In May 2025, three management scholars at MIT’s Sloan School, David Wingate, Barclay Burns, and Jay Barney, published a paper whose title arrived like a cold shower in the middle of the loudest conversation in business: Why AI Will Not Provide Sustainable Competitive Advantage. Their argument was not that AI is overhyped, or that its disruptions are exaggerated. It was something more unsettling: that the race every company in the world is currently running is, structurally, a race to a tie.

I have been thinking about that paper a great deal since because it names something that most AI strategy discourse tends to avoid. I am a Lebanese lawyer working across a region where the pressure to adopt AI is near-total, where the topic permenates boardroom conversations, and where the question of whether to adopt has seemingly been settled in favor of how fast. The MIT Sloan argument shifts the question again. And this time, the shift matters.

The gold rush has a catch

The case for adoption is not in dispute. According to global management consulting firm McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI survey, which drew responses from nearly 2,000 participants across 105 countries, 88 percent of organizations now use AI in at least one business function, up from 78 percent the year before. Research by the London School of Economics and consulting firm Protiviti, published in October 2024 and based on surveys of nearly 3,000 workers, shared their compelling findings that professionals using AI save an average of 7.5 hours per week.

But Wingate, Burns, and Barney identify a structural problem that no amount of enthusiasm about these numbers resolves. Every serious technical advance ultimately becomes equally accessible to every company. Algorithms commoditize and open-source models erode proprietary offerings within months of their release. The MIT Sloan paper’s argument is that talent is plentiful, hardware competition is fierce, and what may be proprietary at time of release becomes table stakes within months.

“Far from being a source of differentiation,” Wingate, Burns, and Barney write, “artificial intelligence will be a source of homogenization.” When everyone runs the same engine, the engine is no longer the race.

The homogenization trap

This is the paradox that most AI strategy fails to confront directly. The universality that makes AI valuable as a category makes it worthless as a differentiator. If your competitor has access to the same models, the same automation capabilities, and the same tools, the advantage does not accumulate to either of you, and your market ranking remains more or less the same.

What rises in value when the tools flatten out? As Harvard Business School’s Institute for Business in Global Society argued in September 2025, AI cannot reliably distinguish good ideas from mediocre ones. It cannot guide long-term business strategy. It cannot replicate the kind of cultural intelligence and contextual judgment that determines whether a decision is right for a specific market, a specific organization, a specific moment in time.

The economists Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb, writing in IMF Finance & Development in June 2025, argue that AI is fundamentally a prediction machine. It processes inputs and generates probabilistic outputs at extraordinary scale and speed. But between the prediction and the decision sits judgment, the weighing of values, context, uncertainty, and stakes that cannot be reduced to pattern recognition.

As prediction becomes cheap, judgment becomes scarce. The antidote to AI homogenization is not more AI. It is better human thinking.

Automating mediocrity at scale

The problem is that most organizations are doing the opposite.

The RAND Corporation, in a report published in August 2024, found that more than 80 percent of AI projects fail to reach meaningful production deployment, at almost twice the failure rate of conventional IT projects, with the primary cause traced not to technology but to the broken organizational foundations underneath.

Nicholas Carr mapped the deeper cost of this dynamic in The Glass Cage, his 2014 study of automation across aviation, medicine, and financial trading. His argument echoes one prominent concern around AI adaptation, which is that when machines absorb skilled tasks, humans lose the capacity to perform those tasks independently. The pilot who delegates to autopilot loses situational awareness; when the system fails, the judgment needed to recover has already atrophied. The financial analyst who defers to algorithmic outputs loses the interpretive muscle that once gave those outputs meaning. Competence, Carr demonstrates, is something that must be practiced. Practices that go unused erode. And in the current race to automate as much as possible as fast as possible, entire categories of human capability are going unpracticed.

