05/30/2026 - 17:28 PM
By Pierre A. Maroun *
Lebanon has survived so many crises that survival itself has become the national strategy. Endure the war. Outlast the occupation. Wait for the region to exhaust itself. Then rebuild — until the next round. This resilience is real, and it deserves respect. But it has also become a trap. A country that organizes itself around surviving its circumstances never gets around to changing them.
“Neutrality” is the latest version of this instinct — a promise to rise above the region’s wars without doing the harder work of building a state capable of enforcing that position. But neutrality is not a diplomatic shortcut. It is the end state of sovereignty, not a substitute for it. And Lebanon cannot reach that end state while a state within the state decides its wars.
This is why Dean Brown’s 1982 proposal remains both revealing and insufficient. Brown correctly identified Lebanon’s tragedy: the country had become an arena for other people’s wars. His answer was a neutral, disarmed Lebanon, protected by international guarantees and multinational forces, modeled loosely on Austria. Brown himself called it “idealistic and perhaps not obtainable.”
He was right on both counts. The instinct was understandable. But the proposal mistook the cure. International guarantees can protect sovereignty; they cannot manufacture it. A neutral Lebanon cannot be produced by withdrawal, symbolic disarmament, or foreign supervision if the Lebanese state itself cannot enforce authority over its own people and territory.
A country cannot claim neutrality when it cannot control its borders, its territory, or the monopoly on force. Neutrality without sovereignty is not a strategy. It is a void dressed in respectable language.
I. Sovereignty Before Sectarian Guarantees
Every functioning model of neutrality rests on a single condition: a sovereign state capable of enforcing its own commitments. Swiss armed neutrality held because Switzerland controlled its own army. Austrian constitutional neutrality held because Austria controlled its own territory. Finnish neutrality held because Finland answered to no foreign patron with a militia on its soil.
Lebanon does not meet that condition today — not because neutrality is the wrong goal, but because the preconditions for it have been steadily stripped away. A state cannot be neutral when armed groups operate outside national authority, when foreign actors use its territory without state consent, when communities depend on sectarian militias rather than the national army, and when the decision to go to war is made by actors who answer Tehran, not Beirut.
This is not a new condition. The Cairo Agreement of 1969 formalized Palestinian armed presence on Lebanese soil at the expense of state sovereignty. The Taif Agreement ended the civil war, but the Syrian Assad regime exempted Hezbollah’s weapons under the label of “resistance.” Each arrangement was sold as a temporary necessity. Each one turned into permanent architecture.
Hezbollah argues its arsenal is necessary resistance given Israel’s capabilities and past occupations. That fear has a legitimate historical root. But the logic collapses under its own weight — turning Lebanon into an Iranian forward base has not deterred destruction. It has been scheduled for it.
Neutrality is not a moral aspiration. It is a sovereign capacity. Lebanon has not yet built it.
II. The Cycle That Keeps Lebanon Weak
Lebanon is trapped in a loop that serves everyone except the Lebanese state and people.
Israel cites Hezbollah’s arsenal to justify strikes on Lebanese territory. Hezbollah cites Israeli aggression to justify keeping that arsenal. Each justification is, in its own terms, coherent. Together, they form a closed, destructive system — one that hollows out the Lebanese state with every iteration.
The Lebanese Armed Forces are denied both the political mandate and the resources to secure the south. Constitutional institutions are bypassed whenever armed actors find them inconvenient. Communities in conflict zones depend on the armed group for survival, making the militia politically irreplaceable regardless of the destruction it invites. The state does not fail dramatically — it is slowly rendered irrelevant.
There is also a political economy to this irrelevance that rarely gets named. Hezbollah’s parallel state — schools, hospitals, social services, construction networks, Al-Qard El-Hasan financial services — is not incidental to its military role. It is the infrastructure of dependency, underwritten by the doctrine of Wilayat al-Faqih, which places religious and political authority in the hands of Iran’s Supreme Leader and provides the ideological framework that transforms these services from charity into obligation — binding the community to a transnational project that answers to Tehran, not Beirut.
Communities that receive their children’s education, their hospital beds, and their reconstruction contracts from the same organization that commands the local armed presence do not experience this as oppression. They experience it as the only functioning system available. For many, the Lebanese state has been functionally absent since the 1970s. Breaking that dependency requires the Lebanese state to show up in places it has spent decades abandoning.
The point is not theoretical. In 2023–2024, Hezbollah opened and escalated the southern front in parallel with the Gaza (Isnad) war without cabinet consensus — demonstrating that a non-state actor can plunge the whole country into war. No state can claim neutrality when its territory can be placed at war by a factional command.
This dynamic is asymmetrical in power but identical in outcome: Lebanon’s fate is determined by actors who do not answer to the Lebanese people. Breaking requires a state capable of enforcing a single national security policy — and a political class willing to pay the price of building one.
III. A Managed Security Transition — Process, Not Event
Lebanon cannot disarm armed factions by force without risking civil conflict. But it cannot coexist indefinitely with armed pluralism without guaranteeing permanent instability. The only viable path is a long-term, state-led Managed Security Transition built on three mutually reinforcing pillars.
This transition cannot rely on Lebanese political will alone. External leverage is essential. The United States and France can condition military assistance on verifiable progress toward a single chain of command. Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE, can link reconstruction packages to clear benchmarks: distancing from Iranian operational control, anti-corruption measures, and gradual restoration of state authority. Targeted sanctions on Hezbollah’s financial networks — carefully designed to avoid harming Shiite civilians — can alter the incentive structure for maintaining a parallel army. These tools do not replace Lebanese ownership; they make ownership possible.
The three pillars must be pursued in sequence.
First, consolidating security. The Lebanese Armed Forces must become the sole legitimate defender of the nation through a phased but irreversible process of integration or dismantling of all non-state armed groups. An army that cannot freely deploy to its own southern border is not a national institution — it is a ceremonial body awaiting permission from the militia.
Second, redefining citizenship. Sectarian power-sharing must evolve toward equal protection under the law. Militias retain political relevance because communities in the south, the Bekaa, and other peripheries have learned through bitter experience that the state will not protect them. That changes only when national institutions demonstrate security, justice, and basic services without sectarian intermediaries.
Third, asserting sovereignty. Lebanon must reclaim full control over its territory and decisions — effective border management, an end to ungoverned spaces, and a single authority over war and peace. Foreign policy must serve Lebanese interests, not those of whichever external actor maintains the strongest armed presence inside the country.
Transitions are rarely clean. Temporary arrangements may be necessary in the early stages. A flawed process that actually moves beats a perfect plan that never starts.
IV. The End State
The objective is not ambiguous.
No private armies. No foreign-aligned militias. No parallel courts. No zones outside state authority.
One law, one judiciary, one army, one constitution.
That is not a radical demand. It is the minimum definition of a functioning state.
Neutrality rests on sovereignty. Sovereignty rests on institutions. Institutions rest on equal citizenship. The sequence holds. There is no cutting in line.
Lebanon has survived almost everything the region has thrown at it. The question is whether survival is enough — or whether this generation is willing to build something that doesn’t need to be rebuilt every fifteen years.
* Strategic Analyst | President, Shields of United Lebanon (SOUL)
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