Obama Plays a Dead Man’s Hand in Lebanon, and Wins

Barely three weeks ago, Barack Obama’s legacy was in tatters. His party was roundly defeated in the election, after he personally engineered the defenestration of his doddering former vice president from the Oval Office. Instead of greeting the sight of Obama emerging from the shadows with relief, Americans reacted with horror. His handpicked candidate was trounced, while the Party he directed lost both houses of Congress. The Iran deal, which he once saw as his ticket to Mount Rushmore, would be consigned to the dustbin of history by self-proclaimed master dealmaker Donald Trump.

And yet, two months before the end of his lengthy shadow presidency, and faced with the final undoing of his signature legacy project in the Middle East, Obama went all in—and won big. By forcing Israel to accept a deal with Hezbollah that will formalize America’s role as the terror group’s protector, Obama will have locked in a key piece of his decade-old policy of leveraging American power to secure both Iran’s continuing regional influence and its direct control over Israel’s borders.

After nearly two months of operating in Lebanon, the Israeli cabinet agreed on Tuesday to the cease-fire deal brokered by President Joe Biden’s special envoy, Amos Hochstein. The details of the deal are, for the most part, as irrelevant as they are meaningless. In essence, they represent a return to the Oct. 6, 2023, status quo ante. Namely, that the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) will again deploy in south Lebanon, and again pretend to “implement UNSCR 1701”—the meaningless 2006 U.N. resolution which supposedly prevents Hezbollah’s rearmament and the reconstruction of its infrastructure south of the Litani River. To prop up this threadbare charade, the U.S. will now up its annual taxpayer subsidization of Hezbollah’s base—reportedly by at least another $400 million—to account for the enlargement of the LAF with new, U.S.-subsidized recruits. With these additions, U.S. taxpayer funding for Hezbollahland will now sit at around a $1 billion a year.

The relevant parts of the agreement have to do with the formalization of the U.S. role in Lebanon—a process that began with Hochstein’s maritime deal in 2022—as an arbiter between Israel and Hezbollah, increasing America’s direct management of the Lebanese special province and of Israel’s defense policy. The vehicle for this role that the deal introduces is the creation of a so-called monitoring committee headed by the U.S., which will be represented presumably by a CENTCOM officer.

In other words, the U.S. is now responsible for handling Israel’s complaints about the myriad violations of 1701 that will doubtlessly be forthcoming as Hezbollah’s forces and supporters stream back into their villages on Israel’s northern border. And since the U.S. underwrites the LAF, in which it has been heavily invested for two decades, the Americans will be inclined to cover for the LAF’s collusion with Hezbollah—in the process becoming directly complicit for the aid that the LAF will give to its symbiotic terrorist partner. The lawyerly language that Team Obama planted in the side letter they gave Israel, as well as the text of the agreement itself, make it plain that the U.S. will now restrict Israeli actions, certainly in the parts of the country north of the Litani. As a senior administration official told its Israeli stenographer Barak Ravid, “There are restrictions on the military activity that Israel can carry out. It is impossible to sign a ceasefire agreement if Israel can shoot afterwards whatever it wants in Lebanon and whenever it wants.”

Instead, as Hochstein told Al Jazeera, “The United States will send diplomats and military personnel to the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, whose mission will be to work with the Lebanese Armed Forces and Lebanese authorities.” And if Israel has a complaint, it will need to notify the U.S., and share intelligence with it in the context of the monitoring committee, so that the CENTCOM officer can then relay those concerns to the LAF, which has long operated in partnership with Hezbollah’s forces, and whose political sponsors in Beirut are dominated by the Iranian-run militia.

In other words, the agreement affirms that Israel is a province that lacks full sovereignty, especially when it comes to its defense policy in territory where Washington has decided to partner with Iran and establish a joint protectorate dedicated to Israel’s destruction.

But none of this explains how and why Netanyahu decided to play what appeared to be a strong hand in order to achieve such a dubious-seeming result. For an entire year, the Israeli prime minister managed to outmaneuver a hostile administration determined to destroy him and to end Israel’s operation in Gaza (it had openly intervened to block an early strike on Hezbollah back in October of last year). Netanyahu patiently built his stack, and then started taking huge pots when he called the administration’s bluff, pushed into Rafah and broke Hamas’ back. In a stunning series of operations, the IDF then killed all of Hamas’ leaders, including Yahya Sinwar.

