Welcome to The Watch Floor. I'm Sarah Adams. When we talk about the Middle East, the headlines usually are about Syria, Israel, Iran, but Lebanon? Not so much. Even though today this country sits in the middle of all of these regional pressures, it doesn't matter if it starts in the deserts of Syria, comes down to downtown Beirut, or goes to the diplomatic enclaves in Washington, D.C., Riyadh, or Jerusalem alike. Today we're going to talk about why Lebanon matters. why actors like ISIS, Hezbollah, and nation states really have an effect on what comes next and how this small, fragile country really does impact U.S. national security interests. If you think of Lebanon as like a boat in the sea, it's getting hit by waves all the time from these neighboring countries and from the Gulf. But when you look at the boat, the engine's broken, the hull's cracked, the people inside of it are bailing out the water all the time. We're going to explain to you what's rocking the boat and what actually might come next. Let's first talk about Lebanon's place in the region. Population-wise, it's a pretty small country. It's about six million people, and they have an interesting form of government. It's called confessionalism. If you haven't heard about this, it's just laying out a piece of the government for each of the major religions. So we have the Sunni, the Shia, the Christians, and the Druze. So all get an equal say and an equal partnership in the government. Obviously, this sounds great on paper, but think about if you're in a car and there's four drivers and you all get a say. Obviously, you might have different opinions. And if you don't really come to a consensus, you can have dreadlock really quickly. And when that happens, then nothing moves forward. Now, when we look at it then within its region, obviously the country most talked about is Syria. So Syria has had a civil war since back to 2012. And massive amounts of refugees left Syria and came over into Lebanon. And when I say massive, I'm saying 1.5 million. I just told you the entire population of Lebanon is only 6 million. So that's 25% of their entire historic population have all come over in the last 10 years. And as we've seen, you know, Syria now has a member of Al-Qaeda running the country. So it's not like it's now a stable country and it takes pressure off of Lebanon. It's still a constant issue. And we have fighters in Syria attempting to come over the border into Lebanon to be involved in terrorism. And that is where we talk about another regional country, Israel. So Israel has to monitor those regions, right, to stop insurgents from coming into Lebanon. And then as we all know, Israel sometimes even has to do attacks, you know, into southern Lebanon. Again, that causes problems, you know, in the country. And we did see even in the last couple of years, there have even been attacks in city centers going after some of these senior Hezbollah leaders. All of that has an effect. Then we have Iran. You know, they always kind of stay under the radar with their hidden hand, but they are, of course, who backs most of the security issues in Lebanon because, you know, they fund Hezbollah. And even when they're not constantly spoken about, they do have a hidden hand, not just in the military side of the country, because Hezbollah really is the size of an army, but they also have a lot of influence on the political side of things, and that's what makes them extra dangerous. And then we just have the Gulf states. And what the Gulf states are usually doing is pushing some sort of pressure on Lebanon to do more about Hezbollah, because obviously Hezbollah projects outside of Lebanon as well, and they target other areas. I mean, we even have a problem of Lebanon being in the Americas, right? They have a lot of kind of support arms all across Latin America, and it is a concern a lot of external countries have. Now, when we talk about Lebanon, you know, why is it fragile? You know, what's causing these vulnerabilities? And one is their financial collapse has been historic. Since 2019, the currency has lost 90% of its value. When that happens, everything gets more expensive. So when we're talking about food, food prices have increased 400%. I mean, can you imagine what this is like, you know, just even just for the middle class? then when everything costs too much your confidence in your government just collapses which is always dangerous too because that's when some of these bad actors can come in as we talked about previously and take advantage of a situation and then even the banks kind of hold tightly onto the money in it you can't go to the bank of Lebanon and take out your entire savings they have restrictions on it. So even if you live there, you don't get full access to your money. I mean, think of the uncertainty this is causing. Imagine this. You walk into your bank. It's a Tuesday. You've worked for 30 years. Maybe you're a doctor, a teacher, or maybe you spent decades waiting tables in Detroit or Dubai just to send money back home to retire. You check your balance. The screen says you have $200,000. It's right there. You can see the digits. You You can feel the safety of that number. You walk up to the teller and say, I'd like to withdraw $500 for groceries and rent. The teller looks at you, smiles a tired, sad smile and says, I'm sorry, we can only give you $50. And the kicker That isn even in dollars It in the local currency And by the time you walk out the door and get to the grocery store the value of that cash has