Lebanon spent two and a half years without a president. Not because no one wanted the job — because the political class couldn't agree on who should have it. In the meantime, the country ran. Ministers held meetings. Parliament convened. Militias collected taxes. Banks collapsed. Life continued, in the particular Lebanese way of continuing through things that would shatter most countries entirely.
This is not a story of failure. It is a story of a system working exactly as designed.
The Architecture of Dysfunction
To understand Lebanon, you have to start with 1943.
When France handed Lebanon its independence, it left behind a constitutional arrangement called confessionalism — a system that distributes political power according to religious sect. The president must be a Maronite Christian. The prime minister, a Sunni Muslim. The speaker of parliament, a Shia Muslim. Seats in parliament, cabinet positions, senior civil service posts — all allocated by sect, in ratios fixed by a census last conducted in 1932.
France did not invent this arrangement out of cruelty. Lebanon's population was genuinely diverse, and confessionalism was sold as a protection — a guarantee that no single community could dominate the others. Every sect would have its seat at the table.
What it actually created was a state that nobody owned.
When power is distributed by identity rather than by policy, political leaders have no incentive to build institutions that serve everyone. Their incentive is to serve their sect — to control the ministries, contracts, and patronage networks that keep their community loyal and their position secure. The state becomes not a shared project but a prize to be divided. And divided prizes don't get maintained.
The Warlords in Suits
Lebanon's civil war ran from 1975 to 1990. Fifteen years of shifting alliances, foreign invasions, massacres, and destruction. When it ended, the Taif Agreement formalized the post-war order — and handed power directly to the warlords who had fought it.
The men who led militias became the men who led parliament. Some of them, or their sons, still do.
This is not a metaphor. Walid Jumblatt inherited leadership of the Druze community from his father, who was assassinated. Nabih Berri has led the Amal movement since 1980 and has been speaker of parliament since 1992 — thirty years in the same chair. The Gemayel family, the Frangieh family, the Hariri dynasty built on Saudi money and reconstruction contracts. Lebanese politics is not a competition between ideas. It is a negotiation between dynasties.
Each dynasty controls a piece of the state. Amal and Hezbollah share the Shia ministries. The Hariris built their base through the finance and infrastructure portfolios. Jumblatt's leverage runs through the Druze mountain and whichever coalition needs his votes. Nobody controls enough to govern alone. Nobody is weak enough to be removed. The result is permanent paralysis dressed up as consensus.
The Palestinian Factor
Before the foreign powers of today, there was a different kind of outside presence — one that helped ignite the war in the first place.
After Jordan expelled the PLO in 1970 following Black September, tens of thousands of Palestinian fighters relocated to Lebanon. They brought with them weapons, military infrastructure, and a cause that Lebanese factions couldn't agree on how to handle. For the Lebanese left and the pan-Arab movements, the Palestinian resistance was a legitimate struggle to be supported. For the Maronite right, particularly the Phalange, an armed Palestinian state-within-a-state on Lebanese soil was an existential threat to Christian political dominance.
The tension ignited in April 1975 when Phalangist gunmen attacked a bus carrying Palestinian passengers in the Beirut suburb of Ain el-Remmaneh. The civil war had begun.
The Palestinian camps — Sabra, Shatila, Bourj el-Barajneh, Ein el-Hilweh — still exist today. Over 200,000 Palestinians live in Lebanon without citizenship, without the right to own property, barred from dozens of professions. They exist in a legal limbo that successive Lebanese governments have maintained deliberately: granting citizenship would alter the sectarian demographic balance and threaten the confessional system. The Palestinian question in Lebanon was never resolved. It was frozen.
Syria: The Neighbor That Never Left
Of all the foreign influences on Lebanon, none has been more intimate or more suffocating than Syria.
Damascus has never fully accepted Lebanese sovereignty. When French mandatory borders were drawn in 1920, Syria lost what it considered its western coast — the port cities, the fertile Bekaa valley, Beirut itself. That territorial grievance never disappeared from the Syrian political consciousness. Lebanon, in the Syrian view, was not a separate country so much as a wayward province.
