It’s an all-too-familiar scene: U.S. President Donald Trump addressing the media from the Oval Office as cabinet members and foreign dignitaries take turns lavishing praise on him. Recently, this scene transpired with Trump flanked by the Lebanese and Israeli ambassadors, alongside Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. They had just concluded a second round of U.S.-sponsored Israeli-Lebanese talks, and Trump had announced a three-week extension of the countries’ cease-fire.
When Trump called on the Lebanese ambassador to speak, she made sure to thank him effusively. “I want to really say thank you to the United States under your leadership, for all your effort to help and to support Lebanon,” said Ambassador Nada Hamadeh Moawad. “And I think with your help, with your support, we can make Lebanon great again.”
“Thank you, I like that phrase,” Trump said. “It’s a good phrase.”
“MLGA,” Hamadeh added.
Hamadeh was flattering Trump a day after Israel had killed and wounded dozens in Lebanon, despite a U.S.-declared cease-fire. The dead included a prominent Lebanese journalist, whom the Israeli military had repeatedly bombed and then prevented first responders from reaching.
The Oval Office event, on April 23, was viewed as deeply embarrassing by many in Lebanon. It was also consistent with how the Trump administration has managed Israel-Lebanon talks, which have abased Lebanon’s leaders without even providing a real cease-fire in exchange.
Several recent Foreign Policy pieces have imagined more responsible, or “serious” ways that the United States could work toward its stated aims of brokering peace between Lebanon and Israel while dismantling Hezbollah. Yet these recommendations implicitly assume that the United States is a good-faith mediator here. It is not behaving like one. Instead, by forcing Lebanon’s leaders to negotiate on Israel’s terms, it is already discrediting them—and pushing the country toward a political crisis.
On April 16, the Trump administration announced a 10-day cessation of hostilities between Lebanon and Israel, after convening the first direct talks between the two countries in decades. Following Trump’s three-week extension, the cease-fire now runs to mid-May. The United States is presently convening a third round of talks, on May 14 and 15.
The initial cease-fire came after 46 days of open war. On March 2, Hezbollah fired on Israel in response to its killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and its violations of a previous cease-fire. Israel retaliated massively, with strikes that have since killed more than 2,800 people and injured thousands more. Roughly a fifth of Lebanon’s population has been displaced. Hezbollah’s attacks have killed more than 20 Israelis, mostly soldiers.
Since the April 16 cease-fire, Israel has mostly stopped attacking Lebanon’s central and northern regions while Hezbollah has halted attacks on the Israeli interior. But in southern Lebanon, the conflict continues. Since the beginning of the cease-fire, Israeli bombing has killed hundreds more people.
Israel continues to occupy a section of south Lebanon delineated by a “forward defensive line” or “yellow line.” Within that zone, the Israeli military has demolished dozens of villages, and Israeli officials have said they will prevent residents from returning. Israel has specifically targeted Shiite Muslim communities, which constitute Hezbollah’s popular base. Israel has ordered further evacuations of towns north of its “yellow line” and continued to strike both above and below the line. Hezbollah, for its part, has targeted Israeli forces in south Lebanon and northern Israel, in attacks that it says are in retaliation for Israel’s violations.
Today’s so-called cease-fire is really just the latest phase of a war that has been ongoing in some form since Oct. 8, 2023, when Hezbollah struck Israeli forces in solidarity with Gaza. Israel dramatically escalated in September 2024 and effectively decapitated Hezbollah. A November 2024 cease-fire agreement was, on paper, equitable, but Israel capitalized on tacit U.S. support and Hezbollah’s perceived weakness to carry out near-daily airstrikes on purported Hezbollah members and continue occupying positions in south Lebanon.
Hezbollah did not retaliate for the ensuing 15 months, saying it was providing space for the Lebanese government’s diplomatic efforts to secure Israeli compliance. Crucially, the November 2024 agreement had stipulated Hezbollah’s disarmament, and both Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam had committed to establishing a state monopoly on arms. They evidently hoped that by convincing the United States and other international partners that they were serious about disarming Hezbollah, those countries would, in turn, prevail on Israel to offer reciprocal concessions.
To that end, Salam directed the army to move forward with a disarmament plan in September 2025. In January, the army said it had established “operational control” in southern Lebanon. After Hezbollah attacked Israel in March, Salam’s government officially banned the party’s military and security activities. Lebanon’s foreign minister tried to expel the Iranian ambassador. Aoun repeatedly appealed for direct talks with Israel.
None of these moves by Lebanese leaders were especially credible; most were stymied by Lebanon’s internal politics, and by fears of civil strife. But Israel refused to give Lebanon’s leaders anything in return.
It was Iran that managed to partially restrain Israel, when it demanded that any cease-fire with the United States and Israel also cover Lebanon. Lebanon’s government objected—after all, it had been trying to reassert the Lebanese state’s sovereign authority after Hezbollah, again, entered a war unilaterally. When the United States and Iran reached a cease-fire on April 7, Lebanon’s government welcomed it but insisted that “no party has the right to negotiate in [Lebanon’s] name except the Lebanese state.”
Then Israel unleashed a wave of airstrikes across Lebanon, killing hundreds. When Iran cried foul, Trump asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to scale back strikes on Lebanon and enter direct talks. Netanyahu finally said on April 9 that he would open negotiations.
