Lebanon Turns a Political Page as Hezbollah’s Hold Is Weakened
For decades, Hezbollah’s grip on Lebanon was iron tight.
With its vast arsenal, the militant group was more powerful than the country’s national military. It controlled or held sway over Lebanon’s most important government agencies as well as critical infrastructure, like its border with Syria and commercial port. Almost no major political decisions could be made without its backing, and no political party could seriously challenge any move it, or its patron Iran, made.
But that longstanding status quo has now been shaken — a turnabout for Hezbollah that has opened a new political chapter in Lebanon.
Fourteen months of fighting against Israel has left the once untouchable Shiite Muslim group battered. Rebels toppled its main ally in neighboring Syria, the dictator Bashar al-Assad. Iran also now finds itself weakened as it and its allies have been hit hard by Israel.
Hezbollah is on its shakiest ground in years, as power dynamics are being realigned across the Middle East after more than a year of war and turmoil. And while the group remains powerful — it still has many thousands of fighters and commands the loyalty of most of the country’s Shiite Muslims — analysts say one thing is clear: The era of Hezbollah and Iran’s unshakable dominance in Lebanon appears to be over.
“It’s a new political reality,” said Mohanad Hage Ali, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “It will take time for this new reality to unfold,” he added, “but what we’ve seen so far is enough to show us that the tide has turned.”
Those shifting political sands were laid bare on Thursday, when Lebanon’s Parliament elected a new president, overcoming years of political gridlock that many critics attributed to Hezbollah’s efforts to block any attempt at resolution. The political paralysis has left the country under the direction of a weak and ineffectual caretaker government for more than two years.
In Lebanon, many saw the election on Thursday of Gen. Joseph Aoun, the commander of the Lebanese military, as a crucial step toward bringing stability to the country. It was also seen as a concession by Hezbollah and, some analysts said, an acknowledgment that the group was no longer in a position to paralyze the state.
Since Lebanon’s founding, a multitude of factions and sects from the country’s more than a dozen religious groups have jockeyed for power and influence. Its fragile political system relies on agreements among parties and sects, as well as their foreign backers. That system has held the country together by a thread as it has careened from crisis to crisis since a 15-year civil war ended in 1990.
Over the past three decades, Hezbollah — which is both a political party and a militant group — has outmaneuvered its domestic foes and struck strategic alliances to cement its position as the real power underpinning the country’s weak and fractious state.
Even as the government struggled to keep the lights on and water running, Hezbollah built up a vast network of social services — including high-quality health care and free education — for its mostly Shiite supporters.
But over the past three months, the group has been dealt a series of devastating blows.
Its war with Israel wiped out Hezbollah’s top brass, destroyed large chunks of its arsenal and left the country with a multibillion-dollar bill for reconstruction. Its stinging defeat also shattered Hezbollah’s promise to Lebanese that it alone could defend Lebanon from Israel — a claim that served as the group’s official raison d’être.
Then last month, the group lost its main land bridge for weapons and cash, as well as a political ally, when Syrian rebels, whom Hezbollah had once fought, toppled the Assad government.
Hezbollah’s patron Iran has also been on the defensive since Mr. al-Assad’s ouster and given its own escalating tension with Israel, including direct conflict through rocket fire.
Iran’s web of anti-Israel militias, known as the Axis of Resistance — Hezbollah was a key player — has unraveled, taking with it Tehran’s ability to project power as far west as the Mediterranean and south to the Arabian Sea.
Without those pillars of support, Hezbollah’s ability to influence Lebanese politics has diminished, even as the group and its allies try to present themselves as the country’s agenda setters. Their dwindling sway was evident even before the vote when, late Wednesday night, the presidential candidate backed by Hezbollah withdrew from the race.
Hezbollah’s “narrative has been seriously discredited, its military has been seriously weakened and, in my view, politically it will have to start paying the price,” said Sami Nader, the director of the Political Sciences Institute at Saint Joseph University of Beirut.
Most experts agree that even in its weakened state, Hezbollah remains Lebanon’s most dominant political force. But that, they say, is less a testament to the group’s hold on power and more a reflection of the country’s political dysfunction and infighting. That dysfunction was on full display during the parliamentary vote on Thursday, which frequently descended into shouting matches before the votes were cast.
The election on Thursday of General Aoun as president is the first step in determining a new political map for the country and the region, analysts say. General Aoun is widely considered to have the backing of the United States and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis once vied for influence in Lebanon before being eclipsed by Iran and Hezbollah.