For this region, the stakes are specific. McKinsey’s 2025 research on the GCC shows that close to 90 percent of CEOs report using GenAI, above global averages. Yet only 11 percent are what McKinsey calls “value realizers”: organizations that have genuinely scaled AI and can attribute meaningful earnings to it. The gap between adoption and value creation is a readiness problem, and underneath the readiness problem is a human capital problem that no amount of software procurement resolves.

The cultural intelligence, relational depth, and contextual market knowledge that define competitive advantage in this part of the world cannot be generated by any model. They were built over decades. They are precisely what AI cannot replicate, and precisely what is most at risk in an undiscriminating adoption sprint.

Human-Centered AI Is Strategy, Not Philosophy

The phrase “human-centered AI” has acquired the texture of a values statement, the kind of language that appears in sustainability reports between carbon targets and inclusion metrics. It is neither. It is the only AI strategy that holds up structurally.

The companies that will extract durable advantage from AI are not the ones with the most tools. They are the ones that use AI to do more of what only humans can do, not less. That means fixing the process before automating it. It means investing in the quality of human judgment before deploying the tools that will amplify it. It means treating creative culture, contextual expertise, and institutional knowledge not as costs to be optimized away, but as the moat that gives AI outputs their value in the first place.

AI amplifies whatever it finds. A company with sharp human judgment and strong creative culture, deploying AI, becomes exponentially more capable. A company with broken processes and atrophied thinking, deploying the same tools, becomes exponentially more broken, faster, and at lower cost.

The questions for every business leader in this region is what, exactly, is the AI going to amplify? Is what you have built worth amplifying? And what essential skills might be lost in the process?

In Lebanon, instability is a daily operating burden that businesses are increasingly forced to absorb on their own. Institutional resilience is vital for small and medium enterprises in this national context, where economic collapse and recurring security crises compound to create cascading failures in electricity, banking, supply chains, and administrative systems. For every single SME, it means deciding which functions cannot be allowed to fail and then rebuilding them at firm level when the wider environment cannot support them reliably.

From my experience in leading corporate strategy, digital transformation and business development,  this usually comes down to a few core continuity points: energy, payments, procurement, documentation, workforce coordination, and client trust. The companies that remain dependable are not simply the ones that work harder. They are the ones that redesign their internal systems so these functions continue to operate despite external breakdowns.

Electricity is the clearest example of this private substitution. Before the recent solar boom, a 2019 IMF country report drawing on World Bank enterprise data found that 97 percent of surveyed businesses in Lebanon reported experiencing electrical outages, while 84 percent said they used private generators, which supplied almost half of their electricity needs. That figure should now be read as a pre-solar baseline rather than a current description of the market. But the management lesson remains the same: firms have had to build parallel energy systems because the public one is not dependable enough.

The response to the collapse of state electricity has been striking. According to the Lebanese Center for Energy Conservation’s 2023 Solar PV Status Report, installed solar PV capacity rose from 92 MWp at the end of 2020 to 1,081 MWp by the end of 2023, with cumulative investment reaching nearly $1.4 billion (LCEC, 2023). During Beirut Energy Week in September 2023, LCEC-linked figures indicated that decentralized solar capacity had already surpassed 1,000 MW and was tracking toward roughly 1,300 MW by year-end. Because EDL’s effective generation capacity had dropped so sharply, that meant installed solar capacity represented more than 40 percent of the country’s available electricity generation capacity at that moment. In the finalized 2023 report, LCEC said solar contributed 15 percent of Lebanon’s actual electricity generation mix for the full year, up from 2.2 percent in 2021.

This matters because solar in Lebanon is not only an energy story. It is an institutional story. It shows what happens when households, businesses, and institutions are forced to replace a missing public function through private coordination, private investment, and private risk-taking.

The same dynamic became visible in finance. Lebanon’s banking collapse is often discussed in terms of savings, currency, and macroeconomic loss. At company level, it also became an operational disruption. When conventional banking channels became unreliable, businesses could no longer treat billing, payment logic, procurement timing, and supplier coordination as back-office routines.

