A New Era of Hezbollah Defeat

Excerpt

Nothing lasts forever. Hezbollah’s self-proclaimed “Era of Victories”—which the group inaugurated after the May 2000 Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon—appears to have run its course. Its new Secretary-General Naim Qassem just confessed in a televised address that Hezbollah’s lifeline through Syria is now gone, thanks to the downfall of the Assad regime.

The dreaded Third Lebanon War is over. The destructive capabilities that Hezbollah possessed before the war never came to fruition. Instead, Hezbollah took a beating. To add insult to injury, the group watched passively as Bashar al-Assad collapsed, bringing Hezbollah’s weapons primary smuggling routes down with it. The group is thus battered badly, with immediate prospects of regaining its strength significantly complicated.

Jonathan Schanzer is senior vice president for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. Follow him on X @JSchanzer. David Daoud is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies focused on Lebanon and Hezbollah.