Sustained, or lasting, economic peace is the precondition for Lebanese social salvation. This is a simple truth that one can call self-evident in the face of our global neighborhood’s long ongoing perma-conflict. It is confirmed, once again this June 5, by the United Nations’ assessment of Lebanon’s urgent survival needs to be funded with $331.5 million for the ongoing three-month period. This added request raises the total UN 2026 flash appeal for the most urgent country support to $639.9 million between March and August of this year.
Moreover, the timeless truth about the need to avoid the multi-dimensional human disaster of war has been locally reinforced in 2026, as it has before in 2024 and 2006 (and before and before…). The lesson of three wars is thus being transcribed into a solid knowledge that peace for the small state of Lebanon is indispensable for national development under all traditional and contemporary perspectives of sovereignty.
A sustainable economy, an economy that does repeat wild swings between growth in year one and recession in years two to five, an economy that capitalizes on autochthon creativity and globally integrated productivity, an economy that achieves global benchmarks for balancing national accounts in trade and payments, an economy that preserves its natural, human and social assets, that can grow without entering dependence-inducing monetary programs and can sustain the population without requiring recurrent external food aid due to social emergencies – is a viable goal for Lebanon. But only in a time of peace.
Before even beginning to talk about foundations for practical peace in Lebanon, however, one has to acknowledge that economic peace is nothing if not a difficult proposition. Sustainable economic peace in the 21st century in general and in the Middle East in particular is not an easy sell, from two contrarian angles.
One angle is that the principle of peace presents itself as a vision and ideal rather than a lasting societal foundation throughout the historic reality of peace building. From this angle, one simply has to recognize that complete long-lasting peace is not a result of perfect contracts among enlightened sovereign republics. It is a visionary ideal worth striving for, but it is not achievable on basis of one nation’s sovereignty, however strong that nation may be. It is an imagined political reality for which there is not even a fleeting precedent in the Lebanese context.
The second, equally weighty but almost impossibly complex angle to the conundrum of practical peace is based on a threefold economic-political observation. First, zero-sum approaches to economic competition, including those with military implications, aren’t always economically inferior than cooperative, mutually beneficial ones; the assumption that win-win is always superior doesn’t hold up. Second, we now understand just how vast and interlinked the potential gains and losses are across environmental, social, economic, and civilizational domains, which means a major war in the 21st century could produce outcomes that are genuinely unpredictable and threaten humanity’s existence as a whole. Third, agreements to avoid military conflict and political hostility are no longer enough to guarantee that individual nations can sustain their economies or maintain economic self-determination, and this gap may be even wider in today’s digital age than it was in earlier eras.
Practical peace in the digital age will have to be forged by the global and economically interconnected community of nations on basis of understanding that war, irrespective of any preliminary bottom line with a win-lose zero sum outcome, is in the long run a lose-lose game with 1000 percent predictability.
Whereas this latter insight in the politico-economic interplay of war and peace has not been at the center of global attention in the post-Cold War era, it is harshly brought to the fore or our attention by the conflicts blasting over the Middle East region in this year of 2026. In support of this view, whereas matters of war and peace evidently have upsides as well as downsides under an politico-economic focus, the international energy markets in this spring and summer make for a most convincing argument that decisions of war and aggression have unexpected and detrimental global impacts on nearly all national economies.
By the way, the example of crude oil is just a highly visible real economy one in a number of escalating arguments against the fragmentation of the economic world. Another tangible politico-economic lesson of the Iran war of 2026 is the complexity that intertwines the opportunity costs of war and the paucity of peace dividends. The expansion of the financialized meta-economies of global trade in the past four decades has ballooned global financial flows but it has also radically increased systemic fragilities, need for costly oversight, and risks tied to fragmentation. According to a June 2026 research paper under the World Economic Forum’s initiative for Navigating Global Financial System Fragmentation, for example, the risk of systemic financial fragmentation including tariffs and trade conflicts, is, in a worst-case projection, as high as $6.9 trillion, more than 6 percent of global GDP.
Middle Eastern history of the late 20th and early 21st century thus is more than just a strict, relentless moral teacher that peace is a vision to strive for. It shows the world that economic peace is the indispensable foundation for a state of sustainable sovereignty. Executive Magazine coincidentally regards this “practical peace” as a foundation to a sovereign Lebanese state.
The trap of self-divide
One can call the primary obstacle to nation-level implementation of practical peace in Lebanon the “Lebanon trap”. In part, this term attempts to codify the centuries old reality that the Lebanese polity has been a sideline event in geopolitics but also an attractive morsel for expansionist empires. Colonizers, conquerors and neo-colonial powers have used the military-political coastal “highway” of the eastern Mediterranean territory and sat at the local decision-making tables either directly or by proxy.
Existing within the confines of a very limiting territorial enclosure has been the fate of many small polities living in not-easy-to-defend lands. But in Lebanon, this fragmentation into small communities has been made worse by a lack of shared purpose among its culturally and economically diverse communities. This diversity is potentially a great strength, but historically it instead created a deeper, almost inescapable dimension to the constraints of this small polity, the Lebanon trap.
Throughout a millennia-spanning history, this trap has been sprung repeatedly by conquerors and invading empires as well as local lords that used a “divide and rule” strategy. Furthermore, many a power usurper also benefited from local “self-divide and be ruled” competition among communities. Examining the contemporary Lebanese mentality of the 21st century, it serves to remember that every Lebanese self-identified as coming from a plethora of faith-based communities long before its current politico-economic, openly or covertly arms bearing, sectarian organizations were established at different points during the past 100 years.
