On March 2, after Hezbollah opened fire on Israel, Lebanon’s government declared it illegal and offered Jerusalem direct talks. Doing so while Hezbollah’s patron and financier was under American and Israeli bombs was a deliberate choice to break with Iran at the moment it was most vulnerable and most unpredictable.
A government that takes that risk, in the middle of a regional war, with Hezbollah armed on its own territory, deserves to be asked the right question. Not “can it be trusted?” but “what do we do with this break?”
For the first time, Israel and Lebanon want the same thing: a disarmed Hezbollah. That convergence is real, fragile, and time-limited. The question is whether the right diplomatic architecture gets built around it before the window closes.
France has positioned itself as the master builder of that architecture. The instinct is right. The proposal is not.
France has real assets in Lebanon. Besides history, nearly 100 French companies operate there, including CMA CGM, which controls nearly 30% of Beirut port traffic, and France co-chairs the ceasefire monitoring mechanism with Washington.
France loses credibility over Lebanon, Hezbollah
But France’s regional credibility since October 7, 2023, has collapsed. When the pager operation dismantled Hezbollah’s communications network in September 2024, French President Emmanuel Macron addressed Lebanon without mentioning Hezbollah.
On both the Israeli and Lebanese pro-sovereignty sides, the signal was the same: Paris no longer reads the region.
When Hezbollah fired on Israel on March 2, Macron called on both parties to de-escalate in the same statement, the same register, the same symmetry. For Jerusalem, placing Israel on the same moral footing as Hezbollah is not neutrality, but disqualification.
Macron needs a win.
While the current French proposal goes further by envisioning direct Lebanese-Israeli talks, it breaks down when putting UNIFIL and resolution 1701 – a UN resolution calling for an end to the Second Lebanon War in 2006 – as the security framework.
UNIFIL has been in Lebanon since 1978. Hezbollah built 150,000 rockets under its watch. Resolution 1701 was never enforced. Peacekeeping missions do not disarm actors who refuse to be disarmed.
One prominent Israeli journalist wrote that Israel doesn’t need Lebanon’s recognition or love. It needs one thing: no rocket, no drone, crossing the border.
That diagnosis is right. The conclusion he draws from it is not.
The Lebanese government proposing direct talks is the same one that declared Hezbollah illegal and spent fourteen months trying to impose state authority on an organization that murdered its political opponents and boobytrapped its own weapons depots to kill Lebanese soldiers. The obstacle was never political will.
It was capacity, and the very real fear that Hezbollah would not hesitate to turn its weapons against the Lebanese state itself. This is not a government trying to save Hezbollah. It is a government trying to survive itself, while doing something no Lebanese government has done before: directly challenging Hezbollah’s monopoly on force.
This moment does not require reinventing the wheel. It requires the courage to use what has worked before.
There is a simple test of France’s seriousness. The Gulf Cooperation Council designated all of Hezbollah a terrorist group in 2016. The UK did so in 2019. Germany followed in 2020. France remains the principal reason the EU has not done the same. If Macron genuinely intends to lead a disarmament process, full designation is not a detail. It is the first signal anyone would look for.
A full designation of Hezbollah, including its political wing, would activate across Europe asset-freezing and financing-prohibition mechanisms that France’s current position still blocks. This is the difference between symbolic pressure and structural constraint. For years, Paris justified its stance by preserving dialogue with Hezbollah’s political wing in the name of Lebanese stability. That logic no longer holds. Lebanon itself is now challenging Hezbollah’s role.
Designation alone is not enough. The architecture this moment requires is coordinated: American political weight, Saudi economic leverage, French diplomatic process. But France cannot build it alone. Two actors are missing.
Donald Trump has met Syria’s Ahmad al-Sharaa, a former jihadist, twice in the Oval Office. He has never called Joseph Aoun. Washington has the leverage – the Lebanese Armed Forces is run on American funding, and the conditionality is written into law. But the administration is treating this file as a second-tier priority at precisely the moment it is not.
Saudi Arabia is back in Beirut. Conditionally. Since 2025, Envoy Prince Yazid bin Farhan has been meeting Aoun, Salam, and Berri. Iran’s attacks on Gulf infrastructure destroyed whatever remained of Riyadh’s rapprochement with Tehran. Saudi investment tied to disarmament benchmarks would complement military pressure. It will not come without them.
History offers two precedents for what coordinated pressure can achieve. Similar combinations of military force, terrorist designation, and financial sanctions dismantled ISIS’s funding base.
And in 1982, Israeli military pressure combined with American-backed diplomacy produced an outcome that seemed impossible: over ten thousand PLO fighters, Arafat included, evacuated Beirut for Tunis. Hezbollah is not the PLO; it is more deeply rooted in Lebanese society.
But it has become a foreign body within the Lebanese state, dependent on Iran and dragged into wars most Lebanese never wanted. If pressure is sustained and a diplomatic exit exists, the departure of Hezbollah’s military leadership from Lebanon is not a fantasy. It is an objective.
Hezbollah is already rebuilding north of the Litani. Without structural pressure, this becomes the Gaza model: periodic degradation, no dismantlement, and another war on the horizon.
The region is in the middle of a structural shift, from the militia order Iran built, toward something that looks like states asserting sovereignty over their own territory. Lebanon is the most fragile and most consequential test of that shift. The problem is not French capacity. It is a French doctrine built for a Middle East that no longer exists.
A photographed summit in Paris is not a strategy for this moment. What France can uniquely contribute is the diplomatic architecture that connects American coercive power, Saudi economic leverage, and Israeli security requirements into something the Lebanese state can actually use.
This moment calls for something other than another agreement that no one will enforce.
The writer is a geopolitical analyst specializing in the Middle East.