dropped by another 10 You aren't imagining this. This isn't a dystopian fiction. This is the reality for millions of people in Lebanon. We aren't just talking about a recession. We aren't talking about a downturn. We are talking about what the world... Bank has called one of the top three most severe economic collapses since the mid-19th century. You know, without any kind of major reforms or foreign investment or some sort of debt restructuring, there's not a huge light at the end of the tunnel. And as you can imagine, these financial problems make bringing imports difficult, makes it difficult to bring in things even as simple as medicines, and then getting any kind of foreign aid is a lot harder to secure if it doesn't look like your financial system is sound. Now, this obviously, as you can imagine, trickles down in other ways. So for example, electricity is intermittent. I mean, think if you're running a business and the electricity is constantly going out. Fuel shortages are incredibly common. You have hospitals first not having, being able to keep that power going, but then as I told you, they have difficulties bringing in high quality medicines to use. Then we have this idea that, hey, if all of these systems aren't doing well and aren't playing together, I feel like I might be in a precarious situation, right? You don't feel safe and secure and stable, which has other effects. So one of the main effects is young adults are emigrating out of the country in large numbers, right? They're looking for some sort of stability, jobs, you know, a place where I can grow my wealth, build my family in a more secure environment. You know, you don't want to lose this type of talent in a country, especially in a country that has, you know, pockets of extremism and terrorism. but you know since 2019 the public has been very very frustrated because there's been this corruption but then there's also this massive decline or stagnation of the economy and they're just not seeing it get better now think of it almost like a pressure cooker so you have all these like internal tensions and something can make it blow and the simplest thing could really cause a massive crisis, and that's what we want to hopefully stop from occurring. Now, we also have kind of these internal but also regional forces. So we have ISIS in the region. We have Hezbollah, even though I know it's internal, but because of Iran's role in it, it does kind of play like an external actor. And then I already told you, we have Israel as an external actor. So when we talk about ISIS, so everybody kind of thinks ISIS is gone because it doesn't get the attention of like its heyday when it had its caliphate in Syria or had a lot of activities going on in Iraq. But it's still incredibly powerful. There are estimates that there are up to 10,000 members of ISIS in Syria, even as our government says, oh, no, it's only 1 to 2,000, right? That is a huge range. So while we're doing operations against ISIS in places like Syria and Iraq, the group is growing. So the operations are not effective, right? They're not stopping this massive resurgence of the group. And a huge piece of this is the new president of Syria obviously protects ISIS in the country. It's protecting the head of ISIS. He's being harbored in Syria. So if we kind of turn a blind eye and pretend this research isn't real and it's not state-backed, others, unfortunately, pay the price for this. You know, if you remember, in June of 2024, there was an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. It didn't get much press and so I did an investigation into it and one of the things I quickly learned is that it was even the U.S. Embassy itself trying to downplay the event because the attacker, his name was Case Farage, he was one of these refugees from Syria. He'd been brought in the country. He had official paperwork from UNHCR, you know, to be in Lebanon as a refugee, and he carried out this attack. Well, the embassy didn't want to put forward kind of like anti-immigrant sentiments in Lebanon, so they're just very, very quiet about it. But there are a lot of questions about this case. First, when it happened, they said, oh, it was a lone wolf ISIS terrorist. But as you started peeling back the layers, like you start for a minute and like, hey, wait a minute. So first off, when he came into Syria, he lived in Beqa Valley. That is the hotbed of terrorism in the country. So he likely made relationships there. A couple weeks before he commits this attack, he gets his weapon, which was just like an AK-47, from a well-known international arms dealer. Now think about it. If I just decided, oh, I'm going to be inspired by ISIS and do an attack, I'm a foreigner in this new country, do I really have access and direct contact and would even be trusted by a famous arms dealer. So that's the first part that's very strange. Then he does this attack and he puts like, it almost looked like duct tape on his body armor and he writes ISIS, like in a sharpie. Okay, so this is his uniform. Then they arrest his brother and they say, oh, there were a ton of bomb making materials in his brother's apartment. And then they say they arrested 20 other people So we went from a lone wolf to an international arms dealer to bond making components to 20 other people we don even know who they are So it's just another one of these really interesting cases that got swept under the rug and a lot of people really said he wasn't even trying to do the attack successfully. It was probably a probe of the