Trump and Netanyahu lost ground. Is Lebanon any safer?

The last time Nawaf Salam had assurances that Lebanon would stay out of a war with Iran, they lasted 48 hours. Hezbollah had told his government it would hold its fire. Israel had sent word through intermediaries that if Hezbollah stayed out, so would Israel. That was Salam’s account in March. On Wednesday, with Benjamin Netanyahu’s majority gone and Donald Trump’s party having lost Congress, Lebanon’s prime minister was back in Baabda warning Hezbollah against dragging the country into another war.

It is tempting, from Beirut, to read the two elections as votes for peace. Consider what each voter was actually being asked to decide. An American could believe that Iran posed a danger, remember Trump promising to keep the country out of new wars, and look at the price of filling the car. By November, the president had offered several accounts of when the fighting might end. Which of them was a Republican candidate supposed to defend on someone’s doorstep? Trump himself acknowledged that the war played a part in his party’s defeat. The Democrats who take control of Congress in January will have a chance to ask what a further round of strikes would achieve when the administration next asks them to pay for it.

An Israeli reservist had a different question to put to Netanyahu. Why should my family carry this obligation if yours can be exempted? The dispute over military service for ultra-Orthodox men, and the question of who should answer for the failures of October 7, 2023, figured prominently in the campaign. Gadi Eisenkot, Netanyahu’s principal rival and a former army chief, questioned whether Netanyahu was fit to lead another operation against Iran. A voter could agree with him on every word and still support such an operation under Eisenkot. That possibility ought to temper any relief we feel in Lebanon.

Of the governments involved in this war, Iran’s may have given the most serious thought to the American voter. In October, senior Iranian officials told Reuters they were deliberately delaying talks with Washington. A deal before November 3 would have given Trump something to take home. Another week of expensive petrol gave his opponents something to campaign on. Tehran could see an advantage in letting the week go by.

That patience was expensive in Iran, too. Annual inflation reached 73.6 percent there in September. An Iranian buying groceries had as much reason as an American buying petrol to want the war over. The difference was what each could do about it. Americans could take their anger out on the president’s party. The Iranian whose household budget no longer stretched to the end of the month had no equivalent vote on the supreme leader who commands the armed forces. That is one advantage an authoritarian government possesses in a long war. It can make its own people pay for the time it needs. 

What Tehran gained on Tuesday was a reason to hold out for better terms. Whether doing so makes anyone safer depends on how Trump reads the same result. Some Gulf governments see an incentive for him to settle. Senior Iranian officials told Reuters they also feared a strike from a president determined to show he could still order one. Both readings are plausible. The incoming Congress can make a prolonged campaign harder to sustain. A president can make a decision tonight whose consequences reach the Gulf well before January. Israel’s caretaker cabinet, meanwhile, retains considerable latitude to act on security grounds while the parties negotiate over who governs next. 

Lebanon has a decision of its own in that interval. In March, after Hezbollah opened fire, the cabinet formally prohibited its military activities. By November, Salam was warning the party again. A government that has already issued a prohibition should be able to tell the people most exposed to Israeli retaliation what happens if someone prepares to violate it. Who gives the order to intervene? Can the army count on the cabinet to stand behind it when it does?

A family deciding whether to rebuild in the south can do very little with the news that Trump had a bad Tuesday. It could do a great deal with the knowledge that, if Washington and Tehran resume fighting, the decision to open a Lebanese front will be taken in Beirut by people that family can vote out. When Salam can give them that assurance, there will be a reason to call Lebanon safer.