- Middle East
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For years, Hezbollah cultivated the illusion of inevitability. It presented itself as an untouchable force, immune to regional shifts, internal dissent, or military attrition. When its secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah and several senior commanders were killed, many assumed this marked the beginning of the end—that decapitation would succeed where politics had failed, and that the Iranian proxy anchoring Lebanon to perpetual conflict would finally unravel. Today, as a potential U.S. strike by a Trump administration looms against Iran and its regional network, that same assumption has resurfaced: that force, once again, will do what reform has persistently avoided.
This belief is seductive—and wrong.
Hezbollah was never sustained by personalities alone. Nor was it held together solely by military hierarchy. Its resilience lies in something far more insidious: its ability to hijack the political narrative of Lebanon itself and embed itself within a system designed to absorb, normalize, and protect coercive power. Even a decisive blow to Iran, or the physical dismantling of Hezbollah’s senior command, does not guarantee the disappearance of the phenomenon. Proxies do not vanish when their patrons weaken; they mutate. They civilianize, bureaucratize, rebrand, and reinsert themselves into the political and social fabric—often with broader acceptance than before.
The internal transition within Hezbollah following Nasrallah’s death is revealing in this regard. The elevation of Naim Qassem—a doctrinaire, uninspiring, and distinctly uncharismatic figure—was absorbed by the party’s base with remarkable ease. There was no crisis of legitimacy, no rupture, no meaningful dissent. This acceptance is not evidence of ideological discipline; it is proof of something far more troubling. Hezbollah’s core constituency no longer relates to the organization as a revolutionary movement or even as a transnational “resistance” project. Instead, it is endured and defended as a sectarian safety net: a body perceived as essential to communal protection, continuity, and survival within a hostile and collapsing state.
This reality makes the predicament worse, not better. Movements sustained by charisma or ideology can fracture when leadership collapses. Structures sustained by sectarian fear, institutional capture, and social dependency do not. Loyalty here is no longer aspirational; it is existential. That is precisely why leadership decapitation—even when tactically successful—fails strategically.
For years, Hezbollah succeeded in presenting its weapons not as an aberration, but as a necessity; not as a threat, but as protection. It cast itself simultaneously as a deterrent against Israel, a guardian of the Shiite community, and—by extension—a defender of Lebanon itself. These claims, repeated often enough and shielded by fear, were allowed to harden into political “truths.” The last war exposed this narrative as a lie. Hezbollah neither deterred catastrophe nor protected Lebanon or the Shiites. It dragged the country into devastation without consent, strategy, or accountability, leaving destruction, displacement, and economic paralysis in its wake.
Yet perhaps the most lethal consequence of this exposure was not military, but political. Lebanon’s ruling elite responded not by confronting the system that produced Hezbollah, but by clinging to the party as a convenient façade. Today, Hezbollah’s continued presence—however weakened—serves a vital function for those in power: it allows them to defer reform, evade responsibility, and preserve a sectarian order built on paralysis and mutual blackmail. In this sense, Hezbollah has become less a threat to the system than its final alibi.
This is the context in which talk of a “new regional order” must be assessed. Dramatic shifts are indeed underway. Hezbollah has been significantly weakened—militarily, financially, and politically. In Syria, the Assad regime has fallen, and its successor, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has been received in the Oval Office, signaling a recalibration once considered unthinkable. The question, however, is whether these changes will produce stability—or simply rearrange the furniture of collapse.
In Lebanon, this question is existential. Can the state dismantle Hezbollah? Can the economy recover? Can sovereignty finally be reclaimed? The temptation is to reduce all of this to a single issue: disarmament. But this reduction is precisely what guarantees failure. Hezbollah’s arms are not the disease; they are the symptom. The real pathology lies in the Lebanese sectarian system that enabled those arms, legitimized them, and continues to shelter them under the guise of communal balance.
Lebanon’s reform debate has long been flattened into a false binary: Hezbollah disarms or Lebanon collapses. This framing is emotionally satisfying but analytically bankrupt. Hezbollah did not emerge in a vacuum. It was produced by a political order that outsourced sovereignty, distributed impunity, and treated paralysis as governance. Its weapons became the most visible manifestation of a state that had already surrendered authority long before the first missile was fired.
The Lebanese sectarian system operates as a veto regime. Power is fragmented, accountability diluted, and responsibility endlessly deferred. Within this architecture, Hezbollah’s arsenal was not an exception—it was an outcome. As long as sovereignty was externalized and decision-making communalized, armed actors could always claim legitimacy. Reform failed repeatedly not because it was impossible, but because it was never allowed to threaten this structure.
