The framework agreement signed in Washington on June 26 between the United States, Israel, and Lebanon is being analyzed in most capitals as a diplomatic development. In Lebanon, it is being experienced as something closer to a political earthquake. Within hours of the signing, Hezbollah’s secretary-general called it “null and void.” Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, the principal intermediary between Hezbollah and the state, called it “incitement to civil war.” Hezbollah supporters blocked roads in Beirut’s southern suburbs with burning tires. And Kataeb leader Samy Gemayel congratulated the president and prime minister on “an achievement accomplished by the Lebanese state.”

The reactions do not describe a country debating the merits of an agreement. They describe a country discovering that the arrangement it has lived under since 1990 has been formally terminated.

The reactions do not describe a country debating the merits of an agreement. They describe a country discovering that the arrangement it has lived under since 1990 has been formally terminated.

The post-Taif order was built on ambiguity. The Taif Accord of 1989 ended the civil war by distributing power across Lebanon’s confessional communities through a set of formal and informal arrangements that left the most dangerous questions deliberately unanswered. The most dangerous question of all, whether the Lebanese state was sovereign over its own territory or whether sovereignty was shared with Hezbollah, was resolved not by answering it but by agreeing never to ask.

The state and the resistance coexisted through institutional opacity: each operated within its own sphere, each maintained its own logic, and neither was forced to confront the other’s claims. This was not a failure of governance. It was governance itself. The ambiguity was the architecture.

The state and the resistance coexisted through institutional opacity: each operated within its own sphere, each maintained its own logic, and neither was forced to confront the other’s claims. This was not a failure of governance. It was governance itself. The ambiguity was the architecture.

The framework agreement ends the ambiguity.

The text commits Lebanon to a “sequenced process” in which the Lebanese Armed Forces will restore “effective sovereign authority over all Lebanese territory, pending the verified disarmament of non-state armed groups.” The........

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