Lebanon’s pursuit of an agreement with Israel, despite the fierce objections of Hezbollah and the ambivalence of Amal, is best understood not as appeasement but as a calculated bid for strategic autonomy. The government of President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam—the first administration since 1992 to take office without Hezbollah’s implicit blessing—has concluded that the Lebanese state cannot recover sovereignty while a non-state actor monopolizes the decision of war and peace.
The opportunity is structural. Hezbollah’s role within Iran’s regional architecture has itself changed: from an autonomous strategic deterrent capable of independent action, it was downgraded to a support front, coordinating fire alongside direct Iranian missile strikes rather than acting as the primary shock absorber for Israeli retaliation. The strategic case for its heavy weapons has weakened accordingly. The February 2026 Israeli-American strikes on Iran and the wider regional conflict left the group decapitated and degraded, removing both the deterrent logic and the patron’s capacity to enforce it.
Beirut has moved decisively to exploit this. The government formally banned Hezbollah’s military activities on 2 March 2026—the most assertive such declaration any Lebanese government has ever made.  Earlier, Aoun declared Iran’s ambassador-designate persona non grata and accused the IRGC of commanding Hezbollah’s operations —a direct challenge to the Tehran connection. This is where your “strategic autonomy against Iranian proxies” framing holds: Beirut is asserting that no non-state actor has the right to drag Lebanon into war.
Yet autonomy from Iran is the means, not the sole motive. The deeper driver is ending the occupation and the strikes. Israeli forces failed to withdraw fully from southern Lebanon, continued striking targets, and the conflict with Iran added new security concerns. Aoun’s calculation is that Israel’s presence in the south gives Hezbollah a pretext to remain armed —so negotiating Israel’s withdrawal simultaneously removes Hezbollah’s justification and restores territorial integrity.
The risk is acute. Lebanon’s push to disarm Hezbollah reveals a deeper crisis of sovereignty, as the state lacks the legitimacy, institutional capacity, and public trust to reclaim a monopoly over force without risking communal backlash. A weakened Hezbollah is still too powerful to be fully controlled, and Israeli “operational excess” could discredit the entire gamble. To sum up, it is obvious that Beirut is seeking strategic autonomy. But it is autonomy born of opportunity and exhaustion, balanced on a knife’s edge between state-building and a slide back into sectarian conflict.