This historic fragmentation and diversity is the cultural baseline of Lebanon. It is both a restraint and a tremendous opportunity. However, this opportunity can be turned into the Lebanon trap in three ways: when the country’s diverse communities remain vulnerable to corruption; the polity repeatedly defers to foreign empires and modern quasi-empires when making national decisions; and local communities tend to avoid taking responsibility for their own conduct, which should be the foundation of sovereignty. The result is a mentality of open subservience to external powers, combined with shameless finger-pointing between communities.
Clutching at sovereign straws
The regional case thus is indeed the master class material for investigating the flaws of two of the 20th century’s highly popular thought experiments in the construction of practical peace – political pacifism and economic peace dividends. The enabling environment for this master class is the wide presence of diverse religions and ideologies that have been competing for allegiance of polities and societies around the region. On the levels of tribe-like societies, nation-states and would-be hegemons, the region has been witnessing active competitors for popular adherence to identity systems that have historically ranged from dedicated Islamism and convinced Zionism to dynastic rule, capitalist laissez faire, socialist utopias, agnostic totalitarianism and lately to social media anarchy.
Political pacifism and economic peace are not materializing in the most developed societies and also have not shown systemic impact in least-developed countries that struggle for baseline survival. In the Arab regional context, however, to cite Lebanese economic thinker and author Nassim Taleb, “the Levant has been a mass producer of consequential events nobody saw coming”.
In a deeper dive into the enigma of Lebanese mentality, it seems prudent to recall scientific research on development of mindsets from perspectives of memory, cognitive selection, and reason. A century of research into reconstructive and constructive memory has convinced most people that memories are not unchangeable recordings of facts. Similarly, cognitive dissonance has been called out in the middle of the last century as coping mechanism for solving intractable contradictions by way of mental dismissal. The very faculty of human reason finally has been noted earlier in the current century for its social (and social capital) utility, meaning the ability to use reasoning for constructing arguments after the fact and winning social acceptance (which in the view of Taleb also is a core component of a “black swan” incident).
This transactional aspect of reason, according to an investigation into “The Enigma of Reason” supersedes the intellectual functionality of reason as instrument of truth detection or improved decision making (to the delight of politicians and journalists). In the context of behavioral economics, as in wider behavioral studies, debates over memories, reason, and a wide range of cognitive processes and biases have taken on the mantle of self-evident truths. Understanding these truths can elucidate the Lebanese cognitive dichotomy and darkness of mentalities shaped by trauma after trauma and influenced by fake narrative after fake narrative as apparently is the case in the Lebanese mind-sphere after centuries of precarious, non-sovereign reality which by way of evolutionary constructs have produced contemporary Lebanese mentalities as tools of survival and social integration.
Peace is a vision that has not been invalidated by historic shocks of the last century – from the horror of “never again” to the evil of weapons of mass destruction. But perfect peace has never been achieved, not even with all the skills, tech, and knowledge accumulations of the 20th century. The most rational approach should nonetheless be that practical peace is a worthy and attainable state of existence but also that under regional realities during the first quarter of the 21st century, economic peace and economic democracy is not yet a realistically attainable platform of existence for the conflict-prone and predator-producing species homo [non] sapiens.
In juxtaposition to such pessimism, however, the scope of economic peace and economic democracy is being reshaped and possibly increasing. The issue is controlling the territory, the metaverse, and the narrative in the digital world within a multi-trillion dollar global economy whose two ideologically, culturally, and socially juxtaposed largest players USA and China control half of total productivity and where trillion-dollar wars are becoming the rule of armed conflict.
For the Islamic world and wider Middle East region, the new scope of war and peace risks in a digitized political and economic environment comes at a time when conflict risk has been reaffirmed as high and when the Iranian model has confirmed its readiness to operate as a determined and unrestrained conflict actor when under threat. It furthermore comes during an inflection period for Arab economies. Oil-exporting autocratic economies in the Gulf are making efforts to recast themselves into new roles as transportation, tourism, trade, and services hubs, partially with advanced AI adoption efforts and entrepreneurship aspirations.
These factors contribute to regional power shifts and new risks of imbalance that are made all the weightier in Lebanon by the fact that Israel is today not just a developed economy in the high income bracket of advanced capitalism with massive technological and military exports. Israel in 2026 stands as a regional hegemonic player with an expansionary ideological-politico-economic game plan. Perhaps the clearest illustrations of the changed position of Israel can be found in the increasing Israeli weapons exports in recent years and two new attempts of Israeli lobbying in the USA to become a strategic partner in mission-critical military tech infrastructures.
Under these circumstances, backward comparisons and memories of past near-reconciliation between Lebanon and any neighbor or regional power are not helpful. New and competing power cores with regional conflict potential have been emerging in Israel, Iran, and the GCC. When compared to the increased power interests and potentials for economic competition of these countries, the already much less significant political and economic potential of Lebanon seems to be at a multi-decade low point. As proven for a repeated time by the war of March 2026, the country is suffering from impotence to defend its territory and is moreover exposed to territorial intrusions, or what critics of Israel call unchecked “Gazafication”.
To sum up the anatomy lesson of the Lebanon trap, its material baseline is the state’s combination of small territory, inferior political power, and minimal military capability with the country’s attractiveness to would-be conquerors. The trap is a combination of the centuries-long experience of extreme vulnerability to external pressures, including foreign sponsors of the economy, with readiness of an internally dichotomous polity to ostracize groups instead of constructing pathways of integration.
There is no evidence that sovereignty has ever protected Lebanon and powered this state to the point of being an equal contender relative to neighboring countries, nor is there evidence of a valid concept of national sovereignty as secret base for Lebanese success in the future. There is moreover no political, military or economic leverage that Beirut can bring to bear in this situation. But there is a path forward: by reshaping the mentality and mindset at the heart of the Lebanon trap, the country can begin to change its own trajectory.