security at the US Embassy which should make everybody pay a little more attention, right? The only reason you'd be probing the security at the US Embassy in Beirut is for a future attack against the US Embassy. Well then, who is doing it, right? Because this clearly wasn't a lone wolf. You know, what is his larger network? Who is he connected to? And why are we not being honest that this was a terrorist from Syria? So again, these are all the problems just you're dealing with on a daily basis in Lebanon. Now again, we go back to the actual main terrorist group in the country, which is Hezbollah. I mean, they're like a nation state military in themself, right? They have the backing of Iran, but they also have a lot of power and influence and control in Lebanon. It's not like they're near being pushed out. you know, there are discussions, we should disarm them, kind of negotiate them to being just a political party, but that doesn't seem, you know, to be coming true anytime soon. You know, we've talked previously how Hezbollah has invested a lot of resources into the second and third generation of their group, so they don't seem to be going anywhere. You know, on the U.S. side of things, we've long had issues with Hezbollah and then some of the other kind of elements that help form it like the Islamic Jihad. And we had massive attacks against our interests, primarily kind of in the 1983, 1984 time period. The US embassy was attacked, the Marine barracks was attacked, the US embassy annex was attacked. A CIA station chief was kidnapped and killed. And the crazy part is, you know, it's been like four decades since these occurrences, and a lot of people forgot about them until about two years ago when Israel really started taking out these senior leaders of Hezbollah, right? Because they were concerned about some of their efforts in the aftermath of October 7th to do attacks in Israel. So when that started happening, we had terrorists that had been on the U.S. most wanted list for 40 years be killed. I mean, this is pretty much the first time we saw kinetic action in today's day and age to go after those perpetrators of those attacks. So we had, of course, Fahd Shakir killed. He was killed July 30th, 2024. He had a massive role in the incidents I talked about. And then we had Ibrahim Akhil killed, and he was the head of all military operations for Hezbollah. And he was killed just a few months later, September 21st, 2024. These were major U.S. targets. They were also focusing on harming Americans, so this was a huge win. Really, like the whole Rodman force, which controlled a lot of the external operations for the group, got wiped out in a meeting. So a lot of wins against Hezbollah, but as we've seen, they always regenerate, they always come back stronger, and at the end of the day, they still are the main power player in the country. And then lastly, as we brought up before, we have Israel, and they really have to monitor the border and spend a lot of time dealing with Lebanon's, I mean, Hezbollah's movements in the area, the movements of weapons, right? Not just into Lebanon, but, you know, in the Syria region as well. You know, it's a constant problem. And there are other agencies there. There's the UN, the EU, and they're doing like a lot of humanitarian missions. But it's like they've long turned a blind eye to the terrorist activity going on. And so it just causes this unstable region, you know, that is a constant problem. And really, unfortunately, it's not getting better as all this unrest continues in the Middle East, right? There is no active functioning peace right now in the Middle East. And if we lie about that and fake it, you know, it's these more fragile states who are really getting a lot of this blowback. Now, you know, what comes next? So when it comes to Lebanon, financially or economically, the currency looks like it's still going to be in decline for the upcoming future. There is going to be increases in inflation still, and they really have to keep preparing for this scarcity of goods because there is no plan to deal with it. A lot of the outside countries still are having discussions, you know, disarm Hezbollah, focus on Hezbollah and the country is like, hey, we don't even have a properly functioning economy. You know, if we destabilize our country, we might actually let Hezbollah get more of a win. And sometimes outside actors don't see the full picture. You know, they say laser focus on their target and they don't look at all the ramifications because you don't want to offer these opportunities for tariffs to take advantage of things. So without some sort of reform or stabilization, you know, Lebanon is not going to get better. Their GDP since just 2019 has actually contracted back to 21%. So it's one of the worst economic collapses globally, and there's nothing improving it. So politically, we also have this gridlock, right? We have all these opposing forces. And they're having a lot of disputes. And one is Hezbollah's influence, right? I think everyone understands that Hezbollah has become a problem, except for Hezbollah itself, of course. How far the Lebanese state can push, I think they're trying. So far they declared that this aren Hezbollah Saad al only for them to be proven wrong This mission has not been completed Whether they can try harder I think they can Whether they want to, I'm not sure. Does the Lebanese state actually have the ability to enforce this, or is that authority still largely theoretical? Well, I think it does have the