President Trump suggested this week that Israel could relent on its current military pressure against Hezbollah in Lebanon and effectively outsource the job of containing the group to Syria’s Ahmed al-Sharaa, while also criticizing Israel’s response to Hezbollah drone attacks as disproportionate, saying that when two drones are dropped harmlessly in the desert, Israel does not need to knock down buildings in Beirut.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain, research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and author of The Arab Case for Israel, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to explain why he considers the Syria proposal deeply misguided and why the ceasefire language governing Lebanon in the broader Iran settlement is dangerously ambiguous.
Abdul-Hussain said the language in the memorandum covering the Israel-Lebanon dimension of the ceasefire appears deliberately vague, likely by design, because it does not clearly specify whether Israeli forces are required to withdraw from territory they currently control inside Lebanon. He said the Israeli military would likely be content to maintain the current ceasefire as long as it retains that territory, but Hezbollah continues attempting to push southward, which forces Israeli responses to repel those incursions. The ambiguity in the text allows each side to interpret the agreement in whatever way serves its interests, and he noted with concern that Iran, even before receiving any of the funds released under the settlement, had already promised to direct significant money toward Hezbollah, which he reads as essentially an advance signal that renewed conflict is expected at some point.
On the proposal that Syria’s al-Sharaa government should take over responsibility for containing Hezbollah, Abdul-Hussain called it one of the worst foreign policy ideas he has encountered, for two primary reasons among many he could cite. First, Hezbollah is currently on the back foot specifically because Israel has maintained sustained military pressure on it. If Israel releases that pressure and Syria steps into the vacuum, there is no actual evidence that Syria’s military is stronger than Hezbollah’s, meaning the assumption that Damascus could finish the job Israel has been doing is simply incorrect. Second, the historical relationship between Syria and Lebanon carries deep and bitter history, and the moment Syrian forces attempt to establish themselves on Lebanese soil, even Lebanese factions currently unpopular, including Hezbollah itself, would likely find new public support as Lebanese citizens rally around national sovereignty against what would be perceived as a Syrian invasion.
Abdul-Hussain situated the current proposal within a seventy-year pattern of American policy treating Lebanon as a bargaining chip to be handed off to whichever regional power needs to be appeased at a given moment, rather than as a sovereign nation worth protecting in its own right. He cited the precedent of ceding influence over Lebanon to Egypt’s Nasser in the 1950s and to Syria’s Assad in 1991 as a reward for Syria’s cooperation in the coalition to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. He noted that in 2008, the United States advised the Lebanese government to come to terms with Hezbollah, similar to suggestions Trump made just a week before this interview, despite the fact that any Lebanese citizen will explain that negotiating with Hezbollah is not viable because the group does not seek to share power as a normal political party but to dominate and rule over the entire country.
He emphasized that Lebanon’s unique character in the region, as one of historically the most religiously diverse nations with a Christian population that was once a majority and has now declined to roughly one-third and continues shrinking, makes the seventy-year pattern of treating it as expendable particularly costly. He said Lebanon is also one of the few countries in the region, alongside Israel, that holds regular elections and allows genuine public opinion expression, meaning the international community does not actually lack information about what Lebanese citizens want. Lebanon’s elected government has been explicit that it wants direct talks with Israel toward genuine peace and that it does not wish to be hostage to Iran’s broader regional agenda. He said the frustration among Lebanese citizens is that even when they say exactly what western policymakers claim to want to hear, the moment major powers like Iran and the United States begin negotiating directly, Lebanese preferences are set aside entirely in service of larger geopolitical arrangements, repeating a pattern that has played out repeatedly across seven decades with consistently poor results for both Lebanon and the broader region.