Iran International
As Washington and Islamabad push for a preliminary agreement with Iran, experts say the unresolved fight over Lebanon could determine what the region looks like after the war and how much influence Iran retains.
The US and Pakistani officials say a Memorandum of Understanding with Iran will be signed on Sunday, describing it as a step toward ending the wider conflict, but Tehran has cast doubt on the timing.
That uncertainty has kept attention on the issues still capable of derailing or reshaping any deal.
One of them is Lebanon.
Iranian officials and media reports have suggested that any broader understanding with the United States would have to include an end to fighting involving Hezbollah. Israel has rejected any arrangement that would limit its freedom of action, with Defense Minister Israel Katz saying Friday that Israel would continue operating in Lebanon regardless of any agreement with Tehran.
The dispute reflects a larger reality taking shape across the Middle East: even if a preliminary Iran-US agreement moves forward, the struggle over Lebanon may decide what kind of post-war order follows it.
For veteran Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller, Tehran’s focus on Lebanon is no accident.
“I think they are using Lebanon now to try to push Trump to push Netanyahu and to establish a new equation,” Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Eye for Iran.
For decades, Hezbollah served as Iran’s primary deterrent against direct attacks on Iranian territory. Now, Miller argues, Tehran is attempting to reverse that logic by making Hezbollah itself the red line.
Lebanon, he said, has become even more important to Iran after setbacks elsewhere in its regional network. The result is a new dynamic in which military action in Lebanon risks triggering a wider confrontation involving Iran directly.
“The concern about Lebanon and the Persian Gulf is that they provide ample opportunities for miscalculation or kinetic interaction,” Miller said.
The repercussions are already being felt beyond Lebanon.
Mohamed Fahmy, an Egyptian-Canadian journalist and Middle East political analyst who recently returned from reporting in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, said the war has altered how Iran is viewed across parts of the Arab world.
“There is a scar that has changed the psyche of people there towards how Iran is viewed,” Fahmy said.
Fahmy said governments across the region are now grappling with questions about deterrence, security and their future relationship with Tehran as missile and drone attacks continue despite diplomatic efforts.
The shifting landscape is also reshaping traditional assumptions about power in the Middle East.
“If you ask me who are the three most powerful players in the region, they’re the three non-Arabs: Israel, Turkey and Iran,” Miller said.
“The three states that dominated Middle Eastern politics for decades, Egypt, Iraq and Syria, are all offline.”
That makes Lebanon more than a side issue in the diplomacy around Iran. It is one of the places where the limits of any agreement may be tested first: whether Iran can preserve the deterrent value of Hezbollah, whether Israel can keep striking without triggering a wider war, and whether Washington can turn a preliminary understanding with Tehran into a more durable regional arrangement.
'The only real end is Iran regime change'
For former US special representative for Iran Elliott Abrams, the debate over Lebanon points to a larger question about the future of the Islamic Republic itself.
“The only real end of this is the end of the regime, which is to say, let the Iranian people govern themselves,” Abrams told Eye for Iran.
Looking beyond the immediate fighting, Abrams argued that the significance of the war may not ultimately be measured by what happens in Lebanon, but by what happens inside Iran.
“If the regime falls in a few years, we’ll all look back on early 2026 and say that’s when it started.”
For now, Lebanon remains one of the clearest tests of the emerging Iran-US track. A preliminary agreement may slow the war, but experts say the unresolved fight over Hezbollah and Israel’s freedom of action could still shape what comes after it.
