Fouad Boutros was among the most brilliant foreign ministers Lebanon ever knew. Yet President Suleiman Frangieh would constantly mock his gloomy demeanor and perennial pessimism, calling him an owl that never stopped hooting bad omens.
The difference between the two men was that the first was highly pragmatic, while the second sought to lighten people’s burdens with a measure of optimism and hopeful expectations. Yesterday, I surveyed the views of newspapers around the world on the Trump–Iran agreement and found them divided into two camps: Boutros and Frangieh. People would like to be optimistic, yet they fear a sudden shock of the kind that has struck the world repeatedly in recent years. Leading the pessimists was The Daily Telegraph, which reminded us that we live in a region where nothing can be taken for granted, a region fraught with problems and unlikely to enjoy lasting peace of mind.
The Telegraph pointed to the many occasions on which agreements were announced only to be abandoned later. Another example was the war of October 7, 2023, followed the next day by the “support war.” From there, conflicts multiplied between Gaza and Lebanon until they came to resemble a quasi-global war whose repercussions extended across the entire blue planet.
Wisdom, necessity, and plain common sense all require us to side with the optimists. Many mocked the exaggerated optimism of the recipient of the “Peace Prize,” yet he proved to be right. Even the issue of nuclear fallout, which we had assumed was an insoluble problem, eventually found a formula for being quietly buried when the time comes, that is, when it is no longer a matter of Iran’s submission or America’s victory.
For that reason, both sides, by mutual consent, resorted to the formula of “constructive ambiguity” as a prelude to a long period of peace, as Abdulrahman Al-Rashed argued in his long-range reading of the agreement’s provisions.
Everyone has grown weary of a war that produces nothing but more death and more ashes. Israel’s punitive campaign is not a solution. Nor has Israeli occupation ever solved anything at any point in time. So let us try an agreement in which Donald Trump is the one delivering the rebuke, and Benjamin Netanyahu the one who deserves it, at the very least.
