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Modest American Diplomacy Is the Best Way Forward—for Now
The Middle East is where clever foreign policy initiatives go to die. This has been the case since at least the Cairo Conference of 1921, at which British Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill—who had to be reminded repeatedly who was Shiite and who was Sunni, and what the difference was between them—devised a plan, in the space of ten days, to ensure long-term British interests in the region. Among other things, he created the state of Iraq, to minimize the cost of occupying the area while protecting British access to India; embraced British mandatory rule over Palestine, to secure the right flank of Egypt and the Suez Canal; and strangled Syrian independence by handing the territory to the French, in exchange for French acquiescence to Britain’s control over Iraq and Palestine. But instead of saving money and preserving British influence, these moves eventually ignited strife across the region and led to the end of British authority in the Middle East.
The truth is that, except for the 1978 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt and a 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, through which the United States fostered enduring peace among the three countries, it is not easy to identify a successful Western policy initiative in the Middle East. And the list of failures is long indeed.
Despite this dismal track record, there are crises that still demand a U.S. policy response. The spiraling conflict in Lebanon, which pits the Iranian-backed Shiite militia Hezbollah against Israel, is one of them. As is typically the case, the United States, owing to its self-conceived indispensability, as well as its influence with key belligerents, a willing American electorate, and an immense military capability, is the only actor capable of formulating a response that could prevent further escalation and suffering in Lebanon.
And there has been ample suffering. A civil war between 1976 and 1989 claimed nearly 100,000 Lebanese lives and cemented Hezbollah’s dominance within the state, thereby ensuring Lebanon remained enmeshed in the broader Arab-Israeli conflict. In 2000, after an embattled 18-year presence in southern Lebanon, Israel withdrew its forces to the Blue Line, a temporary boundary the UN drew to divide Lebanon from Israel and the Golan Heights, which Israel occupies. In 2006, UN Security Council Resolution 1701 ended a short war between Israel and Hezbollah, and called for the withdrawal of Hezbollah’s fighters to the north side of the Litani River, which runs east to west about 15 miles north of the Blue Line. A strengthened UN Interim Force in Lebanon, a corps of UN peacekeepers who had been in Lebanon since 1978, was supposed to fill the area in between, along with 20,000 soldiers of the Lebanese Armed Forces. But because of the incapacity of the LAF, Israeli mistrust of UNIFIL, the absence of an enforcement provision, and Hezbollah’s influence over decision-making in Beirut, Resolution 1701 was never fully implemented.
More recently, the French government has tried to broker a cease-fire. But President Emmanuel Macron seemed to tilt toward Hezbollah by accusing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “sowing barbarism,” which instantly undercut Macron’s already limited influence on one side of the Blue Line. Meanwhile, regional U.S. security partners, especially Saudi Arabia, have made little effort to intervene in the current crisis in Lebanon. Once again, it has fallen to Washington to come up with a plan.
There are downsides to Washington’s involvement. It could draw the United States into direct conflict with Hezbollah or its Iranian backers, a high price for potential gains that are themselves unlikely to serve broader U.S. strategic interests, most of which involve places far from the Middle East. And yet noninvolvement is not a realistic option, in part because Israel and Hezbollah reaching a cease-fire on their own is so improbable, an inertia that will heighten the risk of further escalation. And so the United States is today trying to secure, at a minimum, a cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel. The main obstacles have been Hezbollah’s insistence that any cease-fire with Israel in Lebanon depends on an Israeli cease-fire in Gaza, and Israel’s clear lack of interest in a cease-fire on either front. The Biden administration, however, believes that Hezbollah is now prepared to move forward on a cease-fire in the wake of an intense Israeli assault on the group’s infrastructure and leadership, including the assassination of its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and many of his top deputies.
In trying to solve the puzzle in Lebanon, the administration could take one of three overlapping approaches, all of them imperfect. The first would be to push Lebanon’s political leadership to ask the UN to fully implement Resolution 1701 by helping the LAF deploy southward, increasing the size of UNIFIL, forcing Hezbollah and the Israel Defense Forces to withdraw from the south, and blocking the resupply of Hezbollah by Iran. The second would be to push for an expanded version of the resolution that would, among other things, require Hezbollah to pull back farther than Resolution 1701 stipulates and for the Israeli and Lebanese governments to begin peace talks.
