US diplomacy has so far failed to uncouple Lebanon from Iran, and the latter insists on including the former in its negotiations with the US.
For the US to succeed or at least to score some gain from this war, it must separate the Lebanese path from the Iranian one. Unfortunately, the US in the Lebanese file is not negotiating with Hezbollah. It is negotiating with the Lebanese government that has no influence whatsoever on Hezbollah. The Lebanese government is in effect a mediator between US-Israel and Hezbollah-Iran. And any agreement reached by the Americans or the Israelis with the Lebanese government does not bind Hezbollah, and that has been the thorn plaguing all UN resolutions and international efforts over the past 40 years or so to address Hezbollah's destabilizing of Lebanon: With every eruption of hostilities, everyone negotiates with everyone except not with Hezbollah.
The US right now is bragging that it is shepherding negotiations between the Lebanese government and the Israeli government. But the reality is that the Lebanese government obeys Hezbollah's directive to negotiate only "indirectly" with Israel - for "direct" negotiations imply mutual recognition and the "normalization" taboo. President Aoun of Lebanon claims to want to negotiate directly with Israel but hides behind the lack of buy-in by Hezbollah to argue that such a negotiation is useless if Israel does not show goodwill and makes some concession that Aoun can bring back to Hezbollah.
Hezbollah has been, in theory, severely diminished by Israel's constant military offensive for the past 3 years. Much of Hezbollah's Shiite community along the southern border has been pushed north of the Litani and Zahrani rivers. Israel continues to claim that it has destroyed much of Hezbollah's capabilities. Yet, Hezbollah's official communications and reporting on the ground say that it is still lobbing missiles and rockets into Israel, and is actually engaged in fighting with, and inflicting damage to, the Israeli soldiers slowly advancing north. Because of Syria's metamorphosis from a pro-Iranian Assad regime to an anti-Iran Al-Sharaa regime, one assumes that all military supply lines to Hezbollah have dried up. Therefore, a war of attrition seems like the only available route to take in the hope that, at some point, Hezbollah would run out of weapons and surrender.
Hezbollah seems to also recognize this fact and is preparing for the "afterwards". From a propaganda of utter contempt for Lebanon as a state and a country, acting without any consultation with them, and praising its affiliation with Iran with such a blatancy that many Lebanese believe that Lebanon's Shiites have lost their Lebanese identity altogether, Hezbollah is making a U-turn now that it knows the end is near. Up to now, in all its public manifestations, one would typically see a hundred Hezbollah flags for one puny Lebanese flag, and Hezbollah's strategic target was eliminating Israel from existence and framing its 4-decades long terrorism and fighting as paving the way for the road to Jerusalem.
Now, suddenly, Hezbollah's propaganda is about "defending Lebanon and its people", with rarely a mention of the liberation of Palestine, and you'll see a hundred Lebanese flags for one Hezbollah flag in its public manifestations. In other words, Hezbollah has suddenly discovered the utility of the Lebanese state and is preparing, one hopes, to depose its weapons and reintegrate the country as a political party.
But it is too late in the opinion of this writer. The more likely scenario is - and that depends again on the degree of coupling between Lebanon and Iran and the outcome of the US-Israel-Iran conflict - that faced with certain death by attrition, Hezbollah might seize power in Lebanon, overturn the current government, and split the Lebanese army by calling on all regular Shiite soldiers in the army to desert and join it. There is a precedent for this in 1976 when the Sunni Muslim soldiers of the Lebanese army deserted to form the Arab Army of Lebanon that was allied with Yasser Arafat's PLO. It is this very issue of a possible breakdown of the Lebanese army that both the US and Israel have used over the years to deny supplying the Lebanese army with sufficient firepower to defeat Hezbollah, for in the case of a breakdown, any weapons in the hands of the Shiite soldiers would end up with Hezbollah.
In so doing, and again assuming it retains some military deterrence vis-a-vis Israel, Hezbollah would move the front line from the official borderline between Lebanon and Israel to a new front line wherever the advancing Israeli forces might stop. This new front line could be somewhere in the area between the Litani and the Zahrani rivers, or further north if Israel decides to do a repeat of its 1982 invasion and reach all the way to Beirut.