All parties to these Israel-Lebanon talks have claimed that they are separate from U.S.-Iran negotiations. Yet Trump, at least, has mainly seemed interested in de-escalation in Lebanon to avoid derailing the Iran negotiations. With this in mind, the Trump administration announced its cease-fire shortly after it hosted the first round of talks in Washington. But the language seemed tailored to allow exactly the kind of bloodshed that has ensued.
The cease-fire terms published by the State Department on April 16—purportedly with Lebanese government approval—are distinctly lopsided. The truce is described as “a gesture of goodwill” by Israel, and its extension is contingent on an outcome wherein Lebanon “effectively demonstrates its ability to assert its sovereignty.” The text references only Israel’s right of self-defense and says Israel “shall preserve its right to take all necessary measures in self-defense, at any time, against planned, imminent, or ongoing attacks”—essentially an unlimited license for Israeli action. There is no mention of Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon.
Although President Trump said initially that Israel was “PROHIBITED” from bombing Lebanon, he has since clarified that he supports more limited Israeli strikes. Israeli media has said the United States has pressured Israel not to attack outside of south Lebanon.
The April 16 agreement, which stated that Israel and Lebanon “are not at war,” seeks to align the two against the shared problem of Hezbollah. Rubio has since elaborated on the Trump administration’s vision for Israel-Lebanon peace, in which the United States will cultivate units inside the Lebanese army that will target Hezbollah.
Yet Israeli leaders seem less interested in building up the Lebanese state—which they evidently do not consider a serious partner against Hezbollah—than in securing the Lebanese government’s imprimatur for continued Israeli action. Netanyahu has said that Israel is now operating in Lebanon in agreement with not only the United States, but also Lebanon’s government.
All this means that Washington is pushing negotiations that will only humiliate and weaken Lebanon’s leaders. For the Lebanese public, the terms of the negotiations themselves are demeaning. Aoun, the figure most associated with the negotiations push, has come under attack for persisting absent a real cease-fire. Netanyahu’s claim that Lebanese authorities acquiesced to Israeli freedom of action only fanned controversy in Lebanon.
Hezbollah and others have called on Lebanese authorities to state clearly whether they really endorsed the April 16 agreement. Officials have offered conflicting accounts, claiming, variously, that the agreement was just a State Department release that they “affirmed,” or that it was more a summary of the parties’ positions.
Lebanon’s leaders face a predicament. If they repudiate the Trump administration’s framing of these talks, they risk alienating Washington. Yet their negotiating strategy is premised on currying favor with Trump, with little real leverage of their own—as seen in Hamadeh’s “MLGA” obsequiousness. Aoun has made clear that he hopes to translate Trump’s personal involvement into some favorable dispensation for Lebanon.
Hezbollah and fellow Shiite party the Amal Movement have rejected direct negotiations, thus denying Lebanese authorities the cross-sectarian consensus usually considered necessary for major political decisions in Lebanon. The two parties, which effectively monopolize Lebanese Shiite political representation, have called for indirect talks instead.
The Lebanese government’s pursuit of negotiations has led to public anger and protest and raised fears of civil conflict. Notably, when the United States last brokered a peace agreement between Israel and a weak Lebanese government—midway through Lebanon’s 15-year civil war—opposing Lebanese factions rebelled, and the Lebanese army broke apart. Hezbollah officials and others have pointedly recalled this 1983 agreement and its aftershocks.
Now the Trump administration has demanded a meeting of Aoun and Netanyahu, presided over by Trump. Aoun has resisted, and even Lebanese politicians who back direct negotiations do not support meeting Netanyahu. Yet U.S. officials have continued to pressure Lebanese leaders, apparently seeking another flashy “peace” deal that Trump can claim.
The perverse truth is that, for all the United States’ arm-twisting of Lebanon, it is U.S.-Iran talks that will likely be dispositive for any cease-fire. If the United States and Iran actually reach an agreement, that will likely supersede whatever terms the United States and Israel tried to dictate to Lebanon. This, in turn, will have the embarrassing effect of showing that Tehran is more effective at defending Lebanon than the government in Beirut.
Absent a real cease-fire, Lebanon is likely headed toward renewed military escalation. Hezbollah has insisted that it will not return to a prewar status quo in which Israel occupies Lebanese territory and launches attacks with impunity. Already, Hezbollah continues attacking in order to prevent Israel from establishing a stable presence in south Lebanon. Unless Israel has the truly impeccable intelligence necessary to strike and disrupt Hezbollah’s rear logistics, Hezbollah will just persist with its attacks and expand them further. And Israel will likely intensify its strikes in response, resuming its bombing of the Beirut area and a wide swath of the country’s center and north.
Every day that negotiations continue without a meaningful cease-fire diminishes Lebanon’s leaders and erodes Lebanese sovereignty. If Lebanese authorities, under U.S. pressure, try to confront Hezbollah as it resists Israeli aggression, they risk provoking popular unrest and intra-Lebanese violence. The Trump administration’s push for Israel-Lebanon talks will not prevent further war. All it will do is burn the Lebanese who make the mistake of trusting the United States.
