compliance bureau, and where the resistance, the only force in Lebanon’s history to impose a tangible cost on occupation, is rendered illegitimate. Not through military defeat, but through the cold, concerted consensus of international forums. Its disarmament is not the outcome of a battle, but the prerequisite for a prescribed peace.

France, the EU & the Roadmap to Monopoly of Arms

“The priority for Lebanon, and for those who want to help it, is and must be the fight against the illegal possession of weapons and the imperative of the state’s monopoly on the use of force.” – Anne Grillo, French Ambassador to Lebanon, in an interview with L’Orient-Le Jour, June 2024.

The statement was delivered as a diagnostic fact, not a contested position. It was an empirical truth to be acknowledged, rather than a political demand open for debate. It landed in Beirut not as a point of discussion, but as a precondition for dialogue. The French envoy’s focus was telling: no mention of the economy in freefall, the metastasizing corruption, or the state’s infrastructure crumbling into the Mediterranean. The subject was weapons. This singular emphasis illuminated the new axis around which Western interest decisively pivots – not the reconstruction of Lebanon, but the reconfiguration of its power.

By December 2025, Brussels had progressed from issuing declarative statements on Lebanese sovereignty to drafting the technical schematics for its exercise. A document from the European External Action Service detailed a plan to fortify Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces (ISF) through training, advisory support, and “possibly equipment.” The stated aim was to allow the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to offload internal policing duties and “refocus” on core defense, a recalibration of mandate. In the diplomatic register, this is assistance. In the grammar of strategy, it is a repositioning of forces.

A European scoping mission is already slated for early 2026 to engineer this reinforcement of the ISF. The EU maintains it does not seek to supplant the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), whose mandate is set to expire in December 2026. Yet the entire plan is predicated on a post-UNIFIL reality. It assumes that once the multinational buffer withdraws, the volatile South will be secured not by an international presence, but by a national force whose training, funding, and operational priorities are authored in foreign capitals. The peacekeepers leave; their doctrine remains.

This formal transfer of “internal security tasks” from army to police is more than an administrative shift; it is a philosophical reconstitution of authority. The army is conceptually divorced from its historic, if often unfulfilled, role as the nation’s shield against external invasion. It is recast as the state’s primary instrument for internal pacification, the enforcement arm of disarmament. 

Consequently, the resistance, which draws its legitimacy and resilience from social bedrock rather than state barracks, is redefined as an aberration. In this new design, legitimacy is not earned through efficacy or popular will, but conferred solely by Western approval.

The architects of this shift are European, with France holding the lead pen. Jean-Yves Le Drian, the former French defense and foreign minister turned presidential envoy, reportedly delivered to Beirut a roadmap to “independently assess” the path to future disarmament. The phrase wears the cloak of technical neutrality. But its target is conspicuously singular: the only armed group in Lebanon that has, through repeated conflict, compelled Israeli hesitation. The French proposal is therefore not a neutral evaluation. It is a political solution to what Paris defines as the primary obstacle to stability, and what a significant portion of the Lebanese populace venerates as its only viable shield.

Superficially, the project markets itself as modernization – aligning Lebanon with international norms, bolstering its institutions, and preparing for sovereignty after UNIFIL. But this bureaucratic vocabulary is a cipher for a more profound ambition. The goal is to construct a security state where the monopoly of violence rests entirely with a reconstituted army – an army whose budget, training curriculum, and strategic doctrine will originate from the very powers that have long insisted that Lebanon’s core security flaw is not the threat of invasion, but the persistence of resistance.

What Brussels and Paris proffer, therefore, is not mere assistance. It is a blueprint for hegemony. Beneath a veneer of sovereign restoration lies a project of re-armament under external tutelage: a security architecture where legitimacy is conditional on adherence to externally drawn red lines. The result will be a Lebanon that appears more orderly, more uniform, more centralized. But its capacity for self-defense, its right to define the terms of its own survival, will have been quietly relinquished.

UNIFIL’s Drawdown

In November 2025, the United Nations Security Council voted to extend the mandate of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) for a final, terminal time. The mission is scheduled to cease on December 31, 2026, initiating a year-long drawdown. The decision was framed in New York as the logical conclusion to a long deployment, a final verdict of mission accomplished. In Lebanon, it was received as the prelude to a perilous void.

