On June 26, two official delegations — one from Israel and one from Lebanon — signed a framework agreement with great fanfare in Washington. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, openly enthusiastic, framed the event as paving the way toward “lasting peace and security” between Beirut and Tel Aviv.
A month later, President Donald Trump received Lebanese President Joseph Aoun at the White House. Once again, Rubio welcomed the visit and reiterated the goal of disarming Hezbollah and achieving a complete and definitive peace between Lebanon and its southern neighbor.
Like Tel Aviv, Rubio favors a top-down approach that centers on force and coercion. To neutralize both Tehran and Hezbollah, this camp hopes to combine strong military action against Iranian territory with maximum pressure on the government in Beirut. The goal is two-fold: to strong-arm the Lebanese government into sidelining Hezbollah and to permanently separate the Lebanese and Iranian equations.
Within the Trump administration, not everyone is convinced that this roadmap is the most effective approach. Vice President JD Vance has for some time now made clear that he no longer believes that Washington’s interests and those of Tel Aviv are perfectly aligned, and he openly favors a de-escalation on the Iranian front.
While Vance has not laid out a clear vision for his ideal end state, it would likely include
an agreement with Tehran to keep its allied armed groups in the Middle East — Hezbollah foremost among them — in check. Incidentally, this would help stabilize oil prices and maritime traffic in the Gulf while preventing the war against Iran from becoming even more unpopular among American citizens ahead of the midterms.
In this competitive landscape, the political and media buzz surrounding the Israeli-Lebanese issue offers an opportunity to bolster the supporters of Rubio and Israel at the expense of the vice president’s apparent preferences. All the same however, the Israeli-Lebanese process has very little chance of succeeding.
In Lebanon, first of all, any agreement with Israel would face several legal and constitutional stumbling blocks. The consociational system, under which authority is largely divided up between the three main communities (Sunnis, Shia, Christians), leaves the president with little executive leeway. Since the 1990 signing of the Taif Accords, which marked the end of a 15-year-long civil war, the religious communities must adhere to a distribution of powers that determines the legality of political decisions. While Article 52 of the constitution authorizes the president to “negotiate and ratify treaties,” he may do so “only in agreement with the head of government,” and ratification will be validated “only after approval by the Council of Ministers.”
The problem is that no government decision is constitutionally valid unless it is endorsed by all the major communities. Since the Shia parties expressed their opposition to the terms of the framework agreement from the outset, it is difficult to consider any future agreement viable.
Similarly, any peace agreement with Israel will ultimately have to be ratified by the parliament. Given the body’s current make-up, the probability that the text will be approved by a majority of members is exactly zero.
The Lebanese institutional framework is not the only problem. Trust in Israeli good faith is also a highly problematic issue. On November 27, 2024, Tel Aviv and Hezbollah signed a ceasefire. While Hezbollah adhered to it until March 2026 (that is, for nearly a year and a half), Tel Aviv never honored the deal: it violated the ceasefire agreement it signed in 2024 more than 12,000 times in less than a year . A new joke even emerged: “What does ‘ceasefire’ mean in Hebrew? ‘They cease, we fire.’”
The systematic, large-scale destruction of the country’s south and the massive killings of civilians did not produce Israel’s desired results. Tel Aviv had ideally hoped for a polarization of Lebanese society that would lead to a civil war, in which Shiites would come under fire from their compatriots — or, at the very least, for a majority of Lebanese to condemn and permanently exclude Hezbollah from governance.
The Israeli army’s brutal campaign had the opposite effect, adding fuel to Hezbollah’s fire rather than extinguishing it. In practice, the Israeli army has re-legitimized the Lebanese organization’s narrative that it has a special (if self-assigned) mission to defend the territory against the enemy to the south.
This represents an extraordinary failure for the pro-Israel position on the issue. In January 2025, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia (alongside Israel behind the scenes) had pressured the Lebanese political parties to elect President Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam , who were said to embody a “new era” for Lebanon. The new leadership promised, far and wide, that the United States was working to turn the Lebanese army into a military force capable of defending the country’s territory, which would render Hezbollah’s defensive rhetoric obsolete. They also tried to reassure skeptics by asserting that “diplomatic friendships” were enough to deter Israel’s potential trouble-making.
A year and a half later, the Lebanese army not only still lacked the resources to carry out its mission but was openly fleeing , on orders from Aoun himself, in the face of the Israeli advance in the spring of 2026. Hezbollah, which Tel Aviv claimed to have decimated in the fall of 2024, was back in action as early as March of the same year. And there were no signs of any external “friend of the Lebanese government” to keep Israeli military force in check.
The initial support of Salam, a Sunni, for direct talks with the Israelis in Washington quickly put him in an uncomfortable position within his own community. While Lebanese Sunnis may have internal disagreements with Shiite parties and, in particular, with Hezbollah, the majority of the community remains sympathetic to its pan-Arab, pro-Palestinian, and anti-Zionist heritage. This explained the stance of the Sunni elites, which, at first glance, seemed inconsistent but was in fact the work of a master of balance: as several MPs from the community explained to me in late March, they support the prime minister’s decision to send a delegation to Washington, but not the agreement that will result from it. Sure, there would be loyalty to the leader, but not necessarily to the outcome of his initiatives .
Since the signing of the framework agreement, Salam has hence quietly distanced himself from the process and embarked on a tour focused on building closer ties with rising regional powers, led by Syria and Turkey. When asked about the status of the agreement, he tends to bristle and refer the questioner to the presidential palace.
Worse, the head of the Lebanese army himself, General Rodolphe Haykal, was so openly critical that the American administration asked Aoun to let him go . And on signing day, the Lebanese military personnel who were part of the delegation refused to be in the commemorative picture .
In other words, pressured by the U.S. and Israel to the point of defending options they themselves know to be unrealistic, the Lebanese authorities quickly found themselves losing legitimacy and credibility among their own people. Apart from the Christian far-right — namely the party of the Lebanese Forces, heir to the militia of the same name that embodied during the civil war years a brutal militia that collaborated with Israel — no Lebanese truly believes in what is being cooked up in Washington with the Israeli representatives.
This helps explain why Hezbollah emerged from the 2025 municipal elections as the clear winner in every town and city where it fielded candidates. This reality check led Western governments to pressure Lebanese political parties into postponing the parliamentary elections scheduled for spring 2026 by two years.
Little wonder, then, that even Rubio’s optimism has cooled somewhat. Commenting on Aoun’s recent visit, he merely cautioned that this was “only the beginning of the beginning.”
One thing is certain: it was a rather isolated Lebanese president who took off from Beirut last week to accept Trump’s invitation. In most of the Lebanese capital’s political salons, regardless of sectarian affiliation, the prevailing sentiment is: “ Good luck, my dear. It’ll all be over in November 2028 !”
Trump's Lebanon fantasy is running smack into reality
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at ResponsibleStatecraft.