What does it look like when a state collapses? It is a question that analysts ask ever more often about the Middle East, where five states are currently in some form of existential crisis. Yet one of these states stands apart. Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Libya have recently gone through uprisings, civil war, external interventions, and regional proxy fights. Lebanon’s crisis, by contrast, is self-inflected—and that makes it far more hopeless.
It’s true that Lebanon does not have full sovereignty and is an arena of Israeli-Iranian and Saudi-Iranian competition, but these problems are not the proximate cause of the country’s present troubles. What’s happening in Lebanon is the death spiral of the country’s post-civil war order. Nobody—least of all the Lebanese themselves—knows what comes next.