UNIFIL was birthed in 1978 under Resolution 425, tasked with overseeing an Israeli withdrawal and nurturing the frail sapling of state authority in the ravaged borderlands. Its mandate swelled after the 2006 war, yet its achievements remained perpetually ambiguous. It patrolled blue lines, observed violations, and filed reports in triplicate. What it did not do was deter. Over decades, it calcified from a peacekeeping intervention into a geopolitical buffer: a human shock absorber lodged between two armies, engineered to manage escalation while deliberately ignoring its source. Critics long contended it merely cryogenically froze the conflict. Supporters retorted that in Lebanon, freezing was the only form of peace on offer.

Now, the freezer is being unplugged.

As the blue helmets prepare their departure, the EU-backed redesign of Lebanon’s security apparatus transitions from theoretical plan to operational necessity. With the multinational presence evaporating, the South will ostensibly fall under the protection of national institutions. But this “nationalization” is an elaborate fiction, meticulously mediated by external powers. The Internal Security Forces are to be reconstructed under European supervision. The Lebanese Army’s central mandate is being legally and doctrinally reframed to prosecute a monopoly on arms. In this lexical shift, the weapons of the resistance undergo a crucial reclassification: from a de facto security buffer to an existential threat to the state itself. The entire transformation is marketed as a triumphant return to sovereignty. Yet the sovereignty on offer is a curated one, where the prerogative of violence is funded, trained, and legitimized by foreign ministries.

The timing is not coincidental; it is cryptographic. UNIFIL’s phased exit is precisely synchronized with the army’s adoption of the “Homeland Shield” doctrine, a formal blueprint for the systematic disarmament of Hezbollah, starting in the South and radiating inexorably outward. In the vacuum left by the peacekeepers, with the ISF reconstituted as a Western-groomed constabulary, the Lebanese Army is strategically positioned as the sole executor of this disarmament. Every other armed entity is thereby redefined as its object of control. The official rubric is “restoring state authority.” The tangible effect is the surgical removal of the resistance.

UNIFIL’s departure, therefore, is not an organic endpoint. It is a deliberately timed act within a broader, Western-choreographed production. The South will be secured not by an international mandate, but by a locally recruited foreign-directed force. The national army will be tasked with neutralizing the very arsenal that for decades served as the country’s only credible deterrent. The resistance will be confronted not with tanks at the border, but with legal statutes in Beirut. 

Lebanon will be congratulated on its newfound strength, even as it is systematically stripped of its capacity for autonomous defense. The buffer is leaving. The void it creates has already been filled with a blueprint.

Arms Collection and the “Homeland Shield”

“The weapons of the resistance are not subject to discussion or bargaining. They are the guarantee to protect Lebanon, and the only protector of Lebanon since the creation of the state.” – Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, former Secretary-General of Hezbollah, in a speech marking Resistance and Liberation Day, May 25, 2023.

While often delivered with fiery conviction from the podium, this statement transcended rhetorical performance. It was enunciated as a matter of doctrinal fact – the foundational creed of a parallel sovereignty. Lebanon’s political echelons and their foreign patrons may reduce disarmament as a technical process, a sterile checklist of phases and procedures. But in the villages of the South, the alleys of the camps, and the scarred suburbs where war is a memory written on walls, the subject is not abstract. Here, weapons are not symbols of power. They are artifacts of survival. They are shields.

In September 2025, the Lebanese government codified this clash of credos into official policy, approving a new security doctrine dubbed “Homeland Shield.” A five-phase plan, it envisioned a methodical roll-up of all non-state arms, beginning south of the Litani River and expanding nationwide. On paper, it tasked the Lebanese Armed Forces with a monumental engineering project: dismantling the resistance’s military infrastructure to erect the state’s monopoly on violence. In reality, it commanded the army to undertake a mission that many within its own ranks, from foot soldiers to commanding officers, viewed as not only perilous but illegitimate: to turn its guns against the very force that had stood as the nation’s bulwark when the state itself had retreated into impotence.

The contradictions were not latent; they were instantaneous. “Homeland Shield” extended no binding timeline, only a nebulous sequence of phases where any step could be indefinitely delayed, suspended, or covertly advanced without accountability. An undertaking of existential consequence – the demilitarization of a society’s primary deterrent – was thereby collapsed into a sterile grid of deadlines and deliverables. Yet its political cost was instantaneous and tectonic. Hezbollah and its allies issued a rejection that was absolute. The Axis of Resistance recast the proposed disarmament not as an act of law, but as a declaration of war: a provocation guaranteed to incinerate the fragile peace and plunge the nation back into the inferno it had so recently escaped.

