TESTIMONY: In Lebanon, the LAF plan runs up against Iranian interests — the story of an impossible balance

The LAF plan and the American promise of June 24

On June 24, 2026, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly announced a plan for reinforced support to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) — a plan designed to deploy vetted LAF units in pilot zones around Beaufort Castle and the Nabatiyeh district in southern Lebanon. This plan fits within a broader diplomatic architecture: stabilizing post-conflict Lebanon, reducing Hezbollah's influence in border areas with Israel, and creating a precedent for deploying legitimate Lebanese state forces into territories long controlled by militias.

On paper, this plan has undeniable logic. The Lebanese army, long underfunded and marginalized, is one of the few Lebanese state institutions that enjoys a degree of cross-confessional legitimacy. Its deployment in the south could theoretically offer an alternative to Hezbollah's armed presence — an alternative that local populations, exhausted by decades of conflict, might welcome. But between the plan's logic and its ground reality stands the Iranian question.

What the ISW documented on June 24 about Iran and Lebanon

The special report from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) dated June 24, 2026 sheds crucial light on the real dynamics underlying the Lebanese file. Iran is using a deconfliction cell involving Qatar, the United States, Iran, Lebanon, and Pakistan to constrain any Israeli action in the southern Lebanon security zone. This cell is not a peace forum: it is an instrument of tension management that allows Iran to maintain its influence and reduce the risk of direct confrontation while preserving its regional interests.

Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Bagheri Ghalibaf was in Muscat (Oman) on June 23, discussing a Strait of Hormuz clause — Article 5 of the memorandum of understanding — suggesting that Iran links the Lebanese file to its nuclear concerns and freedom of navigation in the Gulf. Lebanon is not an isolated regional question: it is a piece in a much broader Iranian strategic puzzle.

What I see in this sequence is Iran playing several chessboards simultaneously with the same strategic coherence. Lebanon, the nuclear file, Hormuz — everything is linked in the Iranian vision. The West, by contrast, handles each file separately. That is a structural weakness in the negotiation.

The geography of control — Beaufort as symbol

The choice of Beaufort Castle and the Nabatiyeh district as pilot zones for the LAF deployment is not random. Beaufort Castle, a medieval fortress overlooking the Litani valley, carries immense symbolic and tactical value in the history of the Israeli-Lebanese conflict. Controlled at different times by the PLO, by Israel (1982-2000), and then by Hezbollah, it represents the fundamental question of territorial control in southern Lebanon.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) had transferred the Dibbine sector — near Beaufort — to Lebanese forces on June 4, 2026, in a move that signaled a gradual LAF deployment. This transfer is significant: it represents the first time in years that the IDF has withdrawn from a zone in southern Lebanon in favor of legitimate Lebanese forces rather than Hezbollah fighters. It is a precedent — fragile, conditional, but real.

Nabatiyeh and the confessional complexity

The Nabatiyeh district is predominantly Shia — meaning Hezbollah enjoys a significant popular support base there. Deploying the LAF in this district is not only a logistical and security challenge — it is a profound political challenge. The LAF soldiers themselves come from all Lebanese confessions, including Shia. But their loyalty to a state institution rather than to a confessionally armed and socially rooted militia like Hezbollah is an open question.

The American vetting plan — selecting LAF units whose soldiers have been pre-screened for affiliations — tries to address this concern. But this approach has its own limits: family and community networks in southern Lebanon's Shia community are dense. Vetted soldiers may have brothers, cousins, or in-laws in Hezbollah's ranks. Vetting does not guarantee impermeability to social pressure.

I do not underestimate the difficulty of what the American administration is trying to do in Lebanon. Building a state in a country that has been systematically prevented from being one is a generational project. But every step counts — even one as precarious as the Beaufort pilot zone.

Why Iran opposes the strengthening of the LAF

The strengthening of the Lebanese Armed Forces is, from Iran's perspective, a direct threat to its regional influence architecture. Since the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990, Iran has systematically preferred a weak, underfunded, and paralyzed Lebanese army — precisely so that Hezbollah remains the dominant security actor in the south. An Iran-armed Hezbollah can project power toward Israel and serve as a pressure lever in all regional negotiations.