Again, American diplomacy must uncouple Lebanon from Iran if it wants to claim some gains from this conflict. It is unlikely that Iran will be 100% defeated (short of an on-the-ground invasion and occupation and/or a tactical nuclear strike). However, the US stands to salvage some achievement if it cuts off Hezbollah in Beirut from Iran in Tehran. Therefore the US must insist that no deal will be reached, indeed no negotiations, with Iran over all the pending issues (the nuclear file, the Strait of Hormuz, etc.) as long as Iran continues to exploit Hezbollah as one of its negotiating cards.
The Lebanese fear, as has been the standard fare over the past six decades, that a regional agreement would come at their expense. Lebanon is a useless partner in the region and has nothing to offer the bigger protagonists other than headaches. Nixon's Kissinger surrendered Lebanon to the Syrian regime in 1974 in exchange for keeping the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights free of any anti-Israeli "resistance". The Syrians then used their total control of Lebanon to sponsor "resistance" activities by the PLO first, then by Hezbollah, against Israel exclusively from the Lebanese south, drawing retaliations, invasions, bombing campaigns, etc. In the mid-1980s, George H W Bush further surrendered Lebanon to Syria in order to retrieve the Hezbollah-held western captives in Beirut and to drag Assad into the anti-Saddam Hussein coalition in 1991 on the eve of the First Gulf War.
If Hezbollah manages to survive and assuming it is moving forward with usurping the Lebanese State (like the PLO tried to do in the early 1970s), it is very easy to imagine a deal between Trump and Syria's Al-Sharaa in which the latter would be asked by the now-friendly Americans to "stabilize" Lebanon with another brotherly invasion and occupation like the one in 1976.
For more, see: https://theconversation.com/israeli-action-in-lebanon-risks-repeating-historys-mistakes-and-torpedoing-a-historic-moment-for-dialogue-278607
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Analysis-Iran fights to keep Lebanon as leverage in high-stakes US deal
By Samia Nakhoul, Maya Gebeily, Tom Perry and Laila Bassam
Thu, June 11, 2026
Smoke rises in southern Lebanon following an explosion, as seen from the Israeli side of the Israel-Lebanon border, in northern Israel, June 10, 2026. REUTERS/Ammar Awad
BEIRUT, June 11 (Reuters) - Iran is waging a calculated campaign to preserve Lebanon as its last bastion of influence on the Mediterranean, tying the country's fate to a grand bargain with Washington as it seeks to end Hezbollah's war with Israel on its own terms, not Beirut's.
That effort is colliding with a historic U.S.-sponsored negotiating track between Lebanon and Israel aimed at ending decades of conflict along their frontier and redefining the balance of power in a country long caught between regional foes.
Yet Beirut is not backing down. President Joseph Aoun told Reuters on Wednesday that "Lebanon's future is in the hands of the Lebanese, not Iran -- nor Israel," casting the negotiations as a struggle for Lebanon's sovereignty.
"Cooperation with Iran is one thing, but we do not accept that the Iranians dictate to us," Aoun said. "We are a sovereign state. Iran cannot speak in our name. We do not accept that Lebanon becomes a field for other people's wars."
"I am determined to proceed with the diplomatic track," he added. "There is no military solution. We have no choice but to negotiate to end this conflict, and neither do the Israelis."
Still, Lebanon finds itself at an impasse.
Hezbollah has publicly rejected direct talks with Israel, calling them shameless, but Aoun said the group had not presented the government with its own roadmap to end the crisis.
He warned that if Hezbollah chose to remain on a war footing, the Shi'ite group would harm the very community it claims to defend, prolonging a conflict that erupted on March 2 in parallel to the Iran war and has strained Lebanon's sectarian and political fault lines.
Tehran, meanwhile, has made a ceasefire in Lebanon a condition for any broader deal with Washington, giving it leverage over a process from which it is formally excluded.
