Thread by @BeirutCalling

Reading the apocalyptic headlines in Lebanese newspapers today, one can reach certain clear conclusions. First, that the political class, starting with Hezbollah, has no clue about how to resolve Lebanon's escalating economic and financial problems.

The mode of operation in the past 31 years has been to resolve all problems by dividing the spoils among the political-financial-sectarian cartel and otherwise leaving all problems as they were, bringing in governments to keep this unsustainable system alive.

Now it has all gone tits up—a perfect storm of misery is hitting the country and nothing can contain it. The only ones trying are Western and Gulf countries and international financial institutions, but the idiots here are still paralyzed, fighting over control of a corpse.

Hezbollah, the most powerful political actor in the country, is perhaps best equipped to survive the maelstrom, but even then it offers nothing but more misery if it takes Lebanon into a confrontation with the West and the Arab world, especially the Gulf states.

The only way out is to secure an IMF loan to begin to think of emerging from this. But it's been a year and a half that the cartel has done nothing in this regard. It still refuses to give anything up, and its members have no mechanism to even bargain over mutual concessions.

Our president is semiconscious, if that; we have no prime minister, while the caretaker PM in office is the personification of uselessness; and the speaker of parliament merely wants to revive the previous elite arrangement by bringing Hariri back to power.

The only way out of this monumental mess is an explosion that forces the incompetent and useless cartel to accept that the game is up. They're resisting reform, but without reform they won't be able to control what happens, so widespread is the anger.

Does this mean reform is inevitable? Perhaps, but it may take time. The cartel will try to buy time and ultimately resolve this in the only way it knows—by bringing in one of its own as PM, to maintain control over the process and deal with international financial institutions.

Hezbollah would not be happy with such a direction, but there is little it can do. Even Iran has had to deal with the IMF, so Hezbollah will have to go along with it, because the alternatives the party offers are nonsensical and resolve absolutely nothing.

Will this shake Hezbollah's control over the system? That is already visible, as the party's remedy for the crisis has been to deal with matters in a Shia-specific context. Nasrallah's handle on the situation is at best tentative, each of his speeches showing his ineffectiveness.

Anyway, how can Hezbollah control a system when the system itself is collapsing? Its miscalculation in 2019 was a failure to understand that it could not protect the order in place that had robbed the country. Today its resistance agenda sounds out of touch and irrelevant.

While I remain optimistic that in the end Lebanon will have no choice but to deal with the IMF, in the interim there will be more suffering, more costly and ineffective patch-ups to buy time, causing rising tensions. This will only waste time, to no avail.

That the French, the U.S., and the Gulf states are the only ones bothering with Lebanon will show the Lebanese that there is no hope for the country if it isolates itself in the suicidal Axis of Resistance, which has brought only destruction and failure to the countries in it.

But Iran will not go away, nor will Hezbollah. However, the party has poisoned the well it drank from. It cannot impose order; it has no solution to Lebanon's problems; the only alternative is to find a new modus vivendi with what comes afterward. This may mean concessions.

The reality is that since the port explosion, Lebanon has become increasingly a shared enterprise. France, Turkey, Qatar, Egypt, even the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have all involved themselves in the country, watering down Iran's hegemony to an extent, or allowing this.

The army is the sole institution that retains national credibility and that can contain the possibility of chaos in the future, hence international aid for the institution. What the army gains, Hezbollah loses, regardless of what right-wing ideologues in the U.S. tell you.

Ultimately, it will be difficult for Lebanon to avoid change, and it will be difficult for Hezbollah to prevent change, if only because when it di so in 2019, it trapped itself and heightened the contradictions of the political cartel that are now causing its downfall.

The dynamics unleashed will not be smooth, and Hezbollah will try to hinder them. But even the Shia are tired and impoverished, as many benefited from the state. We're reaching a climax and one thing is certain: the postwar system is definitely transitioning to something else.