The state sought legitimacy in retrospection, framing “Homeland Shield” as the long-delayed fulfillment of the 1989 Taif Accords, which famously mandated the disbandment of all resistance forces. But to a populace that has lived the three decades since Taif, the resonance was different. That history teaches a brutal lesson: in Lebanon, disarmament under foreign auspices has never yielded sovereignty. It has manufactured dependency. Resurrected as justification, the language of Taif revealed its true function – not a framework for reconciliation, but a grammar of conditioned surrender. It is the syntax for reintegrating a Lebanon that is perpetually supervised, meticulously policed, and selectively re-armed under the exacting guidance of foreign powers.

For a vast constituency spanning the Shia heartlands of the South and the Bekaa Valley, the besieged Palestinian camps, the southern suburbs of Beirut, and including resistance-aligned Sunnis and Christians, “Homeland Shield” did not appear as a path to sovereign strength. It materialized as a blueprint for engineered fragility. It articulated the grammar of statehood while ensuring the outcome of defenselessness. The plan promised to retire Lebanon’s only proven deterrent, leaving its most vulnerable communities with nothing more than a parchment guarantee of protection. This guarantee was, in practice, a diplomatic note filed at the United Nations: a formality utterly worthless against the next bomb or the next armored bulldozer. Recent history offered no solace. The grim catalog of Western-sponsored disarmament in Iraq, Libya, and Gaza did not culminate in security. It culminated in fragmentation, in clientelism, and in violence metastasizing through proxy forces.

Seen through this prism, the collection of weapons is not a ritual of sovereign restoration. It is a rite of preparation for subordination.

Domestic Reaction, Sectarian Fracture and the Social Contract Under Strain

Few subjects in Lebanon reveal the nation’s underlying architecture of power more starkly than the question of arms. It is not a neutral policy issue, nor a technical security challenge. It is the country’s deepest geological fault and its seismic rift, cracking through sect, class, geography, and collective memory. The political fissures that erupted after the announcement of “Homeland Shield” exposed more than procedural disagreements; they laid bare competing, irreconcilable visions of the Lebanese state’s very essence: its purpose, its legitimacy, and whom it ultimately exists to protect.

Within the halls of formal power, the message was meticulously unified. President Joseph Aoun declared 2025 would be “the year of restoring state authority over weapons,” framing the project as the non-negotiable bedrock of sovereignty and civic peace. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam amplified this, presenting the doctrine as the essential return to a single source of order, framing it as the prerequisite for international credit lines and diplomatic recognition. The official narrative repeated a mantra of centralization, that the Lebanese Armed Forces – and only the Lebanese Armed Forces – embody the legitimate monopoly of violence. To the state’s adherents, disarmament was not an act of capitulation, but of completion, envisioned as the final suturing of the state’s fractured body into a whole.

This narrative found a receptive audience among the besieged middle class, the investment-starved business elite, diaspora-oriented media, and secular political circles weary unto death of conflict. For them, the promise of a normalized life was a potent siren song. The language of a “civil state” – a state of laws, not resistance – offered a glimmer of exit from the labyrinth of perpetual war. From the vantage point of Beirut’s western districts and from abroad, the stipulated cost, namely the dismantling of the resistance, appeared as a difficult but necessary transaction for a future of predictable borders and open markets.

But another Lebanon – one that is deeper, older, and more frequently targeted – heard in “Homeland Shield” not the peal of a civil state, but the death knell of its only proven defense. In the villages south of the Litani, the towns of the Bekaa, the teeming Palestinian camps, and the southern suburbs whose rooftops are familiar to Israeli targeting pods, the doctrine was translated not as sovereignty, but as surrender. Resistance leaders condemned it as a “major sin,” a betrayal that would leave the nation naked before its historical aggressor. Their language did not traffic in secular legalisms; it was forged in the furnace of religious conviction, martyrological memory, and a visceral understanding of power.

For these communities, the resistance is not a parallel army. It is the embodiment of a social covenant, the practical instrument through which communal dignity is asserted, families are shielded from incursion, and a history of violation is actively contested.

The stakes are not academic; they are somatic, measured in imminent blood and rubble. If “Homeland Shield” succeeds, the South, the camps, and the suburbs – those regions that form the very heartlands of Shia Lebanon – would confront a future of enforced demilitarization. Their tangible, hard-won security would be traded for the insubstantial vapor of international guarantees. Should the plan be resisted, whether politically or militarily, Lebanon risks a fissure more violent and comprehensive than any since the civil war. For the ordinary citizens that are already crushed under the triple weight of hyperinflation, vanishing livelihoods, and the looming threat of displacement, this is not a parliamentary debate. It is a calculation of communal and personal survival.