Contrary to the advice of his General Staff, Netanyahu then turned north and within weeks, he had decapitated Hezbollah’s entire command. The entire world watched in awe as each crushing blow followed the last. Exploding beepers! Nasrallah killed inside his bunker. What would come next?

Even as the kangaroo court at the ICC pronounced him to be a genocidal war criminal, Netanyahu’s winning streak only got longer. Barack Obama and the Democrats received a surprise shellacking, ensuring Donald Trump’s triumphant return to the White House. The Iranians lost a key part of their nuclear complex, and were so shaken—with their trusty shield in Lebanon now dashed to pieces—that they didn’t have the means or the nerve to respond. Netanyahu was holding a full house with aces; a surefire winner. And then he folded.

Of these, the family of arguments that go something like, “well, Israel was running out of meaningful targets, making the returns increasingly smaller,” and “now it can turn its attention fully to Iran,” are the most patently offensive to reason. Israel could have simply run the clock down. And while it actually did not need a “deal” in Lebanon—there being no sovereign entity to make a “deal” with aside from Hezbollah, which was clearly losing its military engagements with the IDF—if it were determined to indulge in one then it should’ve waited for the new administration, so that whatever arrangement ensued would not reinforce a hostile framework, but rather help tear it down.

On the face of it, this is a clear-cut case of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. But then came a flurry of other Israeli statements on background suggesting that Israel was coerced. An Israeli official told the Times of Israel that “Israel had no choice but to accept a cease-fire, out of fear that U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration could punish Israel with a United Nations Security Council resolution in its final weeks.” Reports from Israel were that, in his address to the cabinet, Netanyahu drove home precisely this justification for accepting the deal. By accepting a less-than-ideal agreement, Netanyahu reportedly said, Israel was avoiding a greater risk: a Biden administration-sponsored Security Council resolution that could lead to international sanctions against Israel.

It remains unclear what the resolution in question might have been. A resolution calling for a cease-fire, by itself, is irrelevant and could safely be ignored. For it to mean something, such a resolution would have had to have real-world, long-term material repercussions that would be tricky to reverse.

Sen. Ted Cruz, in a critical statement on the cease-fire agreement, mentioned the Biden administration “threatening to facilitate a further, broader, binding international arms embargo through the United Nations.” There is speculation that this resolution was being prepared by the French, doubtless in direct coordination with the administration, which would have, in a replay of Obama’s December 2016 gambit with UNSCR 2334, allowed the passage of the resolution through abstention, after quarterbacking the entire play. The French may have already given a preview of this scheme when they called for an arms embargo on Israel in October.

Would Team Obama do this on their way out? Of course they would. They played pretty much the same hand on their way out the door the last time. Was such a resolution really in the works to be passed in the next 60 days? Maybe. Would Joe Biden, who prides himself on being a defender of Israel, really have stripped Israel naked on his way out the door, in order to make the guy who pushed him out the window happy? Possibly. But it hardly seems like a slam dunk.

Perhaps more will become clearer in the coming days. In any case, whether Team Obama bluffed Bibi with a pair of eights, or whether they showed their stronger hand at this point is moot. Obama won in Lebanon.

Some will argue that the deal inherently is nonsensical and based on paradoxical gibberish or fake things like the LAF and UNIFIL, and is therefore meaningless and bound to collapse, while Israel will be free to do what it wants—with U.S. backing—the moment Trump takes office. Again, maybe. But what this ostensible real-world logic misses is that while the deal may be a way of tap dancing until the danger passes, it also has lasting, real-world consequences. Never mind that it will bring tens of thousands of Hezbollah fighters and their families along with convenient human shields back to Israel’s border, where they can rebuild their tunnel networks and weapons depots with hundreds of millions of dollars in international funding. And that the Israelis will be pressured against breaking the cease-fire in order to stop them and instead will be encouraged to file a complaint.

Even more significantly, it locks in Obama’s conceptualization of the U.S. position in Lebanon, aspects of which—such as increased U.S. investment in the LAF, and the added prominence of the billion-dollar U.S. Embassy which will host even more American personnel whose job is to constrain Israel—have support within the Republican Party, and therefore are likely to be consolidated under the Trump administration.

It is hard to imagine that at some point—following a cross-border raid by Hezbollah, or an Israeli retaliatory attack that kills LAF personnel or so-called Western advisers—President Donald Trump won’t review the facts he is given, and ask which idiot thought it was a good idea for the United States to be spending $1 billion a year to protect an Iranian terror army. No doubt, someone in his administration will answer “the Israelis.” It would be better for Israel and America alike if that answer was actually wrong.