Three Definitions of Success
The IDF has begun a trial pullout from parts of the Lebanon buffer zone. Lebanese Army units are moving into towns like Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh under an arrangement Washington brokered. President Joseph Aoun sat across from Donald Trump in the Oval Office this week and said Lebanon’s goal is to end the state of hostility with Israel forever. Everyone involved is using the language of resolution. That is precisely what should make an observer nervous.
Seth Frantzman’s reporting in the Jerusalem Post identifies the actual problem, and it is not a small one: Israel, Lebanon, and the United States all endorse the pilot-zone concept, and all three define success against Hezbollah differently. That is not a footnote to the arrangement. It is the arrangement’s central weakness, and it is the kind of weakness that tends to surface eighteen months after the cameras have gone home rather than at the signing ceremony, when everyone still has an incentive to describe convergence that has not actually occurred.
Consider what each party needs “success” to mean. For Washington, success is a deployable, low-casualty stability narrative: Lebanese Army units in the south, a reduced IDF footprint, a diplomatic win that can be cited in a briefing without requiring anyone to explain what happens if Hezbollah simply waits out the arrangement. For Beirut, or more precisely for Aoun’s government, success is something closer to sovereignty theater with just enough substance to avoid being called a client state twice over, once to Hezbollah’s constituency and once to its own army’s professional pride. For Jerusalem, success has to mean something much narrower and much harder: the actual degradation of Hezbollah’s capacity to reconstitute a threat on the northern border, which is not the same thing as the Lebanese Army holding territory that Hezbollah, for tactical reasons of its own, may simply decline to contest for now.
None of these three definitions is dishonest. That is what makes the problem structural rather than a matter of bad faith. A Lebanese Army presence in Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh answers Washington’s need and Beirut’s need reasonably well. It does very little to answer Jerusalem’s, because Hezbollah’s capacity is not primarily territorial. It is a function of weapons stockpiles, command structure, and Iranian resupply lines, none of which a Lebanese Army patrol in a border town addresses directly. An arrangement can look, from Washington’s podium, exactly like the success it was designed to demonstrate, while leaving the actual Israeli security problem essentially unresolved. Both things can be true on the same afternoon.
This is where the comparison to earlier phases of Israeli-Lebanese engagement is instructive, and where I want to be honest about its limits rather than lean on it as a slogan. The 2006 arrangement under UNSCR 1701 similarly assumed that international will and a Lebanese state presence in the south would substitute for Hezbollah’s actual disarmament. It did not, and the reason it did not is precisely the reason worth naming here: the Lebanese state, then as now, lacked either the capacity or the political appetite to compel a non-state actor embedded in its own security architecture and its own parliament. The analogy is not perfect. Aoun’s government in 2026 is not Beirut’s government in 2006, the regional balance around Iran has shifted considerably, and Hezbollah itself has absorbed serious losses since October 2023 that it had not absorbed by 2006. But the structural gap, an international framework substituting a state presence for an actual reduction in non-state military capacity, is the same gap, and it is worth naming rather than assuming has been closed simply because the participants are different this time.
None of this means the pilot zones are worthless. A reduced Israeli footprint paired with a genuine Lebanese Army deployment is better than the status quo ante, and Aoun’s willingness to say publicly that Lebanon wants an end to hostility with Israel is not nothing, coming from a Lebanese head of state. But an arrangement built on three parties using the same vocabulary to describe three different outcomes is an arrangement that has deferred its hardest question rather than answered it. The test will not come at the next Oval Office meeting. It will come the first time Hezbollah decides the buffer zone no longer serves its purposes, and Israel discovers exactly how much the Lebanese Army presence was actually worth.