In our corporate security firm, maintaining uninterrupted service required us to rethink those systems quickly. The issue was not simply whether money moved. It was whether service continuity could be preserved while the financial infrastructure itself was failing. In that sense, banking disruption did not only create financial pain. It forced firms to redesign commercial processes in real time.

Data and institutional memory

Another function that becomes more important as public institutions weaken is documentation, specifically the capacity of private sector SMEs to maintain reliable internal records when government systems and public documentation cannot be relied upon. In stable environments, documentation is often treated as administration. In unstable ones, where the state cannot be counted on to maintain records or provide documented proof, it becomes continuity infrastructure. When teams are under strain, sites are harder to access, staff availability shifts, and compliance still has to be maintained, records become part of the operating backbone.

This is one reason I do not see resilience as improvisation alone. Improvisation helps in the moment, but it does not create reliability. Reliability comes from converting lessons into process: traceable records, stored reports, accessible histories, clearer handovers, and systems that do not rely entirely on memory or one individual’s availability.

From my experience, firms that function more reliably under instability tend to rebuild the same six capabilities at company level. They learn to sense faster by tracking market, infrastructure, financial, supplier, and client signals in real time; to decide faster by shortening decision-making chains before problems intensify; and to adapt processes within limits by giving staff enough flexibility to respond without losing accountability. They also learn to protect continuity points, especially billing, procurement, compliance, workforce coordination, and client service; to preserve trust visibly through clearer communication and steadier client support; and, over time, to turn constraints into operating advantages by using crisis-driven adaptations to build leaner and more responsive systems.

What policymakers should note

The lesson for policymakers and lenders is straightforward. If Lebanese SMEs are privately rebuilding continuity in energy, payments, logistics, and compliance, then they are carrying costs that are often invisible in conventional business analysis. Support for SMEs cannot be reduced to finance alone. It has to account for the institutional burden businesses are already absorbing through backup systems, duplicated workflows, added coordination, and self-funded continuity measures.

That is why institutional resilience in Lebanon should not be romanticized. It is expensive, inefficient, and often exhausting to privately reproduce functions that should be publicly reliable. But it is also one of the clearest explanations for why some firms remain dependable while others become fragile. The most resilient Lebanese SMEs are those that can ensure institutional continuity from the inside out.

On June 3, the United States released a “Joint Statement” announcing a renewed ceasefire agreed upon by Lebanon, Israel, and the United States “contingent on a complete cessation of Hezbollah fire and the evacuation of all Hezbollah operatives from the South Litani Sector.” The agreement, with all of its imperfections and weaknesses, stipulated “the creation of pilot zones in which the Lebanese Armed Forces will take exclusive control of the territory to the exclusion of all non-state actors.” Following this announcement, Israel reported rockets fired by Hezbollah in apparent defiance of the agreement.

The Lebanese-Israeli negotiations currently taking place under United States auspices have become the target of repeated attacks from the Lebanese political factions opposed to the very principle of direct talks with Israel, pointing to the continuation of Israeli bombardments across southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley as evidence of their failure. Hezbollah’s opposition to negotiations was most clearly stated in a May 24 speech broadcast by the Qatari News Channel Al Araby, by Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem. He stated that the “people had the right to take to the streets and topple the government,” which he referred to as part of an “Israeli-American project,” thereby granting Hezbollah, in his view, the right to confront it just as it confronts its two declared enemies.

     A survey conducted by nonpartisan public opinion research network Arab Barometer in the first half of 2024 found that 55 percent of Lebanese respondents said they had lost all trust in Hezbollah, while 30 percent still voiced strong levels of trust in the group. This data was notably collected before the killing of the Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah’s significant weakening. Although there is little data available to track the group’s popular support in spring 2026, it is broadly acknowledged that public support has plummeted.

Yet beyond the debate over the negotiations themselves lies a broader question: whether Lebanon will finally strengthen the authority of its state institutions or remain trapped in the cycle of militia dominance and regional proxy conflicts that has shaped much of its modern history. In this critical period for Lebanon, battered once again by the ravages of war, the best available path forward is to give the Lebanese state a genuine chance and rally behind its efforts to halt the destruction and rebuild what has been lost. Despite its fragilities, Lebanese legitimacy remains the only internationally recognized framework capable of guaranteeing both Lebanon’s stability and an essential component of regional security.