The fragile social contract that has governed the uneasy relationship between the state in Beirut and the resistance in the field was never notarized in a constitution. It was inscribed in blood and validated by memory: an inferred understanding that the former would tolerate the latter so long as it performed the defense the state could not. It was this grim, unwritten pact, and not the parchment of UN resolutions, that for years imposed a deterrent logic on the border. The current project is a deliberate effort to erase and rewrite that contract, to replace resistance with compliance, and swap a hard-earned deterrent for a supervised dependency. 

The Stakes Are Not Abstract

To reduce this debate to the question of guns is to mistake the symptoms for the disease. This is a conflict over justice, over memory, over the physics of deterrence, and over the most fundamental of rights: the right to exist without the specter of annihilation hovering at the frontier.

For Lebanon, resistance has never been a romantic abstraction or a political slogan. It has been a grim and granular arithmetic. It has been the only credible response to a neighbor whose logic of occupation and episodic aggression has been the one constant in Lebanese life since 1948, a shadow cast across four generations.

The proposed disarmament, or more accurately, the wholesale re-engineering of Lebanese security under Western supervision, may offer a sanitized peace to some. It may even manufacture the semblance of order in ministerial reports and diplomatic cables. But for a formidable portion of the nation, and most acutely for those who have knelt in the dust of their own pulverized homes, this project threatens to permanently institutionalize vulnerability. It risks transmuting national sovereignty from a substantive right into a hollow performance – a scripted play of statehood, its viability contingent on the fluctuating goodwill of external patrons, inherently fragile and perpetually reversible.

What is unfolding, therefore, is not a technical reform of security sectors. It is a philosophical coup. It is an attempt to fundamentally redefine the meaning of “security” in the Lebanese context: a shift from a model where deterrence is painstakingly earned through asymmetric struggle and communal sacrifice, to a model where deterrence is outsourced, leased on politically conditional terms, and subject to revocation by foreign creditors. It replaces an organic, if chaotic, capacity for self-defense with a state-administered system of sanctioned defenselessness.

Consequently, the pivotal question now confronting Lebanon is not merely whether it will be disarmed. The machinery for that, as detailed, is being assembled with methodical precision. The ultimate, terrifying question is: Once disarmed, will Lebanon still be Lebanon? Or will it become a steward of its own incapacity, a sovereign entity stripped of the sovereign’s most ancient right, which is the right to defend the integrity of its soil and the safety of its people? The answer will determine not just the configuration of its security apparatus, but the very soul of the nation.

Case Studies: Disarming the Resistance or Redrawing the Balance of Power?

“We are engaged in a comprehensive effort to dilute and diminish the power of Iran’s proxies and partners across the region… This is not just about Gaza, or Lebanon, or Yemen. It is about the entire network.” – A senior U.S. State Department official, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity, November 2024 (as reported by Reuters).

Lebanon does not exist in a geopolitical quarantine. Every surgical strike against its resistance core sends destabilizing tremors along a vast regional arc. This is a geography where the capacity to deter Israel, or at minimum, to impose a prohibitive cost on its ambitions, has never been an academic theory. It has been the only practical difference between communal survival and topographical erasure. The project being engineered in Beirut’s ministries, therefore, cannot be diagnosed in isolation. It is a single chapter in a regional playbook, repeated across other arenas where the same policy structures are built, the same language of “reform” and “sovereignty” is invoked, and the same invisible hand guides the pen.

In Gaza, the grim paradigm is perfected. Even amid declared ceasefires, Israel retains a unilateral monopoly on the tempo and scale of violence. The rubble of one invasion has not cooled before the scaffolding for the next is prepared. Families dig graves then foundations, in an endless loop of siege. It is against this backdrop of managed, perpetual violence that Western disarmament rhetoric in Lebanon gains its sinister coherence. The goal is not to resolve conflict, but to preemptively remove the means of answering it, thereby achieving pacification without the inconvenient predicate of justice or ended occupation.

In Iraq and Syria, the script is translated into a different dialect but obeys the same syntax. Airstrikes, sophisticated sanctions regimes, and covert pressure are relentlessly applied to the networks of the Axis of Resistance. The public justification is a mantra: degrade the “militias” to resurrect the “state.” The method is familiar: offer foreign training and institutional makeovers designed not to strengthen national defense, but to gut the only entities that have proven capable of deterring foreign military aggression. The objective is branded as state-building, but the result is inevitably state-breaking: dependency, fragmentation, and the careful, piecemeal extraction of a nation’s will to resist.

