SerpApi.Org
In his 18-month tenure as Lebanon’s president, Gen Joseph Aoun has overseen a country trapped in a wearily familiar position.
The nation of six million is squeezed between the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia on one side, and Israeli military offensives on the other.
Israeli troops are occupying a six-mile-deep stretch of land across the country’s south, while hundreds of thousands of Lebanese remain displaced following Israeli strikes.
Yet Israel has said it will not withdraw without the disarmament of Hezbollah, which has repeatedly bombarded Israeli towns and cities with thousands of rockets and missiles, and remains heavily armed.
Hezbollah, which wields significant political and social influence in Lebanon, has rejected both the government’s direct talks with Israel and state efforts to strip it of weapons.
The agreement brokered by the US on June 26 may offer a tentative way out of that impasse, with a deal that aims to disarm Hezbollah, and secure a progressive Israeli troop withdrawal. On Monday, the US announced further plans to establish three “pilot zones” controlled by the Lebanese army in the south.
The deal is fraught with difficulty. But this week Lebanon’s army chief-turned-president will visit the White House for his country’s first such visit in nearly two decades, to enlist Donald Trump’s help.
In comments published by his office last week, Gen Aoun said he would ask Mr Trump to “exert the necessary pressure on Israel” to implement the agreement.
A Lebanese official also told Reuters that the country’s president would outline how he intended to decommission Hezbollah’s arsenal.
The official said Gen Aoun believed only Mr Trump possessed the leverage needed to pressure Israel to withdraw its troops and help Lebanon restore its sovereignty.
The June agreement “opens the door for Donald Trump to be the first American president to achieve a permanent end to the Israel-Lebanon conflict, stabilising one of the region’s most combustible front lines”, Fadi Nicholas Nassar, of the Middle East Institute think tank, wrote last week.
“The degradation of Hezbollah, the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in neighbouring Syria, and the strikes on Iran itself have created conditions that did not exist before and may not again,” Mr Nassar said.
A White House get-together would be “an opportunity for each leader to determine whether the other is serious enough to merit the substantial investment and risk needed to sever Lebanon from Iran’s orbit, disarm Tehran’s proxy Hezbollah, and pave a way toward Lebanon-Israel peace,” added Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute.
Washington would have doubts about the willingness and ability of Lebanon’s weak army to stand up to Hezbollah, Mr Satloff said.
Gen Aoun, meanwhile, will want assurances that Washington can push Israel to withdraw, and also provide much-needed resources to Lebanon’s army.
Yet Mr Satloff predicted that despite the difficulties and suspicions, the two leaders may hit it off personally.
“Trump will likely warm to Aoun, a battle-tested, war-weary Lebanese patriot who has taken a strong stand against Iran’s regional ambitions for the sake of national honour and the pursuit of peace – just the type of national leader Trump admires,” he said.
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Gen Aoun, aged 62, became president shortly before Mr Trump began his second term in the White House.
The career soldier has been twice wounded and still carries a shrapnel wound.
He is a Maronite Christian, as required by Lebanon’s sectarian power-sharing system which stipulates the prime minister must be Sunni Muslim and the speaker of parliament must be Shia.
He was born in the east Beirut suburb of Sin al-Fil, and his first army posting was as a platoon commander in the army rangers in 1985, during Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war.
His recent rise to civilian power has followed an earthquake in Lebanon’s power balance, after a devastating Israeli offensive against Hezbollah in 2024, and the ousting of the group’s Syrian ally, Bashar al-Assad.
Those events have weakened the group’s once controlling grip on the state, though it remains formidable.
At his swearing-in ceremony, Gen Aoun set out his stall, pledging to affirm “the state’s right to a monopoly on arms”.
During his first year, Lebanon deployed troops into the south to collect Hezbollah weapon caches, in line with a ceasefire after the 2024 war.
However, a new war then erupted in March this year after Hezbollah fired at Israel following US and Israeli attacks on Iran.
An Israeli air and ground campaign has since killed more than 4,300 people, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
Gen Aoun has criticised Hezbollah for starting the war and said Lebanon was being destroyed for the sake of Iran.
The feasibility of the June deal is set to be tested imminently in two “pilot zones” of southern Lebanese territory, where Israeli troops will withdraw and Lebanese troops will ensure Hezbollah has disarmed.
“The pilot areas will serve as a test of Lebanon’s ability to exercise its sovereignty in practice by implementing the agreed-upon conditions through the Lebanese Armed Forces, under the supervision of [the United States],” an Israeli official told the Jerusalem Post.