May 17, 1983: An agreement at the heart of regional fault lines

Any serious reflection on the current situation inevitably leads back to the May 17, 1983 agreement between Lebanon and Israel, as well as its subsequent abrogation by the Lebanese government on March 5, 1984.

More than forty years later, the circumstances surrounding that episode continue to fuel debate because of the profound impact its consequences had on both Lebanese and regional history.

Each side still maintains its own interpretation of the events.

From the perspective of former President Amine Gemayel and his then-Foreign Minister Elie Salem — who detailed the circumstances surrounding the agreement’s collapse in his book Violence and Diplomacy in Lebanon: The Troubled Years, 1982-1988, as well as in a series of documentary interviews broadcast in 2026 by Al Arabiya — the failure stemmed primarily from a sudden Israeli change of position.

According to this account, Israel demanded the prior withdrawal of Syrian forces before initiating its own withdrawal from Lebanon, despite the agreement originally stipulating that Israeli forces would withdraw first. This modification allegedly sabotaged the entire process. Similar arguments were also developed by Amine Gemayel in his book L’Offense et le Pardon, published at the end of his presidency in 1988, and later in The Resistant Presidency, published in 2020.

On the Israeli side, there was a profound breakdown in communication with President Gemayel. According to the second volume of Alain Menargues’ Les Secrets de la guerre du Liban, Israeli officials met with him on the eve of his election after supporting his candidacy—at his own request—and securing, through U.S. mediation, the withdrawal of former President Camille Chamoun’s candidacy.

However, according to the same source, once elected, Gemayel reportedly refused all direct contact with Israel, insisting that all communications be conducted exclusively through Washington. Over time, this distance is said to have fostered mutual distrust and ultimately led to Israel’s disengagement from the process.

As Israel–Lebanon peace negotiations are relaunched in 2026, marking the first direct talks toward a permanent settlement since the failure of the May 17 Agreement in 1983, it is worth revisiting that earlier episode. Although the circumstances surrounding the two processes differ significantly, an examination of the 1983 experience can provide a useful framework for understanding the dynamics and constraints shaping the current negotiations.

On the Israeli side, the country negotiating today is not the country that signed in 1983. By the early 1980s, Israel could be described as a fragile actor whose strategic calculations were shaped in part by economic vulnerability. The International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s 1983 Article IV Consultation with the country categorized it as an “LDC,” or less developed country with a deteriorated trading position, and overburdened by four years of inflation rates at 100 percent. Today, Israel is classified as an advanced, high-income economy with a nominal GDP approaching $720 billion and a per capita income of nearly $70,000, giving it an entirely different weight and leverage at the negotiating table.

     On the Lebanese side, both the country’s economy and its internal political landscape have undergone profound transformations. In 1983, despite the strains of civil war, Lebanon still maintained a functioning economy. The political system operated under the framework of the 1943 National Pact, which vested the President of the Republic with extensive constitutional powers. Today, however, the institutional balance established by the 1989 Taif Agreement has transferred many of these prerogatives to the Council of Ministers collectively.

The purpose of looking back on the failure of the May 17^th agreement might not be to extract a lesson on what a peace deal with Israel can or cannot provide Lebanon, but rather to make the case that failure to support a sovereign Lebanese state has adverse consequences on the country’s ability to ensure the security and stability of its population.

The collapse of the state and its consequences

The collapse of the May 17 agreement paved the way for one of the most destructive periods in Lebanon’s contemporary history.

At the time, the Lebanese state already represented the weakest link in a country overrun by militias of every kind, financed and backed by foreign powers. Foreign armies occupied Lebanese territory while state institutions had been severely weakened after seven years of civil war. And yet, despite this weakness, the only genuine international and regional bet remained the preservation of Lebanese legitimacy.