Syria entered the civil war in 1976, initially intervening against the Palestinian-left alliance to prevent a decisive outcome that might trigger Israeli intervention. Over the following decades, Syrian intelligence became embedded in every corner of Lebanese political life — in security services, political parties, business networks, and media. Syrian troops remained on Lebanese soil for 29 years.
The clearest demonstration of Syrian reach came in February 2005, when former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated by a massive car bomb in central Beirut. Hariri had been pushing for Syrian troop withdrawal and had allied himself with the UN Security Council resolution demanding it. A UN tribunal later indicted members of Hezbollah for the killing — widely understood as having been carried out at Syrian direction.
His assassination triggered the Cedar Revolution — massive street protests that finally forced Syrian troops to withdraw in April 2005. But withdrawal of troops did not mean withdrawal of influence. Syrian intelligence networks remained. Pro-Syrian political figures remained. And when the Syrian civil war began in 2011, Lebanon became a spillover zone — with Hezbollah openly fighting on Assad's side, Sunni communities sympathizing with the Syrian opposition, and over a million Syrian refugees arriving to a country of four million that had no capacity to absorb them.
Syria didn't just influence Lebanon. For three decades, it effectively ran it.
Israel: The Invasion That Built Hezbollah
Israel's relationship with Lebanon is a story of interventions that each produced consequences worse than what they were designed to prevent.
Israel first invaded in 1978 in response to a PLO attack, occupying a strip of southern Lebanon and handing it to a proxy militia, the South Lebanon Army. It invaded again in 1982, this time all the way to Beirut, with the stated goal of destroying the PLO infrastructure. The PLO was expelled. But the 1982 invasion brought something else with it: the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, carried out by Lebanese Phalangist militias under Israeli command, killed somewhere between 800 and 3,500 Palestinian civilians. The images circled the world.
More consequentially, the 1982 invasion and the subsequent 18-year Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon created the precise conditions that produced Hezbollah. Iran sent Revolutionary Guard advisors to the Bekaa valley in 1982. From that seed grew the most militarily capable non-state armed group in the world — one that would eventually drive Israel out of Lebanon in 2000 and fight it to a bloody stalemate in the 2006 war.
Israel's 2006 war with Hezbollah lasted 34 days, killed over 1,200 Lebanese — the majority civilians — and caused an estimated $3.5 billion in infrastructure damage. Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets into northern Israel throughout. Neither side achieved its objectives. UN Resolution 1701 called for Hezbollah's disarmament south of the Litani River. Like most UN resolutions concerning Lebanon, it was implemented partially, briefly, and then quietly ignored.
Israel's interventions, designed to create security on its northern border, produced the single greatest security threat on its northern border. Hezbollah exists, in significant part, because of Israeli military decisions made in 1982.
Iran and Saudi Arabia: The Proxy War on Lebanese Soil
If Syria was Lebanon's overbearing neighbor, Iran and Saudi Arabia have been the ideological and financial engines of its sectarian divide.
Iran's investment in Lebanon began immediately after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The Khomeinist project was explicitly transnational — the revolution was meant to export itself, to build a network of Shia political movements across the region that would project Iranian power and challenge American and Israeli influence. Lebanon, with its large and historically marginalized Shia population, was the perfect entry point.
Hezbollah was not a spontaneous Lebanese creation. It was built with Iranian money, Iranian weapons, and Iranian ideological direction. Its founding manifesto in 1985 explicitly pledged allegiance to Khomeini's concept of velayat-e faqih — rule of the Islamic jurist. For Iran, Hezbollah is the crown jewel of its "Axis of Resistance": a military force positioned on Israel's northern border, a political movement embedded in the Lebanese state, and a symbol of Iranian reach into the Arab world.
Saudi Arabia's response was to back the Sunni establishment. The Hariri family — Rafik and later his son Saad — were the vehicle. Saudi money flowed into Lebanese politics through the Hariri network, funding reconstruction after the civil war, building patronage structures across the Sunni community, and positioning Lebanon's Sunnis as a bulwark against Iranian expansion.
