Lebanon’s Washington framework entrenches power, not order

Diplomacy often celebrates the signing of agreements. History judges whether those agreements change realities or merely rename them. The trilateral framework negotiated in Washington between Lebanon, Israel and the United States belongs, at least in its current form, to the latter category.  Marketed as the ‘beginning of the beginning’ of a pathway towards peace, the arrangement appears less a diplomatic breakthrough than a sophisticated mechanism for managing instability. Rather than resolving the conflict, it institutionalises its underlying asymmetries, transforming peace into a conditional privilege rather than a reciprocal obligation. Even the framework’s architects have stopped short of calling it a final settlement, acknowledging that it remains only an experimental process built around phased implementation and ‘pilot’ security zones. The central […]