But neither of those approaches is likely to work. What stands a better chance is a less ambitious plan: a makeshift agreement, reached directly by Israel and Hezbollah, that would compel both parties to end hostilities but would require Hezbollah to retreat a more modest distance—say, ten miles from the border, out of range of the weapons the group has used to attack military and civilian infrastructure on the Israeli side of the Blue Line. The viability and durability of such an agreement would depend on a number of ad hoc arrangements to meet each party’s concerns. The point would be to end the fighting as soon as possible, but such a deal, if it’s designed thoughtfully, could also set the stage for the eventual implementation of Resolution 1701.
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE
The United States is led by a lame-duck administration; the upcoming elections could result in a sweeping change in government that might yield a different American approach to the crisis. To say that the conditions for successful diplomatic intervention in Lebanon are grim would be a serious understatement. As the U.S. special envoy to Lebanon, Amos Hochstein, put it, the situation is “out of control.”
One of the main obstacles the United States has faced throughout this conflict is that its closest regional ally, Israel, has (with some notable exceptions) repeatedly rejected its requests to limit civilian casualties, facilitate humanitarian assistance, and push toward a hostage deal. The Biden administration has consistently advised the Israelis to exercise restraint while assuring them that any risks of doing so would be mitigated by U.S. assistance. Under Netanyahu, the Israeli government has taken the assistance but acted without restraint, carrying out a ferocious assault on Gaza that has killed tens of thousands of civilians and launching an audacious campaign of assassinations of top Hezbollah and Hamas leaders, not only in Gaza and Lebanon but even in Iran. These steps enjoy the robust support of a significant majority of Israeli citizens, who are still traumatized by the brutal terrorist attack that Hamas launched on October 7, 2023, which was followed the next day by Hezbollah rocket strikes in Israel’s north.
And Israel is only just getting started. It wants to destroy Hezbollah infrastructure between the Litani River and the Blue Line, including tunnels, depots, bases, and missile launch sites, all while pushing Hezbollah fighters north. At the same time, the Israeli air force has struck dozens of targets throughout Lebanon, including banks that handle Hezbollah’s finances. The aim is to cripple Hezbollah and thereby deprive Iran of the ability to pressure Israel or deter an Israeli assault on Iranian nuclear assets or leadership targets. Israel insists that it has no desire to reoccupy southern Lebanon and asserts that the Israel Defense Forces are staging attacks from Israeli territory and returning there after each mission.
The United States has in recent decades deferred to Hezbollah’s powerful position in Lebanon; challenging its prerogatives was judged to be pointless and destabilizing. But many American commentators and, quietly, some Biden administration officials have welcomed the destruction of Hezbollah’s chain of command and the injuries to thousands of its fighters when Israel detonated explosives it had secretly implanted in the group’s pagers and radios. But the United States is now trying to limit the damage and focusing on a cease-fire that could prevent the type of escalation that would further risk direct Iranian intervention. Hezbollah’s aim is to preserve its military capability, especially what’s left of its missile and rocket stockpiles—which Israel claims, somewhat implausibly, to have reduced by half—and its ability to dominate Lebanon’s political system through the threat of force.
MORE WITH LESS
To get buy-in from both Hezbollah and Israel, a successful cease-fire deal would need to account for the parties’ competing interests. For the moment, Washington is contemplating three alternative approaches. The first would be to finally implement Resolution 1701, which calls for the withdrawal of Hezbollah and Israeli forces from southern Lebanon to be replaced by an increased presence of both UNIFIL soldiers and LAF ground troops. The resolution also prohibits outside countries from arming any nonstate group in Lebanon, a clear reference to Iran’s patronage of Hezbollah.
This route has a number of major obstacles. For one, both Hezbollah and Israel have stymied the implementation of Resolution 1701 for 18 years. Hezbollah’s powerful presence within the Lebanese government has limited the resources available to the LAF and blocked a large-scale deployment of its forces to the south. Israel asserts that it will not withdraw from Lebanon until the LAF is capable of replacing Hezbollah in the south and that even then, its forces would reenter Lebanese territory for the opaque purpose of “active enforcement.” It also demands that it retain unfettered access to Lebanese airspace so that it can continue carrying out airstrikes, including in Beirut, to further weaken Hezbollah. Moreover, Israel has never seen UNIFIL, which currently has 10,000 troops in southern Lebanon, as an impartial actor, because it has not prevented Hezbollah’s encroachment in the south and tends to side with Hezbollah in disputes with Israel.
