Bechara Gerges@BecharaGerges
🚩Hezbollah is shouting because it has stopped steering. That is the read of the third round.
Eight hours at the State Department. Military attachés in the room for the first time. Simon Karam, Ambassador Nada Mouawad, and the LAF beside them. The text on the table, inside a long-term American-Israeli framework, not 1701, is: “Lebanese state monopoly on arms.” This is not a border negotiation. It is an institutional transfer.
The same doctrine was installed in Baghdad yesterday. Ali al-Zaidi’s confidence vote made “state monopoly on arms” Iraqi government program. Iran’s proxy architecture is being legally dismantled across the Levant. And Iran is watching helplessly.
This framework did not arrive by accident. Fouad Makhzoumi laid down the doctrine at the Washington Institute in November: full dismantlement of Hezbollah, state monopoly on force, direct negotiations with Israel, suspension of boycott law, the exact text the State Department is now drafting.
The Sunni cover was prepositioned. Without it, the Christian track would face sectarian veto. With Fouad Makhzoumi, the Lebanese Forces, and the Kataeb behind state logic, the consensus is already cross confessional. Even Druze Leader, Walid Jumblatt, Lebanon’s master pivoter, cannot break ranks.
That is why Hezbollah’s Secretary General Naim Qassem has lost his narrative, and why Hezbollah MPs demands land flat.
Joseph Aoun pronounced the doctrine on April 23: “We are no longer a card in anyone’s pocket, nor a battlefield for others’ wars.” That sentence is the treaty. Everything this week is implementation, sequencing, signatures, guarantees, LAF deployment.
The choice is not between negotiation and resistance. It is between a Lebanon that writes its own armistice and a Lebanon scheduled by Tehran. Beirut chose the pen. Washington is underwriting the ink. Hezbollah is left negotiating with its own audience.
Let us also remember that Michel Issa, the US Ambassador to Lebanon, is doing a heroic job.