Why? Because it represented the only institution capable of providing a credible alternative to militia rule. Only a fully sovereign Lebanese state, acting through institutions recognized under international law, could secure its territory and prevent it from being used as a platform for armed groups or foreign actors whose activities threaten regional and international security.

The failure of this bet immediately plunged Lebanon into a new phase of chaos. It began with the Mountain War of 1983–1984, which quickly evolved into a largely sectarian conflict between Christians and Druze, resulting in massacres and the displacement of large segments of the Christian population. The consequences of this conflict endured for nearly two decades, until the Mountain Reconciliation of 2001, spearheaded by Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir and Druze leader Walid Joumblatt. Throughout that period, the Assad regime did everything in its power to undermine and derail any genuine rapprochement, arresting activists and intimidating supporters of reconciliation.

Nor was the Mountain War an isolated episode. Violence also spread to eastern Sidon, where clashes between Islamist militias and the Lebanese Forces produced similar tragedies, further exacerbating the country’s fragmentation and instability.

This decline formed part of a wider process of state collapse. It reached a critical turning point with the fragmentation of the Lebanese Army after the February 6, 1984 uprising, when the principal political and militia factions operating in West Beirut accused the army leadership of sectarianism in order to justify framing this as a basis for their opposition to both the Lebanese government and the state represented by President Amine Gemayel. The weakening of the army, one of the last functioning national institutions, opened the door to the widespread dominance of militias and the expansion of lawlessness. These developments unfolded under the supervision of the Syrian Baathist regime, which leveraged the turmoil to strengthen and entrench its influence in Lebanon.

The deterioration extended further to the wave of kidnappings and hostage-taking operations that targeted foreign nationals in West Beirut, including members of the American University of Beirut (AUB) staff, journalists, Lebanese Christians, and Jews. Amid Lebanon’s growing sectarian partition between predominantly Muslim and Christian areas, both sides of the conflict witnessed widespread lawlessness, political violence, and militia rule, as state authority steadily eroded.

Furthermore, this period enabled the systematic development of Hezbollah by the Islamic Republic of Iran, with the approval and support of the Syrian regime.

The centrality of Lebanese legitimacy

This is precisely why Lebanese legitimacy poses a pivotal question in regional and international calculations. That legitimacy is embodied by President Joseph Aoun, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam’s government, and above all the Lebanese Armed Forces, which serve both as the executive arm and the symbolic embodiment of the state.

Yet legitimacy cannot remain merely declaratory. It must be translated into tangible action through the gradual reassertion of state authority and the enforcement of the rule of law, beginning in areas beyond Hezbollah’s sphere of influence. This process should be accompanied by concrete measures designed to strengthen and expand the implementation of the proposed pilot-zone model, whereby effective governance, law enforcement, and state institutions are first consolidated in selected areas before being progressively extended elsewhere.

     This is the historic opportunity currently before the Lebanese government in the context of ongoing negotiations: the chance to rebuild a fully sovereign state whose authority is exercised throughout its territory. Such an achievement would not only serve the interests of the Lebanese people but would also constitute a vital pillar of regional stability and a foundation for the fragile yet genuine hopes for peace that are beginning to emerge across the Middle East.

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In the intricate theater of Levantine diplomacy, the ongoing trilateral negotiations surrounding the June 2026 ceasefire framework between the United States, Israel, and Lebanon are widely misread. International observers parse the diplomatic communiqués for signs of a grand bargain, analyzing the technical capabilities of the Israeli and Lebanese delegations as if they were engaged in a conventional negotiation over borders and sovereignty. But this misconstrues the fundamental architecture of the talks. Lebanon is not at the table to outmaneuver Israel; it lacks the leverage, the unified government, and the military deterrent to do so. Instead, for better or worse, Beirut is engaged in a delicate test of statehood for an audience of one: the United States.