In his victory speech, General Aoun hinted at the vision he and his allies share for a new political era in Lebanon, and said the day marked “a new phase in Lebanon’s history.”
He referred to Arab countries, once pushed out of Lebanon by Iran, as “brotherly” nations. He spoke of the state’s “right to monopolize the possession of weapons” — a subtle reference to calls for Hezbollah to be disarmed after its 60-day cease-fire with Israel ends later this month. And he envisioned a state that could be defended by its own national army, absent the militias like Hezbollah that have long dragged the country into infighting and war.
“My pledge is to call for a defensive strategy and the establishment of a state — I repeat, a state — that invests in its army, controls all borders and implements international resolutions,” General Aoun said.
Still, experts caution that the country is still in the early days of this new political chapter — and that Hezbollah may yet rebound. The coming months will be filled with critical litmus tests for the group, including whether it can help rebuild the large swaths of the country devastated by the war and whether it fully withdraws from southern Lebanon, as outlined in the cease-fire deal.
“Hezbollah has been dealt staggering blows in terms of its strategic powers and its ability to confront Israel,” said Paul Salem, the vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “But inside Lebanon, it remains a very heavily armed group, more powerful than any other in the country.”
2024 Brought the World to a Dangerous Warming Threshold. Now What?
At the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31, Earth finished up its hottest year in recorded history, scientists said on Friday. The previous hottest year was 2023. And the next one will be upon us before long: By continuing to burn huge amounts of coal, oil and gas, humankind has all but guaranteed it.
The planet’s record-high average temperature last year reflected the weekslong, 104-degree-Fahrenheit spring heat waves that shuttered schools in Bangladesh and India. It reflected the effects of the bathtub-warm ocean waters that supercharged hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and cyclones in the Philippines. And it reflected the roasting summer and fall conditions that primed Los Angeles this week for the most destructive wildfires in its history.
“We are facing a very new climate and new challenges, challenges that our society is not prepared for,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European Union monitoring agency.
But even within this progression of warmer years and ever-intensifying risks to homes, communities and the environment, 2024 stood out in another unwelcome way. According to the World Meteorological Organization, it was the first year in which global temperatures averaged more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above those the planet experienced at the start of the industrial age.
For the past decade, the world has sought to avoid crossing this dangerous threshold. Nations enshrined the goal in the 2015 Paris agreement to fight climate change. “Keep 1.5 alive” was the mantra at United Nations summits.
Yet here we are. Global temperatures will fluctuate somewhat, as they always do, which is why scientists often look at warming averaged over longer periods, not just a single year.
But even by that standard, staying below 1.5 degrees looks increasingly unattainable, according to researchers who have run the numbers. Globally, despite hundreds of billions of dollars invested in clean-energy technologies, carbon dioxide emissions hit a record in 2024 and show no signs of dropping.
One recent study published in the journal Nature concluded that the absolute best humanity can now hope for is around 1.6 degrees of warming. To achieve it, nations would need to start slashing emissions at a pace that would strain political, social and economic feasibility.
But what if we’d started earlier?
“It was guaranteed we’d get to this point where the gap between reality and the trajectory we needed for 1.5 degrees was so big it was ridiculous,” said David Victor, a professor of public policy at the University of California, San Diego.
The question now is what, if anything, should replace 1.5 as a lodestar for nations’ climate aspirations.
“These top-level goals are at best a compass,” Dr. Victor said. “They’re a reminder that if we don’t do more, we’re in for significant climate impacts.”
The 1.5-degree threshold was never the difference between safety and ruin, between hope and despair. It was a number negotiated by governments trying to answer a big question: What’s the highest global temperature increase — and the associated level of dangers, whether heat waves or wildfires or melting glaciers — that our societies should strive to avoid?
The result, as codified in the Paris agreement, was that nations would aspire to hold warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius while “pursuing efforts” to limit it to 1.5 degrees.
Even at the time, some experts called the latter goal unrealistic, because it required such deep and rapid emissions cuts. Still, the United States, the European Union and other governments adopted it as a guidepost for climate policy.
Christoph Bertram, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland’s Center for Global Sustainability, said the urgency of the 1.5 target spurred companies of all kinds — automakers, cement manufacturers, electric utilities — to start thinking hard about what it would mean to zero out their emissions by midcentury. “I do think that has led to some serious action,” Dr. Bertram said.