ability, and I think, regretfully, that the Lebanese state is not even countering the statements coming out of Hezbollah chief Naim Asin. For example, he goes on TV and he says that we are armed and we're keeping our arms. Then in another speech he goes on TV and he says if there's war with Iran, Hezbollah will join the war. And it's unfortunate that neither President Ta'on nor his prime minister Nawaf Salam actually counter this guy, you know, or at least send someone to arrest him. say you can't run your own foreign policy in this country. Even that, which is supposed to be easy, like issuing a statement to counter him, even that they're not doing. So I think they're still tiptoeing around the subject. They're probably still scared of Hezbollah. But even then, they've done things that others have not done. So what they've done has been good so far, but much more remains to be achieved. And Hezbollah is watching these cleavages and even having discussions. How do we increase, you know, our political influence during this time? This obviously shapes a lot of the activities the state does. And think about it. You're in like a neighborhood and you think the police are there to keep you safe and they're in control. but then there's this outside actor, right? That's what Hezbollah is. And Hezbollah is the one who actually has control in your town. They're actually the security arm in your town, and it's almost like these two competing systems. It's a very strange environment to live in. Security-wise, we have this border problem, right? There's Syria, Lebanon, and, of course, the Israel issues. and as ISIS is resurging, unfortunately, they will always go and take advantage of weak governments. So of course, we're going to keep seeing impacts in Syria. We're likely going to see impacts in Iraq and then of course, you know, they will continue to be a problem in Lebanon and it really is kind of a difficult thing because when it comes to ISIS, is it's not like they have a base in Lebanon. So you can't say, hey, ISIS controls the city. Let's just focus on counterterrorism operations there. It does not work that way. They, like, infiltrate in, and then we get strange cases like Case Farage, right, who carries out an attack, you know, and no one even knew who the clue, you know, who he was at all. Then socially, you know, we have a lot of migration problems. Of course, I told you with migrants coming in, But the bigger problem is all this talent leaving the country. You don't want all these young people leaving, but they have limited access to food, health care, and basic services. They're almost being pushed out. You know, hospitals, again, struggle to really service the people in the way they need. Schools actually have to close all the time because of these power issues. You know, and families really are in a tough situation, right? Is this the best place, you know, to raise my children? Now, then we have the domino effect of the entire region, right? Even if you strengthen these internal problems, you get these spillovers from the other regional countries that are hard to control, right? It's an impact on you. You know, the regional conflict, the political shocks, they all can be felt within your system, even if you weren't being involved in them, Lebanon's instability, you know, has broad consequences. You know, it can affect things going on in the eastern Mediterranean. It really can impact refugee flows to Europe. A lot of refugees went to Lebanon. Well, if they all start going the other way, that's a problem. And then it also can give Iran more of an in to influence, you know, the economy and the politics and the military inside Lebanon, the last thing we want to allow is Iran to gain further influence anywhere. So the key takeaways are even though Lebanon is small, it is regionally strategic. It has a lot of internal dysfunction and then these external pressures from ISIS, Israel, Iran, you know, are threatening its internal security. Even if you're doing a positive security operation against a terrorist group, it obviously has blowback effects in the area it was done, and we do have to be honest about that, right? There's going to always be ripple effects, and then we do have a humanitarian crisis. I mean, we have refugees becoming terrorists and attacking the U.S. embassy. That is a bad pattern. That is not something we want to see continue. We haven't seen massive numbers of Syrians leave Lebanon for Syria because Syria is still unstable. Much of the military was made up of terrorist groups. There's members of HTS in the military. There's members of ISIS in the military. There's members of Al-Qaeda, former members of al-Nusra Front. That is not a situation a lot of people want to bring their families back to. For Americans, just remember, these small countries, they do have impacts. They do matter when you're kind of talking about the regional dynamics, especially when we're saying something like peace and prosperity in the Middle East. Is everybody feeling that? How is this external pressure affecting everyone else? when we put a lot of support, we remove sanctions from somewhere like Syria, how will that affect a place like Lebanon, who has been highly impacted, you know, by the failures occurring in that country? So thanks for joining me on the watch floor. Stay tuned, you know, for future episodes where we break down some of these hot spots that aren't focused on as much, but they do play valuable roles, and we should talk about them. Thanks for tuning in. Thank you.