Lebanon arrives at these negotiations fielding a state apparatus hollowed out by economic collapse, shattered by Israeli demolishment of civilian infrastructure, and sidelined by Tehran’s grip. There is no traditional diplomatic leverage. Yet, in the paradox of Lebanese statecraft, this extreme fragility serves as its primary geopolitical currency.

The strategy is one of vulnerability presented as a value proposition. The Lebanese state is banking on the premise that a total institutional collapse on the Mediterranean remains a red line for American security interests. Beirut is essentially signaling that while it holds no strong cards, its survival as a functioning state is of such paramount interest to Washington that American investment is a geopolitical necessity. To salvage the republic, Lebanon is not attempting to negotiate a sovereign peace it cannot enforce. It is attempting to convince Washington that investing in a Lebanese state is the only viable alternative to the permanent entrenchment of a sprawling Iranian proxy network.

To comprehend the posture of Beirut, one must deconstruct the illusion of the bilateral talks with Israel. The primary objective of the Lebanese delegation is not to trap Israel in a diplomatic masterstroke, but simply to remain in the room, demonstrating good faith, exhibiting state-like behavior, and signaling a willingness to engage within a shaky but still vital international order.

The true counterpart in these meetings is the United States. It is an exercise in proving institutional viability to the Americans. By repeatedly showing up in Washington, Lebanon secures the political capital required to survive. This relationship with the United States is still the primary tie that can deliver structural dividends: vital funding for the Lebanese Armed Forces, diplomatic cover, and occasional leverage to restrain Israeli escalation. Paradoxically, gaining the confidence of Israel’s primary enabler is the only mechanism Beirut possesses to extract any concessions from Tel Aviv.

The Beirut-Washington dynamic

Executing this strategy requires navigating a political landscape in Washington that is highly complex. Washington operates as a labyrinth of competing interests fractured between traditional political wings, the administration, Congress, and, where Lebanon is concerned, deeply entrenched diaspora networks that often work at cross purposes.

The Lebanese diplomatic strategy relies heavily on a triad of American power centers, deeply influenced by the Lebanese diaspora. First is the Oval Office, where familial ties and personal affinities elevate the profile of Lebanon within an administration where executive attention is paramount. The presence of influential Lebanese Americans in high level advisory roles provides Beirut with internal channels that are crucial for maintaining presidential goodwill.

The second pillar encompasses the National Security apparatus and Congress, navigated by established lobbying infrastructure like the American Task Force for Lebanon (ATFL). While executive envoys handle the White House, these task forces leverage decades of bipartisan relationship building to sustain funding and political support within congressional committees. They provide a stabilizing force, often guided by seasoned figures who understand the brutal realities of Lebanese constraints and help keep the bilateral relationship on the rails despite periodic crises.

The third and perhaps most vital pillar is the United States military. Central Command knows the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) better than the Lebanese state itself does. The Pentagon views the army as a critical, albeit heavily constrained, defense against total institutional collapse. While American defense officials harbor exasperation over the Lebanese army’s inability to confront Hezbollah, the uncomfortable reality is that Lebanon’s security has always been managed by proxy.  The LAF’s incapacity has been shaped in no small part by decades of deliberate international underinvestment, designed to ensure that the army never posed a threat to Israel. This created the security vacuum Hezbollah moved to fill. Handing over Lebanon’s security to external powers has never led to stable outcomes in the region.

To engage this complex Washington ecosystem, Beirut has fielded a negotiating team built less for technical boundary disputes and more for political signaling. The delegation balances two distinct archetypes of Lebanese statecraft. One wing of the team, anchored by figures representing the presidency, provides unshakeable nationalist credibility. Rooted in Lebanon’s south, this presence ensures the delegation cannot be easily pressured or dismissed as out of touch with the realities of Israeli occupation. The other wing, led by Lebanon’s ambassador to the United States, provides the dynamic, fluent translation of Lebanese interests into the political language of Washington, signaling to the Americans and Israelis a genuine desire for structural stability.

Together, they are managing an international lifeline. Continued engagement forces Tel Aviv and Washington to view the Lebanese state not merely as an extension of armed factions, but as an independent entity worthy of preservation.