But the high aspiration of the 1.5 target also exposed deep fault lines among nations.
China and India never backed the goal, since it required them to curb their use of coal, gas and oil at a pace they said would hamstring their development. Rich countries that were struggling to cut their own emissions began choking off funding in the developing world for fossil-fuel projects that were economically beneficial. Some low-income countries felt it was deeply unfair to ask them to sacrifice for the climate given that it was wealthy nations — and not them — that had produced most of the greenhouse gases now warming the world.
“The 1.5-degree target has created a lot of tension between rich and poor countries,” said Vijaya Ramachandran, director for energy and development at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research organization.
Costa Samaras, an environmental-engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, compared the warming goals to health officials’ guidelines on, say, cholesterol. “We don’t set health targets on what’s realistic or what’s possible,” Dr. Samaras said. “We say, ‘This is what’s good for you. This is how you’re going to not get sick.’”
“If we were going to say, ‘Well, 1.5 is likely out of the question, let’s put it to 1.75,’ it gives people a false sense of assurance that 1.5 was not that important,” said Dr. Samaras, who helped shape U.S. climate policy from 2021 to 2024 in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “It’s hugely important.”
Scientists convened by the United Nations have concluded that restricting warming to 1.5 degrees instead of 2 would spare tens of millions of people from being exposed to life-threatening heat waves, water shortages and coastal flooding. It might mean the difference between a world that has coral reefs and Arctic sea ice in the summer, and one that doesn’t.
Each tiny increment of additional warming, whether it’s 1.6 degrees versus 1.5, or 1.7 versus 1.6, increases the risks. “Even if the world overshoots 1.5 degrees, and the chances of this happening are increasing every day, we must keep striving” to bring emissions to zero as soon as possible, said Inger Andersen, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Program.
Officially, the sun has not yet set on the 1.5 target. The Paris agreement remains in force, even as President-elect Donald J. Trump vows to withdraw the United States from it for a second time. At U.N. climate negotiations, talk of 1.5 has become more muted compared with years past. But it has hardly gone away.
“With appropriate measures, 1.5 Celsius is still achievable,” Cedric Schuster, the minister of natural resources and environment for the Pacific island nation of Samoa, said at last year’s summit in Azerbaijan. Countries should “rise to the occasion with new, highly ambitious” policies, he said.
To Dr. Victor of U.C. San Diego, it is strange but all too predictable that governments keep speaking this way about what appears to be an unachievable aim. “No major political leader who wants to be taken seriously on climate wants to stick their neck out and say, ‘1.5 degrees isn’t feasible. Let’s talk about more realistic goals,’” he said.
Still, the world will eventually need to have that discussion, Dr. Victor said. And it’s unclear how it will go.
“It could be constructive, where we start asking, ‘How much warming are we really in for? And how do we deal with that?’” he said. “Or it could look very toxic, with a bunch of political finger pointing.”
Israel Strikes Ports and a Power Plant in Houthi-Controlled Parts of Yemen
Israeli fighter jets bombed ports and a power plant in Yemeni territory controlled by the Houthis on Friday, the Israeli military said, in the latest attempt to force the Iranian-backed militant group to stop firing at Israel and commercial ships in the Red Sea.
Israel has escalated its strikes on the Houthis in recent weeks in response to repeated attacks by the Yemeni militia, which has been firing on Israel in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza.
The United States and Britain have also struck Yemen repeatedly in an effort to secure international waterways from Houthi attacks. But it was far from clear whether Israel and its allies could successfully compel the Houthis to end their attacks through a bombing campaign.
Israel’s Air Force bombed the Hezyaz power station near Sana — the Houthi-controlled capital — not far from where thousands of Yemenis had gathered in a weekly solidarity rally with Palestinians. The ports of Hudaydah and Ras Isa, Yemen’s main oil export terminal were also attacked, the Israeli military said in a statement.
Experts have warned that attacking ports like Hudaydah, a major conduit for essential supplies in northern Yemen, could further worsen what is already one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Rocked by civil war for more than a decade, millions of people in Yemen face the threat of malnutrition, according to the United Nations.
The Israeli military said it had struck targets at sites that were being used by the Houthis for military purposes. One worker at the Hezyaz power station was wounded, according to al-Masira, the Houthi-affiliated broadcaster. There were no other immediate reports of serious casualties.
