The Biden administration has claimed the long-awaited ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel as a diplomatic triumph achieved under tremendous pressure during a lame-duck period with a hostile Donald Trump administration waiting in the wings.
Speaking from a lectern in the Rose Garden of the White House, Joe Biden called the result “historic” and said that it “reminds us that peace is possible”. It would return civilians to their homes, he said, and had “determined this conflict will not be just another cycle of violence”.
Yet the peace, which was preceded by heavy Israeli airstrikes in Beirut in the final hours before it came into effect, is shaky at best. The complex agreement will allow Israel to continue to strike targets in Lebanon that it deems a direct security threat and will largely depend on Benjamin Netanyahu’s sense of restraint to endure.
The 60-day ceasefire will also rely on expectations that the Lebanese army can keep the peace in Hezbollah strongholds, that Hezbollah will not manage to rearm and that Lebanon can transform itself following the destructive war.
And finally, it takes place during a power transition from a strongly internationalist Biden administration to Trump’s “America first” worldview.
Given all that, analysts say there is still a significant chance that fighting in southern Lebanon could resume.
“An Israeli-Hezbollah ceasefire would be a significant and welcome success,” wrote Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former US diplomat. “But it’s a transaction not a transformation. We’d all be well advised to withhold judgment until we’re well into the 60-day clock.
“Irony of ironies it might well fall apart on Trump’s watch,” he added.
Yet that there even is an agreement is a rare win for the Biden administration after months of promises that its negotiators were close to securing ceasefires to halt Israel’s conflicts with Hezbollah and Hamas.
A senior US administration official, speaking on background, said that he saw a “light at the end of the tunnel” in late October, reportedly after tacit support was given to Israel’s strategic affairs minister, Ron Dermer, by Trump himself at Mar-a-Lago. Axios reported that Dermer then met with top Biden administration officials to hammer out the final details of the deal. The motivation in the administration, the adviser said, was the “loss of life and the realisation to both sides that the battlefield is not going to be the final answer”.
One cause for hope is that the Trump administration appears to be taking ownership of the policy by claiming it as its own triumph. “Everyone is coming to the table because of President Trump,” the Florida representative Mike Waltz, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, said in a post on X. “His resounding victory sent a clear message to the rest of the world that chaos won’t be tolerated. I’m glad to see concrete steps towards deescalation in the Middle East.”
Looking forward, the US administration official said, the administration believes it may have a “window of opportunity” to leapfrog from the Hezbollah deal on toward a far more elusive ceasefire in Gaza.
“Now I think the political and geopolitical stars are both aligned and we’re going to see what we can do over the next 50, whatever days it is,” the official said. “And to that end, we are clear-eyed that there’s administration coming in, and … we won’t do anything on this unless they know what we’re doing.”
Much will rely on the Lebanese army’s ability to maintain a peace in the country’s south (a similar security guarantee failed after a 2006 war). This time, the US will play a far more central role in providing materiel and then diplomatic support to prevent a new war from breaking out.
“There is genuine hope that the ceasefire deal will last, although many question marks remain,” wrote Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.
If the Lebanese forces appear incapable of preventing Hezbollah from rearming or receiving support from Iran, then the Israeli military may step up attacks again.
“After October 7, Israel is far less trusting of deterrence and more of a believer in keeping its enemies weak,” he wrote. “It may view limited strikes as a way of sending a message, and this may work – but such strikes always come with a risk of escalation and renewed war.”
