TEHRAN – On the eve of a year since the assassination of the Lebanese resistance leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah — a shock that reoriented Lebanon’s politics and public mood — a new campaign to “restore a state monopoly on weapons” has moved from the drawing board into government corridors.

That move is being portrayed in Washington and Tel Aviv as a dispassionate, technical solution: an effort to impose a so-called professional army, a facade of a modern state, and a supposed attempt to eradicate so-called militias.

In Beirut, however, it looks and feels like pressure — a sequence of conditionalities, ultimatums, and material incentives designed to force a strategic outcome: Hezbollah’s disarmament. The consequences of that outcome have been too little examined and too casually dismissed.

The mechanism is as familiar as it is coercive. External actors attach political and economic incentives — or threats — to an otherwise legitimate objective.

There has been an intensifying U.S. push for an explicit cabinet decision committing Lebanon to disarm as a precondition for resumed international support and negotiations. That push has involved envoys, public statements, and the steady linking of reconstruction assistance to security benchmarks. To many Lebanese observers, this reads less like partnership than leverage.

Beirut’s new government has begun to respond. Cabinet papers and recent army briefings show the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) tasked with drafting a plan to centralize arms under state control — a politically explosive brief that would, if implemented, supposedly place the LAF at the center of an operation that could pit it against large, embedded, and popular actors.

The government’s public steps have been accompanied by private exhortations from donor capitals: do this, and the money and diplomatic oxygen follow. That mix of carrot and stick is what transforms a policy choice into a coerced surrender.

Practical questions multiply fast. The Lebanese Army is chronically underfunded, institutionally fractured along sectarian lines, and operationally limited — a force sustained by international assistance that does not include the full spectrum of capabilities needed to deter or defeat a well-armed adversary.

Rebuilding an army to the point where it can credibly replace Hezbollah’s deterrence would require not only money but time, political coherence, and a shift in neighborhood realities.
In the meantime, the structural gap between rhetorical demands and field realities invites dangerous outcomes: coercive disarmament attempts, defections inside the army, and localized clashes that could escalate into national rupture. Many analysts have warned that the LAF lacks the capacity to assume immediately the roles external actors expect of it.

Concrete signs of how this plays out are already visible. Washington has approved “security assistance packages” explicitly aimed at building LAF capacity to “dismantle weapons caches and military infrastructure of non-state groups,” with a U.S. Pentagon package worth about $14.2 million as a recent example.

The optics—explosives, specialist equipment, targeted training—are framed as technical. In reality, they’re tools Washington uses to tighten its grip on Lebanon’s instruments of force, turning the issue of Lebanese sovereignty into a direct question of who answers to Washington’s agenda in Lebanon.

Public sentiment in Lebanon challenges the technocratic story further. A new poll published in August, carried out by Lebanon’s Consultative Center for Studies and Documentation, found that a majority of Lebanese oppose disarmament absent a credible national defensive strategy, and 71.7 percent of citizens distrust the army’s ability, on its own, to confront Israeli aggression.

That is not a sectarian reflex; it reflects lived memory of occupation, displacement, repeated cross-border strikes, and the martyrdom of loved ones in Israeli airstrikes and assassinations. Ignoring those attitudes and imposing disarmament without guarantees will not produce calm. It will lead to confrontation — political, civic, and potentially violent.

Two broad strategic logics underpin the critics’ warnings. The first is deterrence: Hezbollah’s armaments did not appear in a vacuum; they emerged as a response to a history of occupation and repeated Israeli operations.

For many in Lebanon, the paradox is obvious: disarming the one actor that has materially deterred further annexation is counterintuitive if the occupying or violating party remains in place.

The second logic is political: disarmament pursued as a foreign objective is not neutral; it is a reordering of power that will realign Lebanon’s institutions and patronage structures for decades. Neither logic requires an endorsement of violence to be analytically persuasive; both simply underscore the depth of the security dilemma facing Beirut.
External actors will object that a monopoly of force is a principle of the modern state. That may seem right in theory, but ends and means matter. If the state lacks the capacity to provide security, or if the command to disarm comes as the price of relief and reconstruction, the prescription becomes an instrument of pacification rather than a path to sovereignty.

When conditional aid, diplomatic pressure, and military kits are combined to produce a single political result, the façade of “state-building” slides, revealing a strategic design: weaken deterrence, make occupation cheaper, and normalize a new regional order.

Riyadh’s overtures to Beirut, including high-level visits, have been presented as reconstruction diplomacy; in practice, they are acts designed to nudge Lebanon away from the Axis of Resistance. That is realpolitik, but it is not benevolence; it is leverage with a different stamp.

The sober alternative — and the only one that preserves Lebanese agency — is a negotiated, Lebanese-led national defense strategy that anchors the question of weapons in a package of reciprocal security guarantees: verifiable Israeli withdrawal from occupied posts, a phased strengthening of the LAF with clear timelines, and transparent reconstruction assistance delinked from immediate disarmament. Anything short of these risks turns the aim of restoring state authority into the instrument of foreign strategic gain.
Lebanon’s future should not be written in Washington, Tel Aviv, or in the minutes of donor meetings. Even if we assume that respecting the state monopoly of force is a legitimate goal, achieving it through pressure, deadlines, and unilateral technical fixes is not.

If the international community truly wants a stable, sovereign Lebanon, it should underwrite an inclusive, Lebanese-owned pathway that reconciles the security concerns of citizens with the practical limits of the state — not demand surrender and then wonder at the backlash.