“The port of Hudaydah is paralyzed and the port of Ras Isa is ablaze,” Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, said in a statement. “The message is clear: Anyone who harms Israel will be struck tenfold.”
The Houthis are more than 1,000 miles from Israeli territory and have survived numerous efforts to defeat them since they rose to power in Yemen’s decade-long civil war. The United States designates the Houthis as a terrorist group, and some of its regional allies — like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — have targeted them as well.
Since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 prompted the Gaza war, the Houthis have fired hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel. They have also hampered global shipping by firing at passing commercial barges in a self-declared effort to enforce a blockade on Israel.
Over the past two months, the Houthis have stepped up their attacks, sending Israelis across central Israel rushing for bomb shelters late at night as air-raid sirens blare. On Thursday, Houthi militants fired three drones at Israeli territory; the Israeli military said it intercepted them all.
Israel has bombarded Yemen several times in response — sending its fighter jets more than 1,000 miles to do so — but has struggled to decisively subdue the Houthis. The United States and its allies have also struck the Houthis repeatedly over the past year without decisively deterring them from future attacks.
After the strikes on Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, said “the Houthis are paying, and will continue to pay, a heavy price for their aggression against us.”
On Friday, Mr. Katz threatened to kill Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the group’s leader, as well as its other commanders.
“No one is immune,” Mr. Katz said. “We will hunt you down and destroy the terror infrastructure which you built. Israel’s long arm will reach you, wherever you are.”
Johnatan Reisscontributed reporting from Tel Aviv.
He is an autocrat condemned inside and outside his country as having stolen the nation’s last election. Yet on Friday, Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president who has overseen his country’s dramatic decline — including runaway inflation, blackouts, hunger, mass migration and the unraveling of the nation’s democracy — was sworn in for a third term in office.
At the ceremony in Caracas, the capital, Mr. Maduro raised his left hand and declared that he would preside over a period of “peace, prosperity, equality and new democracy.”
“I swear before history!” he shouted.
If he serves the full six years, it will extend his party’s reign into its third decade.
Mr. Maduro returns to Miraflores, the presidential palace in Caracas, even after millions of Venezuelans used the ballot box to express a desire for change. And he will do so amid his harshest crackdown yet, with the police and military in riot gear blanketing the streets of the capital; journalists, activists and community leaders in prison; and a broad expansion of his surveillance apparatus.
The man the United States and others say won the election, Edmundo González, remains in exile, forced to flee to Spain or face arrest, while the country’s most important opposition leader, María Corina Machado, has been in hiding inside Venezuela.
On Thursday she emerged for the first time since August, joining street protests against Mr. Maduro in Caracas. She stood atop a truck while thousands of supporters, all risking detention, shouted “freedom! freedom! freedom!”
Afterward, she was briefly detained by unidentified adversaries and then released.
There have been few other recent protests against the government, and the ever-present threat that security forces will imprison civilians is likely to make it difficult for Ms. Machado to continue to rally supporters to the streets.
Mr. González has said he will return to Venezuela on Friday for his own swearing in — but the government has placed a $100,000 bounty on his head, and it’s unclear how he plans to avoid arrest if he does so.
For his part, Mr. Maduro faces the possibility that President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has filled his foreign policy team with Maduro foes, will take a hard line against him, possibly imposing more economic sanctions.
In response, the Venezuelan leader has spent the last six months amassing a cache of foreign prisoners, which analysts and former U.S. diplomats say he hopes to use as a bargaining tool in negotiations with the United States and other nations.
Since July, Venezuelan security forces have picked up about 50 visitors and dual-passport holders from more than a dozen countries, according to the watchdog group Foro Penal.
“They are pawns to be exchanged,” said Gonzalo Himiob, a founder of Foro Penal.
Mr. Maduro wants the removal of U.S. sanctions, which have battered the Venezuelan economy, and international recognition, among other policy changes.
Venezuelan officials say they have detained at least nine people with American citizenship or resident status, with officials accusing some of them of plotting to kill Mr. Maduro.
The United States has no diplomatic presence in Venezuela, and a State Department representative said the U.S. government was not even sure where its citizens were being held.
Relatives of three detained U.S. citizens said that they had not heard from their loved ones since they disappeared months ago and have received only limited communication from their own government.
David Estrella, 64, a father of five, had crossed into Venezuela by land from Colombia on Sept. 9, according to his former wife, Elvia Macias, 44.
Ms. Macias, who is close to her ex-husband, described him as an “adventurer” who — full of optimism that the situation in Venezuela was “not that bad” — had gone to visit friends.
