Israel’s Lebanon strategy tests U.S. capacity to fix it

Israel’s approach seeks Hezbollah disarmament and Lebanese sovereignty while constraining Lebanon’s ability to achieve it, undercutting U.S. leverage and UNIFIL.

A central paradox drives Israel’s Lebanon policy: it argues Hezbollah must be disarmed and the Lebanese state must extend real authority over its territory. yet it works—through pressure on partners. strikes. and institutional weakening—to prevent the very conditions that could make that outcome possible.. The consequence is a strategy that sets an ambitious end state while dismantling the tools most likely to deliver it.

The claim sits at the heart of the conflict’s logic and has become so familiar it risks going unchallenged.. Israel insists that Lebanon must assert sovereign control, but it has repeatedly impeded Lebanese capacity, including by restricting U.S.. military assistance to the Lebanese Armed Forces and by targeting the infrastructure that allows Lebanon’s government to govern effectively.. At the same time. it has taken actions against the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. or UNIFIL—the international presence mandated to support Lebanese authority in the south.

Israel’s core argument. at least as it has been articulated through years of operational choices. is that Lebanese institutions cannot do the job on their own.. So Israel proposes to do it for them.. But that creates the circular problem: disarmament becomes plausible only when a legitimate authority can credibly demand it. a coercive capacity exists to enforce it. and political room exists to manage backlash from the armed group’s supporters.

Israel’s strategic objective itself is not inherently unreasonable.. If an armed movement were funded. equipped. and directed by an outside power with a direct interest in attacking Americans. Washington would not be expected to treat host-country sovereignty as an answer to security threats.. The symmetry matters more than the rhetoric—particularly since Oct.. 7, 2023, and Hezbollah’s subsequent campaign that, in practice, echoed Hamas’s fight.

In the opening weeks after Oct.. 7, Hezbollah launched rockets, mortars, anti-tank guided missiles, ran sniper attacks, used drones, and struck Israeli surveillance systems.. Israel responded with persistent exchanges that were generally contained near the border.. Northern communities were evacuated, and Lebanese civilians in the south began leaving border villages.

On Nov.. 3, 2023, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah clarified the group’s posture in his first major speech after the Oct.. 7 attack.. He said the Hamas assault was “100 percent Palestinian. ” while Hezbollah’s own role would continue and could escalate depending on developments in Gaza and on 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 still had used only a portion of its arsenal.

Hezbollah is also not simply a Lebanese militia with local grievances.. The group forms a cornerstone of Iran’s deterrence architecture against Israel.. Tehran supports Hezbollah in order to hold Israeli population centers at risk and to complicate any Israeli effort to strike Iranian nuclear facilities.. For years, dismantling Hezbollah has been an Israeli strategic priority; Oct.. 7 provided a trigger rather than the underlying motive.

The practical question is whether Israel can actually achieve disarmament—especially after prior efforts to do so left Hezbollah damaged but apparently able to reconstitute.. Two years earlier. a campaign with parallels to the current one did not eliminate Hezbollah’s operational capacity. raising doubts about whether violence alone can end the threat.

The longer historical record is instructive.. From the end of the 2006 war until Oct.. 7, the Israel-Lebanon frontier was comparatively quiet by regional standards.. Neither side was indifferent to the threat Hezbollah posed. but Israel tolerated Iran’s forward deterrent so long as it stayed dormant.. In parallel. Israel prepared for the moment Hezbollah would be mobilized: intelligence penetration of Hezbollah’s communications network. mapping of tunnel infrastructure. preparation of targeting packages for senior commanders. and the groundwork for the pager attacks.

Those preparations suggest Israel’s planners believed severe damage could be inflicted at manageable cost. yet that they held back earlier because stability in the north still served Israeli interests.. The Gaza war changed the calculus by offering both a pretext and intense domestic pressure to act. but the decision was not inevitable.

That brings the policy back to its central circularity.. Even if disarmament is desired. it can succeed only when three conditions align: legitimacy that makes the demand credible. coercive capacity to enforce it. and political authority capable of absorbing or managing backlash.. The record elsewhere bears that out.

The Irish Republican Army decommissioned only after the Good Friday Agreement placed Sinn Féin into constitutional politics. created verification mechanisms. and altered the security and political context around the armed group.. In Colombia. the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia laid down arms through a peace accord that paired demobilization with transitional justice. reintegration. political participation. and United Nations monitoring. even as dissident factions persisted.. In Aceh. Indonesia. separatists disarmed following a settlement that offered autonomy. amnesty. reintegration. local political participation. and international monitoring. supported by the Indonesian state’s remaining coercive weight.