In Yemen, the formula adapts but holds. Here, a fiercely independent force that withstood a catastrophic foreign onslaught is now offered a seat at the table of a “regional security architecture” – a mechanism aimed at co-opting its power while denying it true sovereign agency. The lesson, seared into the collective memory from Sana’a to Beirut, is unambiguous: in the face of siege and external dictate, arms are not a tool of aggression. They are the fundamental currency of negotiation. They are leverage.

Across every front, Western policy articulates its aims in the sterile, respectable language of stability, order, and centralized control. But the subtext, echoing in every classified briefing and strategic document, is the preservation of Israel’s qualitative military edge and its freedom of action. Lebanon is not a unique case. It is merely the next, most critical domain in a project of continental re-engineering, a project justified in the salons of diplomacy but executed through the captured institutions of the state itself.

To disarm Hezbollah, therefore, is not to “normalize” Lebanon into the community of nations. It is to methodically remove the last, most effective layer of indigenous deterrence in the Levant. It is to demolish a security architecture that has proven resilient precisely because it is decentralized, unpredictable, and refuses compliance with a Western-imposed order. The persistent Western fixation on dismantling this model betrays a deeper anxiety: it is not a threat to peace that is feared, but a threat to uncontested power.

Thus, the question spills beyond Lebanon’s borders. It becomes regional, existential, civilizational. It is the oldest and most brutal of political questions: Who acquires the right to security, and who is condemned to perpetual insecurity? Who sets the terms of existence for whom?

Disarming Lebanon in the Name of Saving It

The discourse of the new doctrine is sleek, technocratic, and sterilized of ideology. It is a liturgy of rehabilitation: institutional strengthening, state sovereignty, monopoly of arms, compliance with international mandates, peace, normalization, investment, inclusion. It is the vocabulary of the boardroom and the diplomatic cable, designed to comfort and to convince. Yet beneath this polished phraseology lies a blunt, atavistic, and familiar reality. 

Envision the Lebanon this project meticulously blueprints: a nation whose army is trained, equipped, and financially sustained by the very capitals that underwrite the regional military supremacy of Israel; a nation whose police apparatus is reconfigured not for public safety, but for the efficient management of internal dissent. This is not the portrait of a stronger state. It is the schematic of a more manageable one – manageable, that is, for external powers. The ultimate objective, therefore, is not Lebanese security, but Lebanese compliance.

The disarmament of Hezbollah, framed as the excision of a tumor, will not yield stability. It will institutionalize vulnerability and will inevitably dismantle a deterrent forged in sacrifice, replacing it with a security paradigm built on dependency. It will present Lebanon with a meticulously crafted illusion of sovereignty, all while transferring the actual levers of defense to foreign patrons whose historical record is not one of protecting any soil, but of selectively exploiting its fragility.

The human cost will be levied, as always, on the same geography of sacrifice: the villages of the South where the soil is shrapnel-rich, the southern suburbs of Beirut where buildings wear their scars like uniforms, the Palestinian camps perennially trapped between neglect and assault, the displaced, the poor – those for whom the resistance has never been an ideological choice, but a fact of ecology, as essential as a wall or a roof. Lebanon’s history is a catechism of disarmament demands, each presented as the final admission ticket to “normality.” Yet every subsequent chapter reveals the same tragic sequence: a fleeting, supervised calm, followed by another war, another incursion, another bombardment. The normality offered is merely the interlude between violations.

The lesson is elemental, imprinted not in treaties but in the rubble of family homes and the silent testimony of survivors. Sovereignty without the means of its own defense is not sovereignty at all – it is an engraved invitation for invasion. What Europe euphemistically terms “stability” is, in practice, the absence of meaningful resistance. What Israel defines as “peace” is the absence of fear in Tel Aviv, purchased by the imposition of terror in Tyre.

And what a great many Lebanese, across sect and party, understand as dignity is something fundamentally different: it is the quiet, unwavering knowledge that when the aggression returns – as it always has, as it always will – they will not stand helpless. They will not be rendered spectators to their own annihilation.

Thus, the choice that now confronts Lebanon is not the simplistic one between war and peace. That is a false binary sold by those who would manage its conflict. The true, defining choice is between two incompatible visions of peace itself: a peace that is imposed, conditional, and eternally supervised, or a peace that is defended, dignified, and legitimately earned. The former is the peace of the graveyard – orderly and silent, while the latter is the peace of the living – messy, resilient, and free.