LEBANON 'GROUND ZERO' FOR IRAN
Lebanon has become all the more important for Iran since the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a main pillar of Tehran's "Axis of Resistance", in late 2024.
"Lebanon is the ground zero of Iran's resistance narrative," said Andreas Krieg at the School of Security Studies at King's College London, describing it as Tehran's primary frontline against Israel and a base for operations across the Levant.
This week's Iranian strike on Israel, in retaliation for an attack on Beirut's southern suburbs, underlined that posture, signalling Tehran's willingness to enforce red lines, particularly in Lebanon, Krieg said. It marked the first time Tehran has intervened directly in a Hezbollah-Israel war.
An Iranian official said those red lines include any effort to weaken Hezbollah, normalise strikes on Lebanon or target Shi'ite areas. The message has been conveyed to Washington and Tel Aviv, the official said, along with a warning that continued hostilities could derail ceasefire efforts and risk wider regional fallout, including threats to maritime chokepoints.
A Lebanese source familiar with the U.S. talks said Tehran was angered by Beirut's decision to negotiate independently with Israel, which it saw as stripping Iran of a key bargaining chip in its standoff with Washington.
TORTUOUS TALKS IN WASHINGTON
Meanwhile, the talks in Washington have produced little visible progress.
At their core lies a stark divide. Lebanon is demanding a durable ceasefire as the basis for negotiations leading to a full Israeli withdrawal and the return of hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians under Lebanese army supervision.
Israel wants Hezbollah dismantled as a military force -- at least in southern Lebanon -- and proof of its removal before relinquishing occupied territory.
Two Lebanese officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the talks with Israel as tortuous. Five hours into a meeting last week, Lebanese negotiators concluded Israel was not prepared to make concessions. Chief negotiator Simon Karam informed U.S. mediators that talks should be paused and left the room. The meeting resumed only after the direct intervention of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance.
That produced what the Lebanese officials described as a "last-minute, take-it-or-leave-it proposal", short on detail.
It proposed a ceasefire contingent on Hezbollah's cessation of hostilities and withdrawal from southern Lebanon as a first step. Like an earlier ceasefire announcement in April, it did not explicitly refer to Israeli troop withdrawal.
Rubio accused Iran this month of trying to stymie the talks.
For upcoming talks this month, Beirut is proposing parallel tracks: an Israeli withdrawal and the gradual extension of Lebanese state authority. Lebanese officials say both tracks must proceed simultaneously.
A ceasefire would trigger a 24-hour deadline for Hezbollah to begin withdrawing to allow for "pilot zones" to be established, beginning around Beaufort Castle, they said. Zone by zone, Israeli troops would withdraw, Lebanese troops would deploy and displaced civilians would begin returning, backed by international reconstruction efforts.
Hezbollah swiftly rejected the plan, publicly describing it as surrender to Israeli terms.
HEZBOLLAH UNLIKELY TO PLAY BALL AS WAR RAGES, SOURCE SAYS
A Lebanese source familiar with Hezbollah's position said the Washington track would lead nowhere, pitting an Israel unwilling to halt its offensive against a Lebanese delegation with no authority over the group.
The real negotiations, he said, would only begin once a ceasefire emerges from a U.S.-Iran deal, when Lebanon would push for Israeli withdrawal and Israel for security arrangements that address Hezbollah's weapons -- an issue the group's leadership is not ready to confront while war continues.
Beirut's position, the two officials say, is fortified by growing Western and Arab backing and rare domestic consensus outside the Shi'ite community supporting an independent national track free from Iranian tutelage.
The government must now try to navigate a path between Israel's insistence on dismantling Hezbollah and Iran's determination to preserve it as a regional lever.
Continued deadlock risks entrenching a new reality in south Lebanon, potentially preventing the return of large segments of the Shi'ite population.
(Additional reporting by Maya Gebeily, Tom Perry, Laila Bassam and Parisa Hafezi; Writing by Samia Nakhoul; Editing by Aidan Lewis)
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