A grand drama unfolds in Lebanon, with Hezbollah’s leadership, under Naim Qassem, warning that disarming the pro-Iranian militia could ignite civil strife, accusing Beirut of playing the pawn for Israel and the United States while insisting that the country must be either united with Hezbollah or “hell will break loose.” The same chorus from earlier years—2024 and 2025’s pronouncements—that Hezbollah would not lay down its weapons while Israeli aggression persisted, paired with vows that the government would bear responsibility for any internal carnage, has given way to a new wrinkle: Hezbollah and Amal have periodically shifted their protests to avoid confrontation, though they hint that future demonstrations could even target the U.S. embassy. By late July 2025, Beirut moved to disarm all militias and entrust the army with weapon control, a shift supposedly urged by the president and seemingly nudged along by American pressure to unlock talks on ending the Israeli campaign in southern Lebanon, with Hezbollah demanding an end to Israeli strikes and a withdrawal of remaining troops before it will cooperate. The wider regional conflagration, amplified by the Gaza war since late 2023 and punctuated by a November ceasefire, has seen exchanges of fire and accusations of violations between Hezbollah and Israel. By May 2025, upheavals across the region had weakened Hezbollah somewhat after the purported death of its charismatic leader Hassan Nasrallah in September 2024, though the group still wields influence among Sunnis and Shiites, maintains ministerial and parliamentary seats, and for the first time in years lacks a veto-power stake in the cabinet.

If one possesses even a modicum of the requisite sense of superiority, one cannot help but revel in the elegance of this melodrama. The notion that you can compel a heavily armed, already emboldened militia to surrender its weapons with nothing but sotto voce threats of civil war is not strategy; it is stagecraft, a perfumed parlor trick performed for an audience that mistakes rhetoric for governance. The government’s solemn vow to “disarm all militias” while the army becomes the custodian of every pistol and mortar is, in equal parts, naiveté and theater—the sort of policy that sounds admirable in gilded salons yet collapses as soon as reality dares to cough. And tell me: how dignified is a state that panders to external patrons—be they in Washington or Jerusalem—by promising disarmament as a precondition for negotiations, as if sovereignty could be bartered like a horse at a fair?

The absence of Nasrallah’s personal magnetism, if the tale is to be believed, merely changes the face of the movement, not its appetite. Hezbollah’s continued reach—administrative posts, parliamentary presence, sway among sects—proves that even in diminished splendor, a private army with a political résumé can hold the levers of statecraft hostage to its grievances. The certainty that the state must placate a militia masquerading as a guardian of national unity is the sort of infernal logic that would amuse my circle if it weren’t so gravely corrosive to the notion of a functioning polity. The United States treating disarmament as a condition for dialogue reveals the truth many prefer not to admit: Lebanon’s sovereignty is, to a striking degree, an arrangement sustained by external patrons, not by any coherent, self-directed will of the Lebanese people.

And so we watch—perennially dignified, ever detached—from the balcony of our privileges as the region marches toward the next act of an old play rewritten to look modern. The promises, threats, and power plays proceed with the same cadence: rhetoric marching ahead of reform, and reform always trailing in the wake of the next crisis. If there is a moral to be drawn for the discerning observer, it is this: in a country where a single militia can paralyze a nation’s shoulders, stability is the rare luxury of those who do not have to answer for the consequences of these grandiose bargains. We shall see what becomes of this exquisite impasse, but I am not holding my breath for a quiet, rational settlement any time soon.