Vying for a piece of Lebanon

Any discussion of Lebanese state-building is ultimately haunted by the specter of Tehran. Iran insists on keeping its Lebanese card firmly in its geopolitical deck. Although the utility of Hezbollah as a deterrent against a direct Israeli strike on Iranian soil has degraded significantly since 2023, the militia remains the most potent instrument Tehran possesses for confronting Israel and extracting leverage from the United States. Iran remains committed to preserving Hezbollah’s vanguard status regardless of the catastrophic cost to Lebanon — to its civilian infrastructure, demolished by Israeli military action, and to its institutional viability, eroded by both internal dysfunction and external aggressions.

This reality imposes an absolute ceiling on what the current negotiations can achieve. The fundamental demand of Beirut, an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanese territory, is contingent upon conditions that the Lebanese state has no power to enforce. Israel systematically destroys entire villages while demanding the disarmament or significant pullback of Hezbollah; Iran categorically refuses. The current fear is that there is no foreseeable pathway for an Israeli withdrawal or the disarmament of Hezbollah. The result is a diplomatic paralysis dictated entirely by foreign capitals.

This hegemonic veto over Lebanese sovereignty exposes the desolate domestic reality of the state, which is further exacerbated by profound internal divisions. The Lebanese negotiating position is inherently hampered by a fractured government where the President, the Prime Minister, and the Speaker of Parliament often pull in contradictory directions.

Furthermore, the state is buffeted by competing international pressures. While the United States pushes for rapid stabilization, regional powers like Saudi Arabia and Turkey apply their own competing pressures. Riyadh works to consolidate Lebanon’s negotiating front while simultaneously resisting any settlement that would draw Beirut into Israel’s sphere of influence, and Ankara positions itself as a counterweight to Israeli regional hegemony rather than a facilitator of a peace agreement. These counterpressures push the Lebanese presidency to constantly triangulate between patrons and undermining the cohesion of the state. Consequently, the government has operated for decades as a junior partner in its own security apparatus, ceding the monopoly on violence to a deeply entrenched non-state actor backed by foreign powers. Today, that institutional erosion is nearly absolute. The government cannot negotiate a sovereign peace because it does not control its own territory.

Given these intractable realities, the most worrying short-term outcome of the current diplomatic push is a managed fragmentation. Should Washington and Tehran reach a broader regional accommodation, they might lean on Israel and Hezbollah to impose a lasting ceasefire, creating a tactical pause of a year or two to allow for basic reconstruction. But this would not be a restoration of the Lebanese republic.

In such a scenario, the country remains carved into three distinct spheres of influence: an Israeli military occupation entrenched in the south, Hezbollah secured in its parallel enclaves, and the Lebanese state squeezed in the middle, attempting to govern a fractured archipelago of uncontested zones. This tripartite Lebanon is inherently unstable, mirroring the volatile status quo of the 1980s and 1990s, where foreign occupation and armed non state actors trap the country in a perpetual cycle of conflict.

Scenarios for a better future

Western diplomatic rhetoric often frames Middle East peace agreements through the utopian lens of economic dividends, the promise that laying down arms will inevitably unlock regional connectivity, foreign investment, and sweeping prosperity. For Lebanon, this narrative is a flawed distraction from the grim, immediate work of national survival.

A sharp line can be drawn between two distinct economic horizons. The seismic, transformative boom that would follow full regional normalization, drawing massive investment and linking Lebanon into a Mediterranean economic corridor with Israel, Syria, Cyprus, and Turkey is an inaccessible vision in the current strategic and socio-political environment.

What remains accessible, however, is a realist’s path to greater stability. This does not require resolving the century old Arab-Israeli conflict; it simply requires the Lebanese state to resume the fundamental duties of governance in the areas it still nominally controls. A lasting ceasefire would allow the state to begin cleaning up the catastrophic banking crisis, overhauling the paralyzed electricity grid, stabilizing digital infrastructure, improving transportation networks, and completing a second airport. These are the basic mechanics of survival, fueled by diaspora remittances and independent of the weapons of Hezbollah or the occupation of Israel.

