Iran, Lebanon, the King’s speech, the WHCD shooting and more…. Danielle Pletka and I are back in full force! Join us TODAY at 5:30 ET for some cocktails and what promises to be a lively discussion.
We had an audio glitch at the very end of the last question, but by then the essential point was clear: Lebanon is not just another front in the Iran war. It is where that war’s contradictions are most exposed — and where any real resolution will be tested.
In a wide-ranging conversation with former U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Jeffrey Feltman, one theme kept resurfacing: across the region, there is motion without clarity. Ceasefires, negotiations, military pressure — all of it suggests activity, but not direction. Nowhere is that more true than in Lebanon.
The war with Iran has settled into a strategic stalemate. Both Washington and Tehran face the same constraint: compromise looks like weakness. So nobody is compromising. Meanwhile, Iran has discovered leverage it didn’t know it had. The Strait of Hormuz — long a theoretical choke point — is now central to the conflict. As Feltman put it, the nuclear file concerned a handful of countries. Hormuz concerns the world. Tehran has noticed.
It is against that backdrop that Lebanon matters — and why President Trump’s push for a ceasefire there is about more than Lebanon. Feltman’s read: the president didn’t want an additional reason for Iran not to negotiate. Whether that’s grand strategy or triage is an open question.
What’s not in question is that this moment has produced something genuinely unusual: direct talks between Israel and Lebanon, conducted openly and over Hezbollah’s explicit objections. One Hezbollah spokesman reminded President Aoun of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s fate after talking to the Israelis. Aoun proceeded anyway. For decades, that would have been unthinkable. That alone marks a shift.
And while the Lebanese state is negotiating, it does not control the forces driving the conflict. Hezbollah is not simply a militia and a terrorist group. It is a political party, a social services network, and a military force whose capabilities rival the Lebanese Armed Forces. It answers to Tehran. And since its leader Hassan Nasrallah’s death, even more so — his successor Naim Qassem is, in Feltman’s words, essentially a fully owned subsidiary of Iran, without Nasrallah’s ability to balance Lebanese politics against Iranian demands.
But Israel’s continued occupation of southern Lebanon risks handing Hezbollah back the resistance narrative that made it powerful in the first place. This is the same ground Israel occupied from 1982 to 2000 — and Hezbollah was born in the rubble of that occupation. It knows how to tell that story. It’s been telling it for forty years.
There is one shift working against Hezbollah from within. The war has displaced more than a million people from the Shia south — the very constituency Hezbollah claims to protect. The group no longer has the deep pockets it had after the war in 2006 to rebuild and buy back loyalty. That erosion of support is real. Whether the Lebanese government can translate it into political movement before the moment passes is another question entirely.
The Aoun government is attempting something genuinely difficult: asserting sovereignty without triggering collapse. Push too hard against Hezbollah and you risk fracturing Lebanon’s sectarian balance. Move too slowly and you hand Israel and Washington the argument that Lebanon cannot act — which, Feltman notes, they are already making.
The Lebanese Armed Forces are part of the problem. It is not just capability — though a soldier earning $200 a month is not rushing into a fight with Hezbollah’s drone units. It is cohesion. Any direct confrontation risks the army splitting along sectarian lines.
The opportunity, if there is one, exists not because these problems have been solved but because the political space for incremental movement may briefly exist. The Aoun government’s best path, Feltman argues, is not sweeping declarations but tangible steps that are hard to dismiss — replacing Hezbollah’s social services with state services, implementing the goverment’s security plan and eroding the political narrative that sustains the group’s legitimacy.
None of it will happen quickly. None of it without significant support. And the risk, as always in Lebanon, is that pressure outruns capacity — that Israel and Washington lose patience before Beirut has had time to show what it can do.
If this effort fails, the outcome is unlikely to be a return to the status quo, but could be a broader, more destructive conflict. If it succeeds — even partially — it could begin to shift the balance toward a Lebanese state that actually governs its own territory.
For now, Lebanon remains suspended between those two outcomes. Balanced, precariously, on a line that has broken before.
There’s no shortage of podcasts where two people who already agree sit down and spend an hour being outraged together. It’s good for the algorithm. It doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know.
That’s not what we’re doing here.
I’m convinced the people worth talking to are the ones who make you reconsider something — not the ones who confirm what you already think. That means serious conversations with diplomats, intelligence officials, and policy architects who’ve actually been in the room. People like Jeff Feltman, who was there for the 2006 war in Lebanon, survived an assassination attempt by Hezbollah, met with the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and has spent twenty years watching the same dynamics repeat themselves.
You might not always agree with what you hear. You’ll probably learn something anyway.
That’s the point. If it sounds like your kind of show, I hope you’ll subscribe.
