This article was originally published in JNS on June 21, 2026.
The U.S.-Iran Memorandum of Understanding is not merely a ceasefire. It strengthens Iran and Hezbollah, undermines Israel’s security and undercuts the Lebanese government that has spent recent months acting against Hezbollah’s weapons. It also endangers those who dared to speak against the organization, from parliamentarians to ordinary citizens.
The last war struck at the heart of Iranian doctrine. For years, Iran built its power on exporting the revolution and waging wars through proxies to keep the fighting far from itself. Hamas was shattered, the regime of Bashar Assad fell, the Syrian route was severed, and the war even reached strikes inside Iran. Within this reality, Hezbollah remains the last major arm through which Iran can still sustain its regional method of warfare.
For Iran, the agreement is an attempt to rescue a wounded doctrine. A ceasefire that gives Hezbollah time to recover lets Iran rebuild its principal instrument for projecting power. Striking Hezbollah or severing it from Iran is not merely a blow to an armed Lebanese organization, but to the central mechanism Iran has left for regional power. A ceasefire that does not deal with Hezbollah does not halt the next war; it lets Iran rebuild the tool meant to wage it.
Here lies the gap between the Western conception and the Iranian one. In the West, war is meant to produce a diplomatic achievement; the agreement is the endpoint. For Iran, one can lose militarily and still win at the table; an agreement is not a war’s end, but time to regroup for the next one. Just as Iran will use any pause to rebuild its military and nuclear infrastructure, so, too, the ceasefire now pressed upon Israel in Lebanon amounts to the reconstitution of Hezbollah for the coming campaign.
The agreement also harms Lebanon itself. In recent months, the government began a difficult move against Hezbollah’s weapons. Within the public, too, other voices began to be heard: fatigue with Hezbollah, a wish to return control to the state, an openness to arrangements that were once impossible. The agreement endangers all this momentum.
Hezbollah will rebuild its power not on the claim that it survived, but that its Iranian patron is still standing, still reaching an agreement with the United States, still forcing Lebanon back into the regional equation in a way that shields Hezbollah. This is not a Lebanese victory. It is an Iranian victory on Lebanese soil.
To this is added the European Union’s enduring mistake: the distinction between Hezbollah’s political and military wings. That distinction does not exist within Hezbollah itself. It lets an armed organization operate as a legitimate political actor while its real power rests on independent weapons, subordination to Iran and the ability to threaten anyone seeking to restore state sovereignty. The European Union does not strengthen Lebanon; it weakens those trying to build real sovereignty within it.
In the past, it was not right to place Israel and Lebanon in the same frame against Hezbollah; such framing would have damaged the Lebanese government’s legitimacy and let Hezbollah claim that it was acting on Lebanon’s behalf. But the agreement changes this. When Iran inserts Lebanon into the arrangement, and Hezbollah remains the tool through which Iran operates there, the correct framing is no longer Israel and Lebanon against Hezbollah. It is Israel and Lebanon facing Iran, which operates through Hezbollah. This casts the Lebanese government not as Israel’s partner against a Lebanese actor, but as a sovereign state confronting Iranian intervention on its soil.
The language must also be precise. Israel has described the talks as peace; the Lebanese described them as a ceasefire. The gap is not semantic. Peace and normalization are a political framework that the Lebanese government cannot bear now. A ceasefire is a security framework. The right language is a pragmatic, phased security arrangement.
The Lebanese government and army cannot today recover territory from Hezbollah alone. Israel has done so. A security arrangement is not a violation of Lebanese sovereignty but the practical way to restore it: the territory Hezbollah lost to Israel must pass to the Lebanese army, not return to Hezbollah.
This is where the pilot zones matter. In each area where Israel reduces its presence, the Lebanese army enters into security coordination with Israel, the arrangement is tested gradually, and Israeli involvement is reserved for cases when Hezbollah attempts to return, violates the terms or turns the ceasefire into a cover for renewed entrenchment. But Israel will no longer allow Hezbollah to entrench on its border.
It is not yet clear how the agreement affects the pilot zones or the U.S.-led framework agreed in Washington. Iran will likely see an opening to object or set conditions; precisely for this reason, the importance of direct security coordination rises sharply. Success in one area can become a pragmatic arrangement in another, and later, civil and economic coordination, without calling it peace.
This pragmatism is already heard in Lebanese discourse. When Lebanese write online of a more normal life, even in the simple phrase, “We will yet drink a beer in Israel,” it is not yet readiness for political peace. It is a sign of fatigue with Hezbollah, with Iran’s wars on Lebanese soil, and a desire for a different civic space.
The choice in the Middle East is always between the bad and the worse. This will be the Lebanese government’s choice: to coordinate with Israel against Iran on its soil and sustain the momentum, or to accept the dictate of an agreement that strengthens Hezbollah’s Iranian patron.
Iran will not give up Hezbollah, and therefore, it will not give up Lebanon.
