Arabic original title: لبنان: الدولة الفاشلة التي يصرّ العالم على إنعاشها!
Original publication: Al Joumhouria Newspaper
Publication date: January 29, 2025
Original Arabic article: https://www.aljoumhouria.com/ar/news/751248/
This article examines Lebanon as a failed state kept alive through external crisis management rather than rebuilt through genuine reform. It argues that international actors, donors, regional powers, and domestic elites have helped preserve a broken political model under the language of stability, while the country’s real need is a decisive break with sectarian allocation, political recycling, and artificial resuscitation.
English translation / adapted English version:
Lebanon: The Failed State the World Insists on Resuscitating!
Does the world need another failed state in the Middle East? This is the question decision-makers should be asking, both within Lebanon and in the international capitals that have long treated the country as a file that can be postponed rather than as a state on the verge of explosion.
For years, the major powers have treated Lebanon like a patient in intensive care, administering financial or diplomatic painkillers whenever it approaches death. Yet no one dares to remove the cancerous tumor consuming its body: a sectarian political system that refuses to die and a corrupt political class that refuses to leave.
Lebanon has elected a new president, Joseph Aoun, and Nawaf Salam has been designated to form a government. In any other country, these developments would be considered the beginning of a new era. In Lebanon, however, they amount to little more than the recycling of failure. The state remains hostage to the lords of the sects, the government will be formed only according to worn-out balances of power, and reforms will remain mere ink on paper because the ruling establishment does not believe in reform. It has instead mastered the art of managing reform as a permanent crisis.
Yet the real question is not why Lebanon repeatedly fails to form governments and implement reforms. The real question is why the world insists on keeping this distorted model alive. Why do Western governments, donors and international institutions continue to inundate the country with conditional assistance when they know that the money will ultimately end up in the overseas accounts of its political leaders? Why is an illusion of stability imposed on Lebanon when every condition indicates that an explosion is approaching?
Perhaps it is because Lebanon is not merely a small country suffering from an economic and political crisis. It is an arena of regional and international conflict that no one is prepared to lose entirely. From Tehran to Washington, and from Paris to Riyadh, everyone understands that genuine change in Lebanon would dismantle balances of power constructed over decades. The problem therefore lies not only with the domestic political elites, but also with the foreign actors that keep those elites in power and then pretend to be concerned about the country’s future.
The truth everyone chooses to ignore is that this model is no longer viable, either domestically or internationally. The Gulf states that supported Lebanon for decades no longer trust its political class. Western governments that pressed for reform have reaped nothing but further corruption and collapse. International organisations that channelled assistance into the country have found themselves becoming indirect partners in financing the machinery of corruption that destroyed it.
Faced with this reality, the new president and the prime minister-designate have two choices. They can become an extension of their predecessors and master the art of recycling crises, or they can break the rules altogether. The world no longer has the luxury of waiting, and what is required today is not merely the formation of another government, but the declaration of a complete rupture with the past.
A technocratic government? A national-unity government? It makes no difference as long as the game continues to be played with the same instruments and according to the same rules. What is required is the declaration of a genuine political and economic state of emergency, in which the formula of sectarian quota-sharing is dismantled and the state is rebuilt according to one standard alone: competence and capability, rather than loyalty and sectarian affiliation.
Is Lebanon ready for such a leap? Certainly not. Yet it has never been ready for any radical transformation. Nevertheless, major transformations have always occurred when one party decides to overturn the table. Today, Joseph Aoun and Nawaf Salam have the opportunity to become the men who overturn it, rather than allowing their names to be used in futile rounds of negotiation among the sectarian leaders. Should they fail to do so, there will be no difference between them and everyone who preceded them in Baabda Palace and the Grand Serail.
As for the foreign powers that continue to regard Lebanon as little more than a bargaining chip in their conflicts, they must understand that the country is no longer a safe wager. Iran cannot turn it into a forward operating base without paying a price, and the West cannot impose artificial stability indefinitely. Lebanon must either be reshaped now or it will enter a new phase of disorder whose course and consequences no one will be able to control.
If the world wants a stable Lebanon, it must stop supporting it as a “hopeless case” and begin treating it as a state requiring genuine reconstruction. And if Lebanon’s leadership wants to save itself before the streets erupt once again, it must recognise that time has run out, and that the old rules are no longer suitable for a rapidly changing world, or for a country dying at the hands of its own sons.
Publication reference:
This article appears within the wider Publications section, under Lebanon, Economy & Public Sector Reform, where Lebanon’s state failure, institutional collapse, donor behavior, political accountability, and the need for structural reform are examined through economic and governance analysis.
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