My good friend Mishaal from Dubai told me the other day that he thought of Lebanon as, and I quote him, a “big momma.”
He elaborated: “She just can’t stop having kids, and when they are grown up she sends them out into the world to work so that every month they wire her money so she can live. This is like Lebanon, which cannot stop sending its sons and daughters out into the world and which would not be able to survive without the money they send home.”
He has, of course, got a point. It is a not an inaccurate rule of thumb — as far as rules of thumbs go — that Lebanon’s GDP is made up of one third banking, one third remittances and one third “the rest,” (i.e. tourism, industry, agriculture, retail etc.). It’s not the most balanced economic model but then again, no one ever said that Lebanon was the most balanced country (although in many ways it is, but that topic is for another debate).
Such then is our destiny. And given that our destiny is predicated upon travel and hard work, it is not an outrageous assumption that Lebanon’s foreign alliances should include those with whom we trade and those that welcome our workforce. It should not be considered outlandish, using this logic, that Lebanon should want to be a friend of the US, a country with a GDP of $14.5 trillion ($14,500 billion). Neither Brazil nor Russia, nor even the emerging giant India has hit $1 trillion, so it stands to reason that Lebanon, a nation that relies on 30% of its income from abroad, should want to work with Uncle Sam.
The same goes for the states of the GCC, especially the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which have absorbed roughly 1 million Lebanese into their workforce. They rely on the Lebanese, fellow Arabs, for their own brand of know-how and entrepreneurial talent and, in these days of petrodollar-fuelled investment, we rely on them.
And yet there are those who would criticize these decisions and argue that we throw in our lot with nations — and let’s not be afraid to name them — such as Syria and Iran, who have a combined GDP of $330 billion and employ practically no Lebanese, both of which offer no value-added to the general economy and whose governments annoy those countries that do.
One thing is for certain: Big Momma wouldn’t be impressed.
She has a household to run and hungry mouths to feed.
That’s all she should care about.
