Lebanon should ask for help to break Hezbollah — and the West should answer

After Iraq and Afghanistan, and now with an unpopular war with Iran underway, no one in the U.S. wants to hear about another opportunity to get involved in the Middle East. That’s understandable and healthy, but perhaps unwise.

Sometimes, the refusal to act carries its own risks. And occasionally, a situation emerges where limited, strategic involvement is not a trap but an opportunity. Lebanon, incredibly, may be such a situation.

Even as Hezbollah fires rockets once again at Israel from Lebanon and Israel retaliates, something important is shifting beneath the surface. President Joseph Aoun’s new Lebanese government is actually trying to get rid of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed jihadist group set up in the 1980s. He even hints at formal peace with Israel. Syria, under its new leadership, seems willing to help, at least by blocking weapons transiting over its territory.

Why should the world care or help? Because Hezbollah’s removal from Lebanon would end one of Iran’s most powerful instruments of regional projection. This would open the door to a formal end to hostilities between Israel and Lebanon — something unthinkable for nearly eight decades — and perhaps draw Lebanon into the broader architecture of regional normalization now tentatively taking shape.

Iran’s longstanding region of influence — a corridor stretching from the Arabian to the Mediterranean Sea — has long exported instability in the form of refugees, financial collapses, and periodic wars. But if Lebanon becomes a functioning state again, it will serve as an economic hub and a bridge between East and West. Helping Lebanon reclaim itself is therefore a strategic investment in a more stable Middle East, and in the kind of order the international system claims to support but too often hesitates to defend.

For decades, Hezbollah........

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