Furthermore, the economic rationale for a ceasefire centers around stemming apocalyptic hemorrhaging before new wealth can be generated. The most lucrative economic policy Lebanon can adopt regarding Israel is simply avoiding the recurring total wars that annihilate billions of dollars in infrastructure and capital every few years. Merely averting that cyclical destruction constitutes a massive economic benefit.

To achieve this, Lebanese policymakers must look to the cold, pragmatic models of Egypt and Jordan, rather than the expansive commercial normalization seen in the Gulf. The normalization model of the United Arab Emirates relies on fundamentally different social and economic backgrounds that simply do not translate to the Levant. The goal for Lebanon is not cultural normalization, which remains socially and politically unpalatable to vast segments of the population, but strict, state to state conflict management.

In Egypt and Jordan, a cold peace allows state ministries to manage shared electricity grids, gas rights, and border security at arm’s length. Even a highly restricted relationship, where Lebanese and Israeli ministries manage maritime borders and energy needs through indirect channels, much like how Beirut historically engaged with Damascus to resolve infrastructure and digital crises during periods of political tension, would yield massive economic relief.

Pursuing this pragmatism is incredibly difficult given the volatile political climate in Israel, where ruling right-wing factions push aggressively for territorial seizures at immense human and environmental costs, making the state a severe, ongoing regional disruptor. Yet, for the Lebanese policymaker, this hostile geography cannot be an excuse for institutional paralysis.

The alternative is a commitment to endless, open warfare. But for a state facing economic and institutional collapse, perpetual war offers no viable future. Governance, in this context, requires severe realism. The state must find a way to stabilize the country and protect its citizens, even when the underlying regional conditions remain hostile.

It is a deeply uncomfortable reality, but one that demands rigorous pragmatism. This unsentimental approach to crisis management should not be framed as a choice between desirable outcomes, but as a severe triage where the preferences of the state are irrelevant. Policymakers must focus entirely on the treatment required for survival, regardless of how unpalatable the underlying geopolitical conditions may be.

Institutional triage

For policymakers in Beirut and Washington, the path forward requires abandoning the search for a silver bullet. There is no immediate diplomatic maneuver that will unilaterally disarm Hezbollah, evict Iranian influence, or guarantee a permanent Israeli withdrawal. The Lebanese state remains crippled by institutional atrophy and foreign hegemony. But acknowledging this reality is the prerequisite for a functional strategy.

The immediate mandate for the Lebanese government is an incremental, almost tedious, reclamation of domestic sovereignty. The longer the state delays, the greater the chance that the outcomes Lebanon most fears—namely, cyclical wars and Israeli territorial seizures—will come to pass. The state cannot yet challenge Hezbollah in the South or in the Dahieh, but it can aggressively reassert control where it does not have to fight for it. This means consolidating unquestioned authority over critical infrastructure like the airports and the seaports, securing administrative Beirut, and reinforcing the presence and services of the state in uncontested regions such as Kesrouan, Metn, Chouf, Jbeil, Batroun, and Akkar.

By proving its competence and monopolizing security in these safe zones, the state can begin to rebuild its institutional credibility, both with a deeply cynical Lebanese public and with the skeptical international partners whose financial and military support is vital for its survival.

There are glimmers of hope on the distant horizon. Broader geopolitical realignments, particularly potential shifts in Syria, may eventually precipitate a strategic eclipse of Iranian proxy influence, opening a window for the reemergence of a fully sovereign Lebanese republic. But waiting passively for regional tides to turn is not a substitute for governance.

Until that window opens, the survival of the republic depends entirely on treating its profound vulnerabilities through rigorous, unglamorous institutional rehabilitation. The state must function as a defense against total collapse, patiently accumulating capacity, territorial control, and international goodwill until the geopolitical weather finally breaks.