If the LAF were to genuinely become the main security actor in southern Lebanon — with the weapons, training, funding, and legitimacy needed — Hezbollah would lose its military raison d'être. That is not a prospect Tehran accepts easily. The Rubio-LAF plan is therefore seen in Tehran not as a humanitarian stabilization gesture, but as a direct strategic attack on a central Iranian geopolitical lever.

The deconfliction cell as an instrument of Iranian control

The deconfliction cell described by ISW — involving Qatar, the United States, Iran, Lebanon, and Pakistan — is superficially a de-escalation forum. In practice, it is an instrument that Iran uses to monitor and constrain Israeli actions in the security zone, while maintaining an indirect presence in diplomatic conversations about Lebanon's future.

Pakistan's presence in this cell is intriguing and revealing: it suggests Iran is seeking to diversify its diplomatic support coalition by including a heavyweight non-Arab Islamic actor. Qatar, for its part, plays its usual role of financially capable and geopolitically ambiguous mediator — a position it also occupies in Iranian nuclear negotiations and in discussions on Gaza. Middle Eastern geopolitics often features the same handful of actors playing at every table simultaneously.

This deconfliction cell is presented as a diplomatic advance. But if Iran uses it to monitor Israeli actions and manage its own interests in Lebanon, is that truly diplomacy — or institutionalized intelligence-gathering under the guise of crisis management? The line is blurry.

Israel between the theory of withdrawal and the practice of occupation

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) will maintain their presence in the security zone in southern Lebanon, regardless of LAF deployments. This position is consistent with Israeli security logic: the October 7, 2023 attacks showed the consequences of withdrawing behind an insufficiently secured border. Israel is not prepared to trust any force — LAF included — to guarantee that Hezbollah will not reconstitute its positions in the south.

This position creates a fundamental contradiction in the American plan. If the IDF remains in the security zone at the same time as the LAF deploys there, what is the LAF's real authority? And how do local populations perceive a national army operating under the watch of a foreign army? The credibility of the LAF deployment depends partly on its ability to represent the sovereignty of the Lebanese state — a sovereignty that cannot fully exist if the IDF remains present.

Resolution 1701 and its structural limits

UN Security Council Resolution 1701, adopted in 2006 after the Lebanon war, already envisioned deploying the UNIFIL and the LAF in southern Lebanon to create a buffer zone. This resolution was never fully implemented — Hezbollah never disarmed, and the LAF never had the means to deploy a serious presence in militia-controlled areas. Twenty years later, Resolution 1701 is still invoked as a legal framework, but its operational track record is a documented failure.

The Rubio-LAF plan is an attempt to reactivate the spirit of Resolution 1701 in a post-conflict context where Hezbollah has been weakened — but not destroyed — by Israeli military operations in 2024-2026. It is a window of opportunity, but a narrow one, conditioned by variables that neither Washington nor Beirut fully controls. The main such variable is called Iran.

Resolution 1701 failed because nobody had the will to truly implement it. If the 2026 LAF plan fails for the same reasons — lack of resources, lack of political will, Iranian resistance — it will be a squandered historic opportunity. And the next ones will be rarer.

The Lebanese army, a poor institution in a poor state

One of the fundamental problems with the LAF deployment in the south is financial. The Lebanese army is a chronically underfunded institution within a state that has suffered a catastrophic economic crisis since 2019 — the collapse of the Lebanese pound, the de facto bankruptcy of the banking system, the Beirut port explosion in 2020. LAF soldiers have seen their real wages collapse. Equipment maintenance is precarious. Institutional morale is fragile.

In this context, American promises of reinforced funding are crucial — but they must be concretized quickly and transparently to have a real impact. Delivery delays, political conditions attached to funds, or slow bureaucracies can hollow out the plan before it has a chance to produce results. That is one lesson of previous LAF strengthening attempts: the promise without the delivery breeds distrust, not stabilization.