Remove any of those preconditions and peace projects collapse.. Lebanon, the argument goes, was already operating far below what such a model requires.. The Lebanese state has been factionalized. financially ruined. and struggling with catastrophic losses of public confidence after the 2020 Beirut port explosion and years of elite predation.. Even the basic posture of the armed forces reflected the fragility: the defense budget. about $2 billion in 2019. fell to around $432 million by 2020 and barely recovered to $240 million by 2023.

On paper. Lebanon’s armed forces number around 80. 000. but they are chronically underpaid and dependent on foreign donors for basic equipment.. In one widely used index. they ranked 118th in the world behind countries that do not face a threat comparable to Hezbollah.. At its peak, Hezbollah’s arsenal included more precision-guided missiles than most European NATO members.

Against that backdrop, Israel introduced policies that were designed to make Lebanon weaker, not stronger.. For years. it lobbied Washington against robust military assistance to the Lebanese Armed Forces. treating a stronger LAF not as a counterweight to Hezbollah but as a potential threat.. The approach succeeded in slowing and limiting support Washington would otherwise have provided. even though the LAF had operated independently of Hezbollah’s influence.

U.S. assistance to the LAF since 2006 totaled roughly $2.5 billion in military financing and equipment. But the impact, as described here, was uneven: outdated equipment, salaries so low that soldiers took second jobs to survive, and no air defense capability.

At the same time, Israel moved to degrade UNIFIL. During the 2024 campaign, Israeli forces attacked UNIFIL positions directly, and Israel simultaneously pressed for a reduction of UNIFIL’s mandate with U.S. backing.

After the first cease-fire in 2024, a narrow opening appeared.. Hezbollah’s position in the south had weakened from Israel’s punishment. creating real space to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1701.. The Biden administration recognized the opening, but the effort did not match the speed the moment required.

The administration is described as being too deferential to Israeli contempt for the Lebanese government. too willing to look away as Israeli strikes and ground operations continued under a self-defense rationale while the cease-fire remained nominally in force.. It also lacked a sustained diplomatic campaign across European and regional capitals and in Israel itself—an approach that could have helped Beirut flood the south with Lebanese army units before Hezbollah could reconstitute.

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

Later. Donald Trump’s envoy. Tom Barrack. appeared to identify the problem and endorsed a phased disarmament plan: Hezbollah would disarm by the end of 2025 in exchange for an end to Israeli military operations and Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon.. Barrack’s view was that “the Lebanese government has done their part.. Now what we need is Israel to comply with that equal handshake.”

A U.S.-drafted roadmap, never fully disclosed by the administration, was reported to link Lebanese action on disarmament to Israeli withdrawal and an end to strikes. The pace was described as deliberate because any serious move against Hezbollah had to avoid pushing Lebanon toward internal collapse.

But whether this was ever the real trajectory of American policy is questioned. The continuing war on Lebanon, it is argued, appears to have become part of the payment extracted as U.S. priorities shifted with Iran nuclear negotiations and Trump’s broader conflicts.

The likely outcome. as characterized here. is a Lebanon shattered by the campaign. Hezbollah damaged but not destroyed. and northern Israel staying within the reach of Hezbollah’s arsenal.. The eventual stalemate could resemble May 2000. when Israel withdrew after nearly 20 years without achieving its political objectives and. through the brutality of the occupation. incubated the force it later found difficult to remove.

Still, the piece argues, the situation is not necessarily irreversible.. A current cease-fire offers what it calls a narrow but real opening. particularly after Trump declared on Truth Social that Israel was “prohibited” from bombing Lebanon—an announcement described as blindsiding both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the U.S.. State Department.

The administration has signaled, through those posts and subsequent statements, that it intends to engage Lebanon separately and deal with Hezbollah through means other than Israeli airpower. Whether that becomes a coherent, sustained policy is the central question.

A serious effort. the argument continues. would begin by stabilizing the cease-fire through a multilateral monitoring mechanism with enough teeth—and international buy-in—to make violations politically costly.. It would place rehabilitation of the LAF at the center of U.S.. policy, systematically equipping, funding, and structuring it to credibly occupy the south.

It would also renew and reinforce UNIFIL’s mandate in New York. rather than allow a drift toward winding the mission down at the point when its presence matters most.. Reconstruction would need to draw resources from Gulf states. European partners. and multilateral institutions to rebuild towns on both sides of the border shattered by the fighting.. And the U.S.. would need to back a Lebanese government push to bring Hezbollah’s anomalous status into conformity with Lebanon’s own constitutional order while encouraging direct Israel-Lebanon diplomacy that a more stable south could eventually make possible.

The tools for a different outcome exist, but the missing ingredient on the U.S.. side is described as consistent will paired with the understanding 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 sustain such an effort is not presented as self-evident.. But if Trump seeks a “historic dawn of a new Middle East. ” the path in Lebanon. the piece argues. is not inscrutable.

Israel Lebanon policy Hezbollah disarmament U.S. military assistance UNIFIL mandate Lebanese Armed Forces cease-fire implementation