Opinion: The morning after the Lebanon 'agreement'
There was a 19th-century Orientalist traveller and diplomat by the name of David Urquhart, who said about (Mount) Lebanon that there “never was a country for which God has done so much, nor a people who could do less for themselves”.
Such a description was unfair and stereotypical. But Urquhart was writing just as Lebanon was becoming a central node in both European imperialism and the Ottoman attempt to stymie that imperialism.
One of the results of this struggle was the emergence of a new “culture of sectarianism”, which anticipated the current Lebanese political system. Another result was the degree to which local actions and aspirations were thenceforth implicated within the great game of geopolitics, for which Lebanon was paradoxically both important and a sideshow at the same time.
Lebanon remains a paradoxical central node/sideshow of western imperialism, today of a US-Israeli project that appears to be trying to recover in and via Lebanon what it lost in its unsuccessful war on Iran.
: The morning after the Lebanon 'agreement' Opinion by Ussama Makdisi
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio (centre of back row) looks on as Israeli, American and Lebanese officials sign a framework agreement in Washington, DC, 26 June 2026 (Saul Loeb/AFP)
