There is a paradoxical claim at the heart of Israeli policy toward Lebanon, one that has become so routine that it goes almost unnoticed. Israel insists, correctly, that the Lebanese state must disarm Hezbollah and assert sovereign control over its own territory. It then does everything within its considerable power to ensure that the Lebanese state cannot do so—impeding U.S. military assistance to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), attacking the infrastructure of governance, and hobbling the one international force mandated to support Lebanese authority in the south.

Having helped engineer the conditions for Lebanese failure, Israel contends that the Lebanese cannot handle it themselves. Israel must handle it for them. It is a policy that simultaneously demands a formidable outcome and incapacitates the only plausible instrument for achieving it.

That this is a self-defeating strategy does not mean Israel’s underlying strategic objective is illegitimate. If Canada were harboring a heavily armed militant movement, funded and equipped by a distant power with no shared border with the United States but a determined interest in killing Americans, Washington would not be overly concerned about Canadian sovereignty, and it would use every instrument at its disposal to destroy the threat.

This is roughly Israel’s position vis-à-vis Hezbollah, and it is essential to keep that symmetry in mind, particularly in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, and the group’s subsequent, if largely performative, solidarity campaign on Hamas’s behalf. During the first weeks, Hezbollah used rockets, mortars, anti-tank guided missiles, sniping, drones, and attacks on Israeli surveillance systems. The exchanges were persistent but mostly contained near the border. Israel evacuated many northern communities, while Lebanese civilians in the south also began leaving border villages.

Then-Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s first major speech after Oct. 7, on Nov. 3, 2023, clarified the posture. He said the Hamas assault was “100 percent Palestinian,” while Hezbollah’s front would continue and could escalate depending on Gaza and Israeli actions toward Lebanon. By then, Hezbollah and Israel had been exchanging fire since Oct. 8, more than 55 Hezbollah fighters had been killed, and Hezbollah had still used only a fraction of its arsenal.

Hezbollah is not merely a Lebanese militia with a grudge but the cornerstone of Iran’s deterrence architecture against Israel, supported by Tehran specifically to hold Israeli population centers at risk and complicate any strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. Dismantling it has been an Israeli strategic priority for years, and Oct. 7 and its aftermath provided the trigger, not the motive.

The question is whether Israel can actually achieve this goal, given that a nearly identical effort to the current campaign two years ago left Hezbollah damaged but apparently intact and capable of reconstitution. The historical baseline is instructive. From the end of the 2006 war until Oct. 7, the Israel-Lebanon frontier was, by the standards of the region, quiet—not peaceful, since the structural antagonism never disappeared, but stable enough that both sides found it preferable to the alternative, each calculating that initiating hostilities would impose costs it could not easily absorb.

Israel was not indifferent to the threat Hezbollah posed during those years but tolerated Iran’s forward deterrent so long as it stayed dormant, while methodically preparing for the moment it was mobilized. The intelligence penetration of Hezbollah’s communications network, the mapping of tunnel infrastructure, the targeting packages for senior commanders, and the preparation of the pager attacks took years.

This implies that Israeli planners believed long before Oct. 7 that they could inflict severe damage on Hezbollah at manageable cost yet nonetheless held back because stability in the north served Israeli interests well enough. The Israel-Hamas war in Gaza changed that calculation, providing both the pretext and the domestic pressure to act, but the decision was not inevitable.

Which brings us back to the circularity. Disarmament succeeds only when three conditions converge: the state or settlement has enough legitimacy to make the demand credible, enough coercive capacity to enforce it, and enough political authority to absorb or manage the backlash from the armed group’s supporters.

The comparative record bears this out. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) decommissioned only after the Good Friday Agreement had embedded Sinn Féin in constitutional politics, created verification mechanisms, and altered the security and political context in which the IRA operated.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, laid down arms through a Colombian peace accord that paired demobilization with transitional justice, reintegration, political participation, and U.N. monitoring, though dissident factions persisted. Separatists in Aceh, Indonesia, disarmed after a settlement that offered autonomy, amnesty, reintegration, local political participation, and international monitoring, backed by the Indonesian state’s residual coercive weight.

Remove any of those three preconditions—state legitimacy, coercive capability, political authority—and the project of peace collapses. Lebanon’s government, factionalized, financially ruined, and struggling with a catastrophic loss of public confidence following the 2020 Beirut port explosion and years of elite predation, was already operating far below the threshold those conditions require. Its defense budget, which stood at roughly $2 billion in 2019, crashed to around $432 million by 2020 following the financial crisis and had barely recovered to $240 million by 2023.

Its armed forces, some 80,000 strong on paper but chronically underpaid and dependent on foreign donors for basic equipment, ranked 118th in the world by one widely used index behind countries that do not face a threat remotely comparable to Hezbollah, an organization that at its peak commanded more precision-guided missiles than most European NATO members.