Gulf partners and their potential role

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have historically funded arms programs for the LAF — before freezing these programs due to Hezbollah's growing influence within the Lebanese government. In the 2026 context, where Hezbollah is weakened and the Lebanese government has a rare opportunity to regain levers of sovereignty, a resumption of Gulf aid is conceivable.

The Gulf monarchies have their own reasons to want a stabilized Lebanon: reducing Iranian influence in the Levant, setting a precedent for rebuilding failed Arab states, and — in the Saudi case — offering Lebanon's Sunni community a political alternative to marginalization. But this potential funding remains conditional on guarantees that the LAF will not be infiltrated by Hezbollah — guarantees that no one can give with certainty right now.

The Gulf could fund the LAF and change the equation. But Gulf monarchies do not give their money for nothing — they expect guarantees and a geopolitical return. That is realpolitik. And realpolitik, in this file, may be the only language that truly works.

Civilians exhausted by three decades of conflict

Behind the geopolitical calculations about the LAF plan, there are hundreds of thousands of Lebanese in the south who have lived through the wars of 2006, 2024, and the 2025-2026 cycles of conflict. These populations — predominantly Shia — supported Hezbollah not necessarily out of ideological conviction, but because the militia offered what the Lebanese state could not provide: physical protection, social services, a collective identity against the Israeli enemy.

If the LAF truly wants to replace Hezbollah in its social and security function, it must offer these populations something tangible and lasting. Military presence alone is not enough. Functioning hospitals, schools, roads, a responsive administration — that is what southern Lebanon needs to permanently shift toward the state rather than the militia. The Rubio plan must be accompanied by a civilian reconstruction plan, not merely a military one.

Distrust of the Lebanese state — a hard reality to overcome

The Lebanese state is perceived by part of the southern population as a distant, corrupt, and ineffective entity. The Lebanese political class — the one that presided over the 2019 economic collapse, that failed to protect inhabitants during the 2020 port explosion, that was slow to respond to successive crises — does not enjoy high levels of trust in the south. Asking Nabatiyeh's residents to trust the LAF as a representative of that state is asking for a bet on a government institution that the population has sound historical reasons not to trust.

This reality is often underestimated in geopolitical analyses that see the Lebanon problem as a matter of armed forces and regional balances. Lasting stabilization of Lebanon requires rebuilding popular trust in state institutions — a project far longer and more complex than deploying a few vetted battalions in a pilot zone. That is a generational undertaking, not a diplomatic plan signed in Washington.

I think of those families in southern Lebanon caught between the interests of Tehran, Tel Aviv, and Washington. They do not want to be pawns on the regional chessboard — they want to live in peace in their country. That fundamental desire deserves to be at the center of any solution, not in the margins of diplomatic communiqués.

How Iran links Lebanon to its nuclear interests

The presence of Mohammad Bagheri Ghalibaf in Muscat on June 23, 2026 — discussing a Strait of Hormuz clause within the memorandum of understanding — reveals Iran's strategic coherence: Tehran explicitly links the Lebanon file, the nuclear negotiations, and control of maritime routes in an integrated negotiating architecture. For Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon is not a humanitarian or regional question — it is a bargaining chip in much broader discussions.

This integrated approach is both the strength and the weakness of the Iranian strategy. Its strength: it gives Tehran multiple cards to play simultaneously, allowing concessions on one file in exchange for gestures on another. Its weakness: it ties together files that block each other mutually. If nuclear negotiations collapse, Lebanon concessions collapse with them. If the situation in Lebanon deteriorates, the nuclear file suffers. Everything is conditional, everything is fragile.

Hormuz as leverage and threat

The Strait of Hormuz is the main maritime passage for Gulf oil to the rest of the world — approximately 20% of global oil consumption transits through it. Iran has repeatedly threatened to close it in the event of military escalation. That the memorandum's Article 5 explicitly addresses Hormuz suggests Iran has succeeded in having its right to use the closure threat as a diplomatic lever — at least implicitly — recognized.

