This past month, I visited Abbas Ibrahim, Lebanon’s former national-security chief, at his apartment complex in a well-heeled neighborhood on Beirut’s southern outskirts. The area had been heavily bombarded in recent weeks, and an Israeli drone buzzed overhead, looping around the cleaved remains of nearby buildings. Ibrahim, who retired in 2023, was once one of Washington’s most valuable back channels in the region, a trusted interlocutor with access to the highest echelons of power in Hezbollah and in Tehran. His office was stuffed with books—“The Invention of the Jewish People” (Shlomo Sand), “World Order” (Henry Kissinger), “The Shia Revival” (Vali Nasr)—which formed a kind of syllabus on the region’s unsettled questions. Many were spread open on desks and tables, as if he were busy moving between them all at once. In one meeting room was a worn copy of Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal,” which Ibrahim insisted I take with me. It was not a book he admired, but he had read it when Trump returned to office, hoping that it would provide some insight into the man now trying to exercise control over Lebanon’s most intractable problem. I asked Ibrahim whether Hezbollah could be disarmed, particularly now, with Israel occupying so much of the country’s south. “Forget about it,” he said. “By force, it’s impossible.”
Since 2006, the U.S. has poured more than three billion dollars into the Lebanese military, hoping that it could be made powerful enough to counter Hezbollah. But this aid always came with an implicit ceiling. It helped build an army largely for counterterrorism and border control, not one capable of fighting Israel, the enemy Hezbollah invokes to justify its arms. The state’s arsenal comprises a patchwork of older and secondhand equipment, with no advanced air-defense system fit to challenge Israeli warplanes. Its soldiers have had to contend with other shortcomings. Lebanon’s economy began to collapse in 2019, causing salaries to plummet; many enlistees were forced to take second jobs, and others to desert altogether. In Beirut, I have more than once found myself in a servees—one of the shared taxis that ferry passengers across the city—driven by a moonlighting Army sniper. Other soldiers wait tables, deliver food, or guard buildings after hours. At one point, the military even started offering helicopter rides to tourists to raise cash.
Hezbollah’s case for keeping its munitions draws strength from this vacuum, especially in southern Lebanon, which Israel has invaded repeatedly and where many Shiites see the group as the only force willing to protect them. “Are those Western countries ready to give us the weapons and equipment we need to defend the country if Israel tries to invade us?” Ibrahim asked. “The answer is no.” At the onset of the current war, the Lebanese military withdrew from the border region, citing operational concerns: it had to reposition units that risked being encircled by Israel. But the pullback reflected a broader strategic predicament. Lebanon had not started the war, and any confrontation between two U.S.-backed forces would have been politically explosive. It only lent credence to Hezbollah’s argument. The state had ceded the front line just as it was asking the group to lay down its arms. Ibrahim said, “How can you ask people to be disarmed when you don’t have an alternative?”
Beyond the issue of brute capability, there is a deeper, internal danger. Rudolph Haykal, Lebanon’s Army commander, has been wary of any disarmament campaign that could turn the military into Hezbollah’s direct antagonist—and, by extension, set it against a large part of the country’s Shiite community, roughly a third of the population. In Lebanon’s fragile political system, power is divided among religious communities, and the Army’s cross-sectarian legitimacy depends on being seen as an institution—one of the few—that can stand above those divides. During the civil war, the Army splintered along sectarian lines, and, for a time, that consensus collapsed. The state lost control of roads, ports, and entire neighborhoods, as the country devolved into a patchwork of militia-held zones. Ibrahim warned that ordering the military into a direct confrontation with Hezbollah could reopen those fractures. The question, as he saw it, was not only whether the Army had the means to disarm the group. It was whether Lebanon could survive the attempt. “We passed through this experience before,” he said. “Why do we want to drink from this bitter glass again?”
