Despite the approval of a plan submitted on September 5, by the Lebanese Armed Forces, to disarm Hezbollah, the United States and Israeli regime are not satisfied with the move. What they had hoped for was an aggressive and destructive plot that could have plunged the nation into chaos.

The United States has been pushing the Lebanese government to order the full disarmament of Hezbollah, doing so without providing any tangible guarantees or even allowing Beirut to draft its own national defence strategy. Simply put, the US Trump administration hopes to pursue, through diplomacy, what the Israelis failed to achieve during their war of aggression against Lebanon.

While Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has decided to take his orders from the United States on the question of disarmament, it is clear that the plan which was recently adopted by the Lebanese Armed Forces does not meet the standards set by the United States, and by extension, the Israelis.

The plan is supposedly divided into four separate phases, beginning in south of the Litani River. However, the plan was not revealed publicly, and there appears to be no specific deadline as to when Lebanon will achieve its stated mission. Everything has remained quite vague.

This predicament has now sparked outrage amongst Washington-based pro-war think tanks that have a significant impact on the US’s foreign policy decisions.

Take the Zionist Lobby cut out think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), for example. Their most recent article on the issue is titled “Without a Hezbollah Disarmament Deadline, Lebanon Should Face Repercussions”. 

The WINEP piece argues that the US government should pressure the Lebanese Army to take escalatory measures that would inevitably result in violent armed clashes with Hezbollah, including seizing a military position north of the Litani River as an initial step toward disarmament, and setting a specific deadline for this process.

The author of the piece, Hanin Ghaddar, writing for the Zionist think tank, advocates weaponising US aid to Lebanon by making it conditional on disarmament demands. She goes even further, arguing that the US should go after Lebanese Parliament Speaker, Nabih Berri, in order to turn the Amal Movement against Hezbollah and to destroy the Shia alliance in the upcoming elections. It is also noted that additional sanctions should be used to the effect of going after Lebanese Shia elected officials. This is a clear call for election interference.

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Another notable piece was recently published by Haaretz and reposted by the infamous Zionist think tank, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). The author of the piece, entitled “Why Israel Shouldn't Celebrate Lebanon's Promise to Disarm Hezbollah Just Yet”, was written by FDD senior fellow David Daoud.

In this article, the FDD think tank senior fellow argues that the Israeli regime should continue bombing Hezbollah sites throughout Lebanese territory and aim at significantly weakening the Lebanese resistance group in order to pave the way towards the Lebanese Armed Forces being able to carry out the rest of the job. 

In the WINEP piece, delusional depictions of the Lebanese military’s capabilities when it comes to fighting a war with Hezbollah, use the likes of LAF’s operation in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, back in 2007, and the Army’s clashes with ISIS - in which Hezbollah fought alongside them - as examples of how they could prove successful. However, Daoud is less delusional and sets forth a strategy that allows for the Israelis to do all of the heavy lifting instead.

The Atlantic Council think tank has meanwhile been promoting the false idea that the Lebanese public, with the exception of the nation’s Shia population, are in favour of Hezbollah disarmament and that the resistance group has been all but defeated. Completely contradicting this notion however, is the fact that 58% of the Lebanese public polled said they oppose Hezbollah’s disarmament without a national defense strategy.

Even more revealing ,however, was that the data published by Lebanon’s Consultative Center for Studies and Documentation exposed that 71.7% said they don’t believe the Lebanese army could defend the country from an Israeli attack, and 76% answered that they didn’t believe Lebanon’s diplomatic maneuvers could stop the Zionist regime from attacking. 

The gap here, between 58% that opposed disarmament and the 71.7% to 76% that answered the way they did above, indicates that the respondents answered the disarmament question based upon emotion rather than logic, which could largely be attributed to the effectiveness of anti-Hezbollah propaganda.

Other Washington-based think tanks have also been active on this issue, including the most influential think tank over the Trump administration, the Heritage Foundation. In its case, it openly praised US President Donald Trump for his efforts to expel UNIFIL forces from Lebanon, which will occur under a phasing out approach come the end of 2026.

Across all of the prominent Washington-based Zionist think tanks, the message appears uniform, they all seek further pressure upon Beirut in order to force it to disarm Hezbollah, against the wishes of the majority of the Lebanese public.

The US is directly meddling in Lebanon’s affairs and its moves, including threatening Beirut with another Israeli war, are tantamount to violations of the nation’s sovereignty, in addition to being anti-democratic. For all the talk about “sovereignty”, Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and his ilk have remained silent about the US imposing its will on Lebanon, nor do they have a strategy to liberate their territory in the south, or even stop the daily Israeli airstrikes carried out on Lebanese lands.