He worked in quality control for pharmaceutical companies in New Jersey, was preparing to retire and had already visited Venezuela once before, she said.
Ms. Macias cried as she recounted celebrating Christmas without him.
“This situation has had a tremendous impact on our lives,” she said.
Mr. Maduro’s socialist-inspired movement has run the country since 1999, when his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, took office. In July, Mr. Maduro faced his most difficult electoral challenge yet, facing off against Mr. González, a former diplomat who became the surrogate for Ms. Machado when the government barred her from running.
Even amid a stepped-up repression campaign, many Venezuelans came out in force to support Mr. González. And in the days after the election, the opposition collected thousands of vote tally sheets, publishing them online and saying they showed that Mr. González had won by a landslide.
Mr. Maduro nevertheless declared victory, an assertion questioned by independent observers, including the Carter Center, the United Nations and a member of the country’s electoral council.
The United States has recognized Mr. González as the winner — and even Maduro allies like presidents Gustavo Petro of Colombia and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, both leftist neighbors of Venezuela, have distanced themselves.
Neither will attend the inauguration.
Mr. Maduro has held foreigners for political purposes before. But never has his government held so many at once, according to Foro Penal, the watchdog group.
Some analysts said Mr. Maduro had decided to arrest foreigners because he has seen that it gets him what he wants.
In 2022 and then again in 2023, the United States struck deals with the Venezuelan government, in which Washington released high-profile Venezuelan allies in exchange for U.S. citizens held by Mr. Maduro.
This was a part of a shift in American dealings with governments and others who capture Americans abroad.
In the past, U.S. policy was not to negotiate with captors, out of fear that cutting deals would encourage the taking of hostages.
But this left detained Americans with little hope of rescue, and critics said it even contributed to the deaths of people like James Foley, a journalist killed by ISIS in Syria in 2014.
The United States has since shown more willingness to negotiate. But some critics maintain that provokes the very practice Mr. Maduro is engaged in.
Tom Shannon, who served in a high-ranking State Department role in the Obama and Trump administrations, said he believed Mr. Maduro had been encouraged by recent hostage deals with Russia and Iran.
Still, he did not think cutting deals was a mistake.
“I think one of our jobs is to take care of American citizens abroad,’’ Mr. Shannon said. “And it’s very difficult just to write people off and say, ‘oh bad luck, so sorry.’”
Instead, he said the U.S. government should “inflict levels of pain on the kidnappers that make it clear that this is not going to happen again.”
Other U.S. citizens detained in Venezuela include Wilbert Castañeda, 37, a Navy SEAL who traveled to Venezuela to visit his girlfriend, according to his mother, Petra Castañeda, 60.
Mr. Castañeda, a father of four, was apprehended by the authorities in late August. By September his face had been plastered across state television, with Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela’s interior minister, accusing him and others of participating in a plot to assassinate the president.
Ms. Castañeda, who lives in California, said her son was innocent.
“The whole family is very worried, we are desperate,” she said. “We are clinging to the hope that the United States will be able to reach an agreement with Mr. Maduro.”
Stephen William Logan, 83, a retired teacher in West Virginia, said he did not even realize his son Aaron Barrett Logan, 34, had gone to Venezuela. Then, in September, his family got a call from State Department officials, notifying them that he had been detained.
Mr. Logan said his son worked in the United States for a major bank as a “penetration tester” — testing the bank’s security by trying to hack into its systems.
Mr. Cabello accused the younger Mr. Logan of being involved in the same assassination plot.
“I don’t even know how to visualize it,” the older Mr. Logan said of the conditions his son was living in, wondering if it was like “a concentration camp.”
Representatives of Mr. Trump’s transition team declined to comment. None of the U.S. detainees have been declared wrongfully detained by the State Department, a designation that could get them more help from within the U.S. government.
In Caracas, many attended Thursday’s anti-Maduro protest even though similar gatherings have been met with violence from security forces and ended in the deaths of participants.
Among those in the streets was Laura Matos, 21, who said “everyone” had told her “don’t go out.”
But “last night I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I said, ‘I want something to happen, I want President-elect Edmundo González to be sworn in, I want Venezuela to experience a change.’”
“We don’t deserve to be like this,” she went on, as fellow protesters blew plastic horns around her. “We deserve more, to have a better future. Young people like me deserve to be able to study and work and stay in our country.’’
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.