Who can save Lebanon? It certainly will not be France, whose last initiatives drowned in the swamps of Lebanese politics. Yet of all the diplomatic powers, France seemed to be the one best equipped to rid Lebanon of the demons that torture it. As the former mandatory power, and in light of the historic role that it played since the end of the First World War as well its extensive knowledge of the territory, France has the tools that others lack, as well as a legitimacy to act. France is also the only western actor that speaks with all parties, including Hezbollah, without which no solution in Lebanon is possible. There has been a historic, cultural and even sometimes nearly romantic French attachment to Lebanon, shared by all the presidents who have occupied the Elysée Palace, and Emmanuel Macron, who wants France to regain its place in the Middle East, is no exception.
Macron's first step was crowned with success: in November 2017, when he was still new in office, he accomplished a major diplomatic achievement, winning the liberation of Saad Hariri, the former Prime Minister of Lebanon, who was being held in Saudi Arabia by Mohammed ben Salman (MBS). The Crown Prince had forced Hariri to resign, no longer believing in his capacity to stand up against Hezbollah, the armed force of Shiite Iran in Lebanon and across the region. Macron masterfully negotiated Hariri's "exfiltration" during a stopover in the middle of the night at Riyadh airport.
But his other Lebanese initiatives failed. After the explosion in the port of Beirut on August 4, 2020, Macron rushed to the Lebanese capital, just as former President Francois Mitterand had done in October 1983, after the attack of Drakkar, which cost the lives of 58 French parachutists. Like Mitterand, Macron feels responsible for Lebanon and refuses to abandon a close ally facing adversity. In Beirut, he pulled out all the stops, calling for "a new pact with the people of Lebanon." But by blaming the political system for all the problems of the country, he stirred up a lot of trouble. His initiative aimed at creating a new political dynamic in Lebanon by mobilizing pressure from international donors. The intention was laudable and the project ambitious. However access to international funds was contingent on the ability of the Lebanese political system to reform itself, and the project got bogged down in the political swamps of the Middle East. None of the reforms necessary to change the political system has been undertaken. After Macron's two visits, the internal conflicts and habits of corruption have continued, as if nothing had happened, and Lebanon has continued on its descent into hell.
In international affairs, good intentions are no substitute for levers of power, and the levers Macron thought he had did not work. The Lebanese crisis is the result of several decades of poor governance on the part of the clientelist political class that has pillaged the country and drained public funds with impunity, with no sign of ever wanting to change its habits. Since the Mitterand visit in 1983, the actors have been the same, and they have consistently refused the injunctions of the former mandatory power. None of these actors, who feed on the perversity of the system, has any interest in changing. Therefore they all resisted the reforms that Macron proposed, which was all the easier, since there were no plans for sanctions mechanisms that might have compelled the local political bosses to undertake reforms. The legislative elections of May 2022 therefore naturally ended up reinstating the same clique that has been in power for three decades.
Of course, the French President was naive to believe that after meeting with his deputies, Hezbollah would start to reform. First of all, any change of the system would affect its central role in the country. In addition, Hezbollah is nothing but an instrument at the service of Iran's regional expansionist project, and its political orientations are decided in Teheran, not in Beirut. In the words of the political scientist Ghassan Salamé, speaking at the Montaigne Institute in Paris: "If Emmanuel Macron wants Hezbollah to participate in a solution, he needs Iran. Hezbollah is not an independent Lebanese party but only an Iranian instrument." The French President could also not solve the problem alone: he needed international institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to realize his project. "But Hezbollah views the institutions of Bretton Woods as representatives of the Great Satan, America," continued Salamé. Even more than the meeting with Hezbollah, Macron's mistake was doubtless his belief that he could get something out of it. He promised more than he could deliver. Within a matter of weeks, all the energy that he displayed turned into powerlessness. "For me, Lebanon is the Titanic without the orchestra. It is sinking into a total denial of the situation. And there is not even any music” commented the former French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian last spring. Emmanuel Macron underestimated the power of inertia of the Lebanese system, while overestimating the virtues of diplomacy as well as the power of his own personal influence.
France faced the same powerlessness in Syria, where its policies, that were both "moral" and "just" proved ineffective. By making a resumption of negotiations with Damascus contingent on the departure of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian tyrant, Paris has seen its influence in Syria fade, in favor of Iran, Russia and Turkey. Eleven years later, Bashar al Assad is still in office, but France is out of the game. France has also been marginalized in matters concerning Iran's nuclear power. Despite all its efforts since 2003, at first together with Germany and Great Britain, and later with the United States of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, France has not been able to prevent the Islamic Republic from reaching nuclear threshold stage, nor has it been able to revive the 2015 agreement, the JCPOA, that was supposed to slow down and limit Tehran's progress toward a nuclear weapons program. France has also faced a similar impasse in Libya, where none of the French diplomatic initiatives has been able to put an end to the chaos created by its military intervention, on the side of Great Britain and the United States, against the Khadafi regime in 2011. Since then France faces an enormous gap between the role it aspires to play in the Middle East and its real influence.
This discrepancy is not only a result of analytic errors of the French government. More generally, the French stalemate in Lebanon exposes the erosion of western influence in the Middle East and in Africa. Russia, China, Iran and Turkey--all these authoritarian countries that are promoting internationally their counter-model against liberal democracy--are filling the vacuum left by Washington, Paris and their western allies in the theaters of the Middle East. In Lebanon just as much as in Libya and Syria, the regional powers are waging proxy wars. And it is Hezbollah that is inviting Chinese capital into Lebanese infrastructure and that will benefit from the disappearance of the West. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard wants to transform Lebanon into a springboard for a campaign against the countries of the Gulf and especially against Saudi Arabia, Tehran's major Sunni rival. Even though Hezbollah lost its majority in the Lebanese elections of May 2022, it has become a bastion of Iranian influence on the Mediterranean. There is no doubt that it will fight to the end to maintain a status quo that favors it.
And now? What and who? In Lebanon, there are voices calling for the country to be placed under international supervision in order to get past the legal and political inertia of the local power structure. "It is in any case necessary to return Lebanon to the path of negotiations acceptable to the international institutions, in order to stop the collapse of the country," according to political scientist Josep Bahout, the director of the Institute Issam Farès in Beirut. Others believe that only an intensive diplomatic initiative under American leadership can keep the country alive. However, the "pivot to Asia" has distanced Washington from the region, and since February 24, 2022, the war in Ukraine has relegated the Lebanese file to second place. In the final analysis, the destiny of Lebanon belongs to no one except itself. Only by relying on its citizens, rather than on the political class, corrupt and subordinate to Iranian interests, will Lebanon ever be able to recover its independence. In the words of the Lebanese political scientist Anthony Samrani in the daily L'Orient le Jour: "No one can save a country that refuses to save itself."
Translated by Russell A. Berman
Isabelle Lasserre is the diplomatic correspondent of Le Figaro. She has also been a defense correspondent, correspondent in Moscow and war reporter. She has published several books, among them, “Our Secret War in Mali”.
