Trading Away Lebanon: Washington’s Bargains at Beirut’s Expense

For the fifth time since 1958, the U.S. has placed Lebanon on the bargaining table, this time ready to sacrifice the country’s interests in pursuit of a deal with Iran. If Tehran dismantles its nuclear program and reopens the Strait of Hormuz, Washington will let Hezbollah off the Israeli hook and allow the militia to reestablish itself as Lebanon’s dominant power.

Washington’s habit of throwing its allies under the bus for short-term gains and unforeseen long-term costs began in 1956, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower allowed Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to nationalize the Suez Canal. Eisenhower, hoping to court Nasser, ordered the United Kingdom, France, and Israel to halt their military campaign in Egypt.

Two years later, Eisenhower once again deferred to Nasser during the crisis in Lebanon. The Egyptian leader incited his Lebanese proxies to revolt against Beirut’s elected government after it planned to join a pact rival to Cairo. Although Eisenhower deployed the U.S. Marines to Lebanon to quell the violence. Washington succumbed to Nasser’s terms. It allowed the Egyptian ruler to dictate Lebanon’s neutrality, which eventually gave way to Egyptian dominance.

Lebanon remained neutral during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, given the small size of its army. However, when Nasser shifted to asymmetric warfare against Israel, he facilitated Palestinian militias in Jordan and Lebanon to stage cross-border attacks against the Jewish state. Israel responded forcefully in Jordan. Amman expelled the Palestinian militias—with Israeli support—and resisted pressure from Nasser and Syria. The militias then shifted their base to Lebanon, inviting repeated Israeli reprisals.

When a weakened Lebanon tried to follow Jordan’s example, Nasser forced it to concede to Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian fighters in the 1969 Cairo Agreement. The Lebanese state and its supporters, mainly Christians, attempted to remove Arafat themselves. Civil War ensued from 1975 through 1990. At the war’s end, the U.S. offered Lebanon as a reward to Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad for participating in the coalition that ousted Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Assad disbanded all militias in Lebanon, with the exception of Hezbollah, which he instead used as leverage against Israel and the United States.

In 2005, during the George W. Bush administration’s democracy-promotion campaign in the Middle East, Washington and Paris helped Beirut force Assad’s withdrawal from Lebanon. Afterward, the Lebanese state sought to reassert its sovereignty, only to be undermined by Hezbollah. The standoff between the two peaked in May 2008, when Hezbollah and its allies sent their gunmen into the streets of Beirut. By then, Condoleezza Rice had become the Bush administration’s top foreign-policy official, pursuing a strategy of extinguishing the fires lit by earlier democracy promotion. She therefore urged Lebanon’s pro-sovereignty March 14 coalition to concede and enter a “unity government” with Hezbollah.

Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, then the loudest anti-Hezbollah and pro-sovereignty voice, traveled repeatedly to Washington. He begged officials to stay the course and even requested arms to confront Hezbollah. The U.S. had already moved on. In 2009, President Barack Obama launched an engagement policy with Assad, believing he could pull Syria away from Iran. Assad interpreted the policy as permission to serve as a bridge between Tehran and Washington rather than oppose Iran. Jumblatt quickly sought Hezbollah’s mercy and never returned to the sovereignty camp, convinced that betting on the U.S. was futile.

Then came Hamas’s massacres on October 7, 2023. As part of its wider military efforts, Israel moved to decisively degrade Hezbollah. This effort initially succeeded. In November 2024, following the killing of its top leadership, Hezbollah signed a cessation of hostilities agreement that called for its disarmament. Yet now, the picture has changed once again.

In the Iran War, the U.S. failed to fulfill its role as guarantor of global trade, especially energy flows. Even the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, the pride of the U.S. Navy, was forced to withdraw from the theater mid-conflict. The U.S. air campaign against Iran fell short.

Bruised but unbroken, Iran emerged from the war with a new source of leverage alongside its nuclear program: the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, which sent global oil prices surging. Unwilling to commit ground troops to reopen the strait, Washington was forced to seek a face-saving deal.

In exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz and dismantling its nuclear program, Iran would receive Lebanon. For the deal to work, Israel would need to end its military pressure on Hezbollah, allowing the group—and by extension Tehran—to restore dominance over the Lebanese state. Hezbollah would be able to regroup, rearm, and prepare for the next war, leaving Israel’s north under existential threat from the Lebanese militia. Lebanon would be unable to regain full sovereignty or live as a normal country enjoying the benefits of peace.

And so it goes. Seventy years after the U.S. first undercut its allies by halting a campaign that could have hobbled Nasser, it is doing so again by restraining a successful Israeli and Lebanese effort to eliminate Hezbollah and restore Lebanese sovereignty.

For seven decades, the U.S. has made defying it more attractive than being its ally. Ask Lebanon. Ask the Kurds of Iraq and Syria. Ask people across the Middle East. Arabs even have a proverb for Washington’s unreliability: “He who covers himself with America will find himself naked.”

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a columnist focusing on Lebanon and broader Arab affairs.