This recognition is problematic for the West. It validates an Iranian doctrine of economic intimidation that, if rewarded, will encourage Tehran to resort to it again. For Gulf states that export their oil via Hormuz, this clause is a source of deep concern. And for Ukraine, whose reconstruction depends on stable oil prices sustaining Western donor economies, a Hormuz closure would be a direct economic catastrophe.

Iran negotiating Hormuz alongside Lebanon and the nuclear file — that is a geopolitical actor of formidable sophistication. I respect the strategy without endorsing it. And I deplore that the West is so often reacting rather than anticipating in the face of that coherence.

Possible successes in the pilot zones

Under current conditions, the Rubio-LAF plan can succeed at certain limited but important things. In the pilot zones of Beaufort and Nabatiyeh, a successful LAF deployment could establish a precedent for legitimate Lebanese state presence in areas long dominated by Hezbollah. This precedent, however geographically narrow, would carry symbolic and practical value for the future.

A successful deployment could also institutionally strengthen the Lebanese army itself: by giving it a clear mission, sufficient resources, and field successes to build upon, it is possible to rebuild the morale and cohesion of an institution that needed both. This is a long-term investment in Lebanese sovereignty — the strategic objective that the United States, France, and the Gulf states theoretically share.

What the plan cannot resolve alone

The LAF plan cannot, on its own, solve Lebanon's fundamental problems. It cannot rebuild a collapsed economy. It cannot eliminate systemic corruption within state institutions. It cannot persuade southern Shia populations to replace their loyalty to Hezbollah with trust in institutions that have historically let them down. And it cannot force Iran to give up its geopolitical interests in Lebanon.

This plan is useful, necessary, and probably insufficient. That is the lot of many policies in the Middle East: insufficient given the complexity, but the best available option among those that exist. The West must accompany it with patience and resources — knowing that visible results will take years, not months. And it must be prepared for Iran to try to sabotage it at every step. That is the reality of Lebanon in 2026.

I support this plan — imperfect, precarious, conditional. Because the alternative — letting Hezbollah reconstitute its presence in the south with no state counterpart — is worse. Sometimes foreign policy means choosing between the difficult and the catastrophic. This plan is difficult. Inaction would be catastrophic.

The window of opportunity exists — it is narrow

Lebanon in June 2026 offers a rare window of opportunity: a weakened Hezbollah, a Lebanese army ready to engage, expressed American support, and favorable international pressure. This window exists — but it is narrow, conditional, and subject to variables that no one fully controls. Iran can close it by a strategic decision. Israel can complicate it by maintaining a military presence that deprives the LAF of its sovereign credibility. And Lebanon itself can squander it through its own institutional incapacity.

What the West can do is maximize the chances of this window succeeding: fund the LAF generously and quickly, maintain diplomatic pressure on Iran not to actively sabotage the deployment, and demand practical cooperation from Israel on zone transfers. That is an ambitious program for actors often dominated by short-term calculus. But the alternative — a Lebanon returning to the state of Iranian proxy in ten years — is a major strategic failure for everyone, including Iran, which will pay the bill for its own growing isolation.

The lesson for the entire Middle East

The Lebanese file illustrates a reality that geopolitical analyses too often condense into sharp categories: Iranian interests in Lebanon are not monolithic, Hezbollah is not eternal, and the Lebanese state is not condemned to remain an empty shell. There are room for maneuver — narrow, contingent, fragile — for rebuilding Lebanese sovereignty. These spaces deserve to be seized with intelligence, not merely with declarations of support without resources.

The West must understand that stabilizing Lebanon also means structurally weakening Iranian influence in the Middle East — a major strategic objective that justifies the effort and the risks. Zelensky defends Ukraine. Lebanese forces can defend Lebanon's sovereignty. These are two faces of the same resistance to revisionist powers that do not accept the borders of sovereign states. The West must support both.

I end with this thought: every time the Lebanese state reclaims a square meter of sovereignty over its territory, that is a square meter wrested from Iranian influence. It is small, precarious, insufficient. But it is real. And the real, in this file, is worth more than all the grand statements of support the West produces in industrial quantities.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. I claim analytical clarity, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

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