FDD’s Badran on Tuesday predicted additional deadlock.

“This guy is not going to become president, full stop,” Badran said. “He is being put forward as a blocking option so that they can then negotiate on a figure who is not the guy that Hezbollah is pushing as its lead candidate.”

As Israel Watches, Hezbollah Sees Opportunity

One actor potentially taking advantage of the chaos in Lebanon is Russia, which has become increasingly reliant on Iran for support in the invasion of Ukraine and which the Treasury Department says is now cooperating with Hezbollah in a partnership to evade US sanctions.

Matthew Levitt, a former US Treasury official now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who co-wrote a report in May on the “nascent alliance” between Hezbollah and Russia, told The Algemeiner this was a “powerful opportunity” for the terrorist group.

“The Russians are involved not just with anybody, but with people like Muhammad Qasir, who is Hezbollah’s point person for facilitating money transfers, weapons, technology for Hezbollah from around the world,” Levitt said. “That’s a sign of just how deeply they’re engaged in this. Hezbollah doesn’t need Russia to provide them warplanes, but from small arms to explosives, to potentially providing rockets of different types to Iran, through Iran, for them is a game changer.”

The potential stakes of that relationship were highlighted in April when 36 rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel, the largest such rocket attack since the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war. While Israel exclusively blamed a Lebanon-based contingent of Hamas for the rocket fire, an IDF spokesman said that the IDF believed Hezbollah was also aware of the attack.

In May, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah continued to saber rattle in his response to a warning from the head of Israel’s military intelligence directorate that Nasrallah was on the brink of provoking a war.

“You are not the ones to threaten a grand war; we are the ones who rather threaten you with it,” Nasrallah said. “Any mistake might blow up the entire region.”

Levitt said Russia’s new relationship with Hezbollah means that Israel may face more complex interactions with Russia given its involvement not just in Syria but now in Lebanon as well.

“Israel has to balance lots of different things, including its ability to continue carrying out strikes, targeting things like weapons deliveries to Hezbollah in Syria,” Levitt said. “And it needs to be able to continue communicating with Russia to deconflict. And Russia wants that relationship too. But it does present an opportunity for Hezbollah to be able to get all the benefits that a state like Russia has to offer…whether it’s actual weapons, whether it’s using Russia to help shape whatever the ‘new normal’ is going to be in Lebanon, in a way that is less in line with what the United States and the West would like to see, and more in line with what Iran and Syria and now Russia would like to see. So we’re at a bit of an inflection point.” 

An Iran-Saudi Détente?

One key dynamic in Lebanon’s future is whether Saudi Arabia will re-engage with the country financially and politically in the wake of a March agreement facilitated by China to re-establish relations between Saudi Arabia and Hezbollah’s primary patron, Iran.

US officials have downplayed the significance of the Beijing negotiations amid concern from analysts and lawmakers that a rapprochement between two of the most powerful countries in the region negotiated by America’s greatest rival might threaten US interests.

“They didn’t broker or anything,” US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf said of China’s role at a Congressional hearing on Tuesday. “They hosted a meeting at which the Iranians and the Saudis worked out an arrangement, essentially détente. It’s not a ‘reconciliation.’ It’s not a ‘rapprochement.’ It’s simply a relaxation of tensions.”

Stephanie Williams, a former UN and State Department official who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, made a similar assessment to The Algemeiner.

“I’m not sure that it’s unlocked very much so far,” Williams said of the Saudi-Iranian agreement. “This is also happening in the context of Syria’s reintegration or normalization within the Arab world. What have the Saudis gotten for this? You can point to [the truce agreement in] Yemen. But it doesn’t seem that Bashar [al-Assad] has been dealt a lesson. He’s not at all recalcitrant in his behavior.”

FDD’s Badran said that despite the Biden administration’s public objections to Arab states normalizing relations with Assad, diplomatic “reintegration” between the region’s pro-Iran bloc and Saudi Arabia is effectively Biden administration policy as it continues to pursue a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear program and has shifted the terms of Arab normalization with Israel to include a greater role for the Palestinians. While the Saudis have now aligned with that new reality, they haven’t yet invested in it politically or financially, including in Lebanon, which Saudi Arabia wrote off as an Iranian satrapy when they cut billions of dollars in aid in 2016.

“These things are question marks,” Badran said. “And we have to wait and see how they develop.”