This is why the obsession with “technical” disarmament is misleading. Hezbollah’s strength does not reside primarily in its weapons depots. It resides in its capacity to reproduce power without firing a bullet. Patronage networks bind communities to dependency. Parallel welfare systems substitute services for citizenship. Fear narratives frame dissent as betrayal. Institutions are slowly captured, hollowed out, or neutralized. The gun, in this sense, is not the engine—it is the insurance policy.
Hezbollah is therefore not external to the Lebanese system. It is embedded within it. It plays the same clientelist game as the ruling elite, but with the added advantage of coercion. This is precisely why weakening it militarily, while necessary, is insufficient. Arms can be hidden, rebranded, or reabsorbed. What remains intact is the environment that made them politically useful.
At the heart of this environment lies Hezbollah’s most durable shield: sectarian cover. By framing the party as a Shiite representative rather than a political-military actor, Lebanon’s elites transformed communal identity into a barrier against accountability. This was not an accident. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Hezbollah gained immunity, while other sectarian leaders gained a permanent excuse: reform is impossible because the “balance” is fragile.
This monopolization extends to one of the most consequential questions of all: peace. Lebanon’s political elite has allowed the issue of peace with Israel—whether as policy, negotiation, or even strategic discussion—to be treated as a sectarian position rather than a national interest. By doing so, they have ceded a core sovereign prerogative to Hezbollah, allowing it to claim ownership over the Shiite community’s stance on war and peace. No party, militia, or self-appointed representative of a sect can be permitted to monopolize a decision that concerns the survival, security, and future of the entire country.
Equally dangerous is the fiction that repeated electoral victories—secured in environments shaped by intimidation, coercion, and sectarian bullying—grant Hezbollah permanent custodianship over Lebanon’s Shiites, as though an entire community were political property rather than citizens with plural voices and rights. Elections held under fear do not confer representation; they reproduce captivity. A state that accepts this logic has already abdicated its authority.
This is also where Lebanon’s regional failure becomes undeniable. For decades, the country’s rulers avoided defining Lebanon’s role in the region. Instead, they allowed it to drift—sometimes as a frontline, sometimes as a message board, sometimes as collateral damage. Hezbollah filled that vacuum by force, embedding Lebanon within the Iranian axis and redefining “resistance” as national purpose.
But regional orders change. Axes decay. The gradual collapse of Iran’s regional project—militarily overstretched, economically exhausted, and politically delegitimized—will mean nothing for Lebanon if it is not accompanied by structural reform. A weakened axis does not automatically produce a sovereign state. Without reform, it merely creates space for the next distortion—or worse, a descent into irrelevance and regional alienation.
This is the most dangerous illusion of the current moment: the belief that Hezbollah’s decline, on its own, guarantees progress. It does not. Without dismantling the structures that normalized its rise, Lebanon risks replacing one monstrosity with another. The Minotaur was not born because Hezbollah existed; Hezbollah existed because the labyrinth was designed to produce it.
Disarmament, therefore, must be understood as a political process before it is a military one. It requires stripping armed actors of the social, sectarian, and institutional environments that render them acceptable. It requires redefining Lebanon’s place in the region not as a proxy arena, but as a state with interests, limits, and agency.
What would reform actually mean in practice? Judicial independence is the starting point. Without it, corruption remains negotiable. Security sector reform must establish an unequivocal monopoly over borders, intelligence, and the decision to wage war. Economic transparency must dismantle the cartelized economy that rewards collapse. Decentralization must empower local governance without reproducing sectarian fiefdoms. Electoral reform must break the logic of communal hostage-taking.
Most importantly, sovereignty must be redefined as a social contract, not a slogan. It must mean equal citizenship, accountability, and the end of selective immunity. Economic recovery cannot precede this process—it must be conditional upon it. The fantasy that technocratic fixes can bypass politics has already bankrupted Lebanon once.
The regional context offers an opening, but no guarantees. External actors may encourage stabilization, but they will not substitute for domestic political will. Neutrality cannot be romanticized. Neutrality without sovereignty is submission. Lebanon cannot reform while outsourcing war and peace—or while refusing to define its role altogether.
The uncomfortable truth is this: Hezbollah is both a cause and a product of Lebanon’s collapse. Weakening it requires dismantling the system that made it indispensable. That system is sectarian, cartelized, and hostile to accountability. Those who defend Hezbollah’s continued presence as a façade in the name of “stability” are not preventing collapse—they are preparing the ground for its repetition.
A post-militia Lebanon is not a utopia. It is a country where daily life is no longer governed by fear and dependency; where politics is competitive rather than coercive; where sovereignty is exercised, not negotiated. The question is not whether this Lebanon is possible—but who stands to lose if it becomes real.
Makram Rabah is an Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut, Department of History. His book Conflict on Mount Lebanon: The Druze, the Maronites and Collective Memory (Edinburgh University Press) covers collective identities and the Lebanese Civil War.
