In August of last year, the Beirut Port explosion evinced the tragedy of Lebanon’s demise — yet another misfortune in a country already felled by rampant corruption, institutional paralysis, and gross financial malfeasance.
For a month or so after the explosion, the beleaguered nation captured global consciousness as the social media community rallied to raise emergency funds for a state already teetering on the economic verge. Reinvigorated by the destructive blast and their newfound audience, domestic protesters raised their unyielding voices, determined not to let the abhorrent crimes of the political class pass yet again unpunished.
Despite these initial overtures towards change, however, Lebanon now confronts an especially perilous set of challenges: First, a dilapidated economy and a financial system which has dismantled any semblance of international credibility; second, the potential disbandment of the state’s formal security apparatus, as crime runs rampant; and third, ostensibly irresolvable political deadlock, causing 50% of the population to be foisted into poverty, with the black market value of the Lira tumbling below 15% the U.S.-pegged rate. Amidst those statistics, the recent passage of a scant World Bank emergency aid package through parliament will do little to attenuate the mass immiseration of the Lebanese people. Equally, the Lebanese army — traditionally backed by the United States and France as a countervailing force to Hezbollah’s paramilitary consolidation — now labors under the threat of increasing desertions, with soldiers poised to defect from their ranks to join the chorus of protest and seek subsistence wages.
So where did it unravel?
For a time, there were hints of potential progress. Prime Minister Hasan Diab’s parliamentary cabinet — formed just six months before the blast — resigned within a week, unable to temper the furor of the masses and unwilling to be scapegoated for the political negligence they claimed preceded them. Haranguing his political adversaries, President Michel Aoun vowed a thorough and transparent investigation of the blast. Macron, reanimating the strained and dwindling relationship between France and Lebanon, pledged his earnest support and coordinated with international governments and institutions to chart a path for Lebanon’s recovery. Judge Fadi Sawan, tasked with litigating blame for the explosion, even took the unprecedented step of levying criminal charges against Diab and three former ministers (including the prominent former minister of finance, Ali Hassan Khalil).
All of this to say, things were happening — and the impartial observer, tentative as they might be to suspect reform from a country so intransigently beset by political conspiracy and stasis, might have been forgiven for wondering whether the Lebanese ruling class might finally fall on the sword of their heinously self-serving criminality.
Alas, we find ourselves half a year later, and the characteristically fugacious focus of the West has, once again, fled Lebanon. In its wake, everything auspicious about the initial response to the port explosion has been straitjacketed by insidious political power-brokering and institutional frailty.
After having been pressured just a year earlier to step down after the unabating 2019 protests, Said Hariri — a stalwart of the sectarian cabal — has weaseled his way back into the political fray, and was subsequently reinstated as the prime minister of Lebanon in October 2020. Seven months after Diab’s incipient cabinet resigned, both Hariri and Aoun remain at an intractable impasse in the formation of another cabinet, despite the pleas of citizens and clergy alike for a competent political body (though a cabinet approval is supposedly imminent). In the absence of an even vaguely functional government, the proposed Macron-IMF economic bailout is unrealizable — not to mention the further finance-sector reforms and election plans upon which the bailout is contingent. And as if to affirm the imperviousness of powerful politicians to the remit of justice, just three weeks ago the Lebanese Court of Cessation ruled to remove Sawan from his post as lead investigator of the port blast, upon the petition of the very same ministers he charged with malfeasance.
The Upshot
Instead of proving a watershed moment in Lebanese citizens’ implacable efforts to upheave their ineffectual and unscrupulous government, the response to the Beirut blast only instantiated the urgency of their movement. Irrespective of their righteous ardor, protesters are inevitably constrained by the sparse set of tenable, immediate reforms to the status quo. Lebanon’s (sometimes intentionally) weak institutions have allowed venal politicians to evade formal punishment, which has in turn further weakened institution-building norms, as politicians have no incentive to coordinate against a system from which they explicitly profit. Likewise, international support to Lebanon has been conditioned on a series of financial and political reforms, which themselves only seem feasible once Lebanon has received international support.
Furthermore, the cynicism with which the Lebanese people have come to view the value of their vote feeds the patronage politics which are the very source of their disillusionment. In this way, Lebanon is the victim of the circularity of its grievances, trapped in a degenerate loop of agency and coordination problems.
The West cannot afford to be a reactive force in this loop. The recent meeting between Mohammad Raad — the head of Hezbollah’s Loyalty to the Resistance bloc — and Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, signals Russia’s intention to extend their sphere of influence in the Middle East from Syria to Lebanon, extirpating Western leverage in the Levant in the process. The collapse of the army would render Hezbollah the most capable military force in Lebanon, threatening to amplify tensions on an already-strained Southern border with Israel.
The exigency of this situation means Western emergency and financial aid cannot be contingent on milestones like the reformation of a parliamentary cabinet, the disarmament of Hezbollah, or the restructuring of the financial system. Rather, the crisis demands that the West seek new channels of disbursing aid; relying less on a government in which all trust has been lost, and more on a coordinated network of Civil Society Organizations and NGOs with a track record of local, on-the-ground work. Social stability is a necessary precedent to any tenable structural reform in Lebanon; as the trimming of essential-good subsidies by incumbent finance minister Ghazi Wazni tightens the inexorable grip of poverty in the state, citizens’ time horizons are unlikely to be long enough to patiently await such reform.
For now, Lebanon sits a nudge away from the catastrophic civil war which lasted from 1975 to 1990. The agenda of countries like the United States and France ought to be no more ambitious than to prevent it.
Image Credit: “Beirut Explosion” by TR Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
