There are bad ideas in Middle East policy, and then there are ideas so reckless that they manage to revive every historical trauma at once. The suggestion that Syria could somehow be recruited into a military role against Hezbollah in Lebanon belongs firmly in the second category.
At first glance, it may sound clever in Washington: Syria knows the terrain, understands the militias, and has long experience with Lebanon’s security file. But this is exactly the problem. Syria’s “experience” in Lebanon is not a neutral asset. It is a history of domination, coercion, intelligence networks, assassinations, occupation, and the systematic weakening of the Lebanese state. To present Damascus as a possible partner in fixing Lebanon is not strategic thinking. It is Orientalist improvisation dressed up as realism.
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This is where the role of Tom Barrack, President Donald Trump’s special envoy to Syria and Iraq, must be examined carefully. Barrack appears to be promoting a view of the region in which borders are flexible, sovereignty is negotiable, and Lebanon is once again treated as an arena to be managed by stronger neighbors. His approach seems to assume that Syria, by virtue of geography and history, has a natural right to interfere in Lebanon’s security future. That logic is not new. It is the same logic that justified decades of Syrian tutelage over Lebanon under Hafez al-Assad and Bashar al-Assad. It is also the same logic that many Lebanese paid for with their lives.
