It must have been difficult for Hezbollah to watch the public ceremony in which the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) fighters burned their rifles with their own hands. The scenes symbolized the termination of a long armed struggle in the region, quietly introducing a new era that compels reassessments of the goals and functions of armed non-state actors. The decision was neither the result of political coercion nor the culmination of a decisive military victory. Rather, it reflected a profound intellectual shift; the PKK has concluded the age of militancy, whether nationalist or religious, is drawing to a close, demanding a shift in vision, ambition, and stance.
In Iraq, despite the fragility of its political equilibrium, the government has managed to uphold and safeguard neutrality during the recent Iran–Israel clashes. More importantly, it reaffirmed that it will not allow non-state actors to maintain arms, resisting both the pressures of the axis and the allure of the moment. In Baghdad, the call to unify military forces is growing louder, mirroring a growing national conviction that the authority of the state must take precedence over the power of militias.
In Gaza, the war has ended in a political and military defeat that has effectively left no place for Hamas in the "day after" deliberations on reconstruction and the Strip’s political future. The movement lost control of large parts of the Gaza Strip and found itself exposed before its enemies, and, more significantly, before its own people. The neutralization of its arms has become irreversible- a demand shared by all the key stakeholders.
Against the backdrop of this regional transition to a post-chaos era, Hezbollah is sticking to an obsolete discourse. It watches on as organizations that had once resembled it collapse and feels the ground shaking beneath its feet. Yet, it has failed to build a new narrative that legitimizes maintaining the terms to which it had grown accustomed.
The party’s emphatic defeat in the 2024 war did not compel a strategic reassessment. Instead, Hezbollah hardened its resistance rhetoric and sacralization of its arms. Rather than a political dispute, the matter has been sanctified and presented as untouchable.
Hezbollah’s weapons are no longer framed as mere instruments of resistance. In the party’s discourse, they have been rendered an extension of a creed. They are justified by a divine mandate and a necessary component of a distinct identity. This discursive shift is deliberate: it seeks to create a bulwark against critique, oversight, and political compromise by elevating the question into a metaphysical and existential matter.
However, it has not hardened its ideology from a position of confidence but because of Hezbollah’s apprehensions about the shifting regional landscape. Support for the party has diminished, Iran’s supported backing is increasingly constrained by shifting priorities, and Syria is taking steps toward sweeping settlements, including with Israel- settlements that will probably engender arrangements that blindside Hezbollah and make militant ideological ventures untenable.
This change in rhetoric also coincides with credible reports of significant internal divisions within Hezbollah amid an ongoing internal reassessment of its role, function, operational capacity, and the mounting costs of its entanglement in Iran’s military project.
Meanwhile, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam continue to take crucial steps, though there is more to be done, to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1701. Most notably, they have dismantled hundreds of Hezbollah positions south of the Litani River following the ceasefire that the party had been compelled to accept.
That is not to say that state sovereignty has been restored. However, it does signal a crucial development: Hezbollah’s exceptionalism is now exposed, and its dominance is increasingly intolerable regionally, internationally, and even domestically. Waning popular support in its own community and across Lebanese society, which has grown weary after two decades of bearing the social and economic costs of its wars, compounds its difficulties.
Moreover, backed by the United States and Europe, Israel is not deterred by Hezbollah. Rather, it is now seen as a legitimate target for preemptive strikes, as shown by Israel’s ongoing raids and assassinations.
Where, then, is Hezbollah taking Lebanon? Can it continue to rely on a disintegrating regional axis to durably legitimize an arsenal that has no support, even among some of the party’s closest allies? Can a supernatural discourse mask its glaring decline? Does Hezbollah have the political maturity and autonomy needed to begin disentangling itself from a transnational revolutionary creed to build a national political project?
There is no indication that the party has clear answers to these questions. What is certain, however, is that Lebanon cannot afford to wait.
More than ever before, Hezbollah’s weapons now constitute an existential threat to the Lebanese state. This assessment was voiced by US envoy Tom Barrack and is now an almost visceral conclusion that the majority of Lebanese citizens share. More critical than the threat it poses to Lebanon as a political entity are the potential ramifications for Hezbollah’s own community. Maintaining arms outside the state’s control risks plunging the party’s constituency into a perpetual confrontation with the rest of the country, foreclosing any chance of a stable national partnership. If the weapons are not addressed today, the costs may be greater than another war with Israel. Such failure could lead to domestic disintegration that would rip the Shiite community apart before engulfing the rest of Lebanon.