Israel introduced a set of policies destined to make things worse in this already fragile situation. For years it lobbied Washington against robust military assistance to the LAF, treating a stronger LAF not as a counterweight to Hezbollah but as a potential threat. Israel discounted the LAF’s established record of operating independently of Hezbollah’s influence and succeeded in slowing and limiting the flow of support Washington would otherwise have provided.

U.S. assistance to the LAF since 2006 totaled roughly $2.5 billion in military financing and equipment, a substantial figure spread across nearly two decades, but one that left the army with outdated equipment, salaries so low that soldiers were taking second jobs to survive, and no air defense capability.

At the same time, Israel took active steps to degrade the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), the roughly 8,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force established in 1978 to assist the government of Lebanon in exercising its authority in the south. Israeli forces attacked UNIFIL positions directly during the 2024 campaign, and simultaneously successfully pressed for a reduction of UNIFIL’s mandate, with U.S. backing.

After the first cease-fire in 2024, there was a genuine, if narrow, opportunity to break this dynamic. The punishment Israel had inflicted on Hezbollah had weakened the organization’s position in the south, and that created real space for a serious implementation of Resolution 1701. The Biden administration recognized the opening but proved incapable of acting on it with anything approaching the energy the moment required.

Former U.S. President Joe Biden and his team were too deferential to Israeli contempt for the Lebanese government, too willing to look away as Israeli strikes and ground operations continued under the flag of self-defense while the cease-fire was nominally in force, and too timid to mount the kind of sustained diplomatic campaign—in European and regional capitals, and in Israel itself—that might have enabled Beirut to flood the south with Lebanese army units before Hezbollah could reconstitute its presence there.

In the final days of the administration, Washington scrambled to shift roughly $117 million to the LAF to support cease-fire implementation, a figure that, whatever its operational value, underscored how little had been done to build Lebanese capacity in the preceding years, when it might have mattered most.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s envoy, Tom Barrack, appeared to grasp the problem, endorsing a phased disarmament plan under which Hezbollah would disarm by the end of 2025 in exchange for an end to Israeli military operations and an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon. He judged that “the Lebanese government has done their part. Now what we need is Israel to comply with that equal handshake.”

The U.S.-drafted road map, never fully disclosed by the administration, was reported to link Lebanese action on disarmament with Israeli withdrawal and an end to strikes. That was a slow approach, and a sensible one, because any serious move against Hezbollah had to avoid pushing Lebanon into internal collapse.

Whether that was ever genuinely American policy, it has not survived the Iran nuclear negotiations and Trump’s war, in which Israeli acquiescence carried a price. The continuing war on Lebanon appears to have been part of the payment.

Lebanon will emerge from this campaign shattered, while Hezbollah, damaged but not destroyed, will reconstitute as it has before, and northern Israel will remain within range of its arsenal. The contours of the eventual stalemate will look disturbingly like those of May 2000, where after nearly 20 years Israel withdrew having achieved none of its political objectives and having incubated, through the brutality of that occupation, the very force it could not subsequently dislodge.

None of this is necessarily irreversible, which is what makes the waste of opportunities so frustrating. The current cease-fire, where Trump declared, in his bait-and-switch mode, on Truth Social that Israel was “prohibited” from bombing Lebanon, blindsiding both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the U.S. State Department, offered a narrow but real opening.

The administration has signaled, through that post and subsequent statements, that it intends to engage Lebanon separately and deal with the Hezbollah problem through means other than Israeli airpower. Whether that signal translates into a coherent and sustained policy, which would seem to be a lot to expect from this administration, or dissipates as similar signals have before, is the question on which everything else depends.

A serious American effort would start with stabilizing the cease-fire through a multilateral monitoring mechanism with enough teeth and international buy-in to make violations politically costly for all parties. It would treat the rehabilitation of the LAF not as an afterthought but as the central organizing objective of U.S. policy in Lebanon, systematically equipping, funding, and structuring the LAF to the point where it can credibly occupy the south.

It would launch a sustained diplomatic effort in New York to renew, fund, and reinforce the UNIFIL mandate rather than continue the current drift toward winding the mission down at precisely the moment when its presence matters most. It would mobilize international resources from Gulf states, European partners, and multilateral institutions for the reconstruction of towns on both sides of the border that the fighting has shattered.

And it would firmly back a Lebanese government effort to bring Hezbollah’s anomalous status into conformity with Beirut’s own constitutional order, while encouraging the direct diplomatic engagement between Israel and Lebanon that a more stable south could eventually make possible.

The tools for a different outcome exist. What has been missing, on the U.S. side at least, is the will to use them consistently and the wisdom to understand that Israel cannot bomb its way to the political result it says it wants. Whether the Trump administration has the focus, competence, and motivation to initiate and sustain such an effort is not, to say the least, self-evident. But if Trump really wishes to usher in “the historic dawn of a new Middle East,” the way forward in Lebanon is not inscrutable.