The most absurd expression of this dynamic came in November 2017, when Saad Hariri traveled to Riyadh and, in a televised address that appeared visibly coerced, announced his resignation as prime minister — citing Iranian interference in Lebanon and fear for his life. He had apparently been summoned, detained, and pressured by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as part of a broader Saudi move against Iranian influence. Lebanese President Michel Aoun refused to accept the resignation. After weeks of diplomatic pressure, Hariri returned to Beirut, suspended his resignation, and continued in office. The episode illustrated, with unusual clarity, how Lebanese prime ministers answer to Riyadh as much as to Beirut.
Every major Lebanese political crisis since the 1980s has had an Iranian-Saudi dimension. The two powers do not fight each other directly. They fight each other through Lebanese proxies, on Lebanese territory, at Lebanese expense.
The Heist
For decades, Lebanon ran a financial system built on a simple premise: pay high interest rates to attract dollar deposits from the Lebanese diaspora, use those deposits to finance government debt, and maintain a fixed exchange rate that made everyone feel stable.
It was not a banking system. It was a Ponzi scheme with a central bank.
The Banque du Liban, under governor Riad Salameh, conducted what became known as "financial engineering" — essentially borrowing from commercial banks at high rates to pay off older obligations, creating the appearance of reserves that didn't exist. The political class knew. They were the ones drawing salaries, contracts, and subsidies from the system. Between 1993 and 2019, Lebanon's public debt grew from $3 billion to over $90 billion. The money went somewhere. It went into the pockets of the same families that have run the country since the war.
When the system collapsed in 2019, ordinary Lebanese lost their savings overnight. Depositors found their accounts frozen. The currency lost over 90% of its value. More than 80% of the population fell below the poverty line. The political class that engineered the collapse faced no legal consequences. Most of them are still in office.
The Beirut port explosion in August 2020 — 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate stored unsafely for six years because no ministry would take responsibility for moving it — killed over 200 people and destroyed a third of the city. Investigations were blocked. Judges who attempted to indict senior officials were removed from the case. Nobody has been held accountable.
This is not dysfunction. This is the system protecting itself.
Why It Stays Broken
The Lebanese state is weak by design and kept weak by interest — both domestic and foreign.
A strong state would mean rule of law. Rule of law would mean accountability. Accountability would mean that the men who looted the banking system, blocked port investigations, and ran sectarian militias would face consequences. It would also mean a Lebanon capable of making independent foreign policy decisions — which neither Iran, nor Saudi Arabia, nor Syria, nor Israel has ever wanted.
Confessionalism gives every sect leader veto power over reform. Any attempt to restructure the system threatens someone's share. The international community periodically attaches reform conditions to aid packages. The political class agrees, collects the first tranche, and implements nothing. This has happened so many times it has its own rhythm.
Hezbollah complicates everything further. As both a political party and an armed force with capabilities exceeding the Lebanese army, it operates as a state within the state — with its own social services, its own foreign policy, and its own military logic tied to the Iranian regional project. No Lebanese government can make a decision that Hezbollah opposes. No Lebanese government can disarm it. The question of Hezbollah's weapons has been "under dialogue" for twenty years.
And yet Lebanon persists. The restaurants fill up. The diaspora sends remittances. The generators run when the state electricity cuts out — which is most of the time. People build private solutions to public failures: private schools, private hospitals, private security, private power. The Lebanese have become experts at living around a state that does not function, because the state was never really built for them in the first place.
The Bottom Line
Lebanon is not simply a country that has been badly governed. It is a country that has been systematically used — by its own political class, and by every regional power with an interest in keeping it pliable.
The confessional system ensures no one can govern effectively. The warlord dynasties ensure no one is held accountable. Syria shaped it for three decades from the outside. Iran built a military force inside it that now exceeds the state itself. Saudi Arabia funded the opposition to that force and lost. Israel invaded it twice and created the very threat it was trying to eliminate. France cultivated its old clientele and called it friendship. The United States wrote reports and issued statements.
The question of whether Lebanon can ever have a real state is ultimately a question of whether any of these incentive structures — domestic and foreign — can be broken simultaneously. So far, nothing has been enough: not civil war, not economic collapse, not a port explosion that leveled a capital city, not decades of foreign intervention that left every intervening party worse off than when they started.
That tells you something about how deep the design goes.