A renewed attempt to implement Resolution 1701 would in essence require action from a Lebanese government that does not exist. The heads of key Lebanese parties would have to mobilize to choose a president, something they’ve been unable to do for two years now; that president would then need to appoint a prime minister who would have to be sufficiently pro-Hezbollah to avoid being blocked by the group and sufficiently independent to win the trust of other Lebanese political parties, as well as the United States and the UN. Little evidence suggests that Lebanese politics is poised for a breakthrough of that kind.
Nevertheless, Hochstein, the U.S. envoy, recently unveiled an even more ambitious plan. In addition to the steps laid out in Resolution 1701, Hochstein’s proposal calls for Hezbollah to withdraw even farther past the Litani River. It also envisions Lebanon and Israel entering into direct peace talks. The plan recalls one brokered by the United States in 1983, known as the May 17 Agreement, which forced a shattered Lebanon, eight years into its civil war and under both Israeli and Syrian occupation, to enter into a treaty with Israel. The agreement called for both Israeli and Syrian withdrawal and an Israeli-Lebanese peace treaty, but it was never carried out; before the agreement was signed, Syria assassinated the leader of Lebanon’s ruling Christian faction, sending a powerful signal that Syria would not countenance an Israeli challenge to its influence in Lebanon. Hochstein’s plan would risk similar results: Syria’s place has been taken by Iran, whose strategic and ideological interest in Lebanon would be comparably imperiled, tempting Tehran to protect it by escalating the conflict. The implementation of Resolution 1701 might be an impossible goal; pursuing an amended version would only heighten the stakes and increase the risk of violence.
The best path forward, at least for now, is the least ambitious one: an informal, jerry-rigged agreement between Hezbollah and Israel that would establish an immediate cease-fire and require a more modest pullback of Hezbollah forces. This would be a fragile, tenuous scheme, but side agreements would help it hold by easing each party’s concerns. Israel, for example, believes that Hezbollah would quickly reintroduce weapons to southern Lebanon, as it did after 2006; to prevent this, the LAF could screen all residents returning to the area. A group of states on which both Hezbollah and Israel agree could establish an independent oversight committee composed of experts to evaluate UNIFIL’s operations. The same body could conduct snap investigations of alleged Hezbollah or Israeli movements and inspections of both sides’ forces when they accuse each other of violating the agreement. States that have aerial surveillance capabilities—for example, some NATO members or India, Japan, or South Korea—could conduct high-altitude surveillance missions over southern Lebanon, which might help adjudicate infractions and provide early warnings of problems. Finally, Western leaders and diplomats could expand the narrow swath of Lebanese officials with whom they currently engage. This practice has led to a passivity among members of Lebanon’s political elite, which has delayed the formation of a new government.
For the plan to work, it would have to sharply limit Israeli violations of Lebanese airspace, which all Lebanese deplore. (It would not put an end to Israeli airstrikes on efforts by Iran to resupply Hezbollah’s arsenals.) And a makeshift cease-fire that lacks UN authority would be inherently fragile. But even if it could not stabilize Lebanon as fully as would a properly implemented Resolution 1701, a less formal—and less ambitious—cease-fire now could lay the groundwork for fully implementing the resolution down the road.
U.S. diplomatic efforts are critical to stemming the escalating violence in Lebanon and reducing the risk of armed conflict between the United States and Iran. To get what it wants—and what the region needs—Washington should think smaller, crafting an agreement that makes up for what it lacks in ambition with elements tailored to quell each side’s most pressing anxieties. Israel has the upper hand right now and will want to press its advantage in pursuit of “total victory.” Hezbollah has a weak hand, but to avoid the appearance of defeat, it will hold out for a cease-fire that results in Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and an end to airstrikes. Even for an ad hoc arrangement, these are not the most promising conditions. But a 21-day cease-fire was brokered by France and the United States in September, only for Israel to almost immediately reverse its initial assent. Days later, an Israeli airstrike in Beirut killed Nasrallah. At that point, a renewed effort was impossible. It is time for another go.