Say it once, and perhaps we did not fully grasp your meaning.
Say it twice, and we might excuse it as a diplomatic misstep.
Say it three times, in three different regional forums, and we can no longer pretend it is an accident.
It becomes a worldview. One that requires a serious response.
Over the past months, U.S. envoy Tom Barrack has offered a sequence of public statements about Lebanon and Syria that reveal a coherent vision of the region, even if he has not stated it explicitly. The places differ, the audiences differ, yet the thread connecting his remarks is unmistakable: Lebanon is not seen as a sovereign political project, but as a fragment of a larger, civilizational space whose borders, identity and fate are negotiable.
The first moment comes not from a single event but from a series of public statements in which Barrack dismissed the modern Middle East as an artificial construct imposed by Western powers. He has argued repeatedly that there is “no Middle East,” only tribes and villages, and that what we now call nation-states are the by-products of European engineering under Sykes–Picot. His tone has been one of historical correction. An attempt to remind the region that its borders were drawn by outsiders and therefore should not be treated as sacred. What might pass elsewhere as abstract geopolitical commentary lands very differently in Lebanon. For a small state whose very existence has been contested, resisted and reasserted for a century, casual references to the artificiality of borders signal something deeper: a willingness to imagine the map differently, to treat established sovereignties as mistakes waiting to be fixed.
The second moment crystallized at the Manama Dialogue in Bahrain, where Barrack declared Lebanon a “failed state.” He did not frame this as an analytical diagnosis but as a downgrading. An announcement that Lebanon, in the eyes of an American envoy, has forfeited the status of a functioning polity. In contrast, he described post-Assad Syria with surprising enthusiasm, praising its “remarkable transformation” and portraying it as an emerging partner for regional stability. The juxtaposition was striking. Lebanon’s chaotic pluralism, however dysfunctional, was reduced to failure, while Syria’s heavy, centralized authority – still carrying the weight of war and repression – was elevated as a template for future order. It was not an observation; it was a hierarchy. In that hierarchy, stability trumps democracy, authority trumps plurality, and Lebanon’s disorder becomes a justification for treating it as a problem to be managed rather than a state to be supported.
The third moment came in Doha, where the subtext became explicit. From the stage of the 2025 Forum, Barrack declared that Lebanon and Syria “must be brought together” or at least “brought closer”, because they form a single “remarkable civilization.” He spoke of examining both countries through a “unified lens” and suggested that resolving their crises requires treating them as parts of the same political and cultural unit. With that one statement, a century of Lebanese struggle for sovereignty and self-definition was reframed as an inconvenient divergence from a more “natural” Levantine whole. It was not simply a proposal for cooperation; it was a civilizational argument for erasing or diluting Lebanon’s distinctness.
Taken together, these three moments form a coherent message. Barrack’s remarks reveal a worldview in which civilizations matter more than states, in which borders are mistakes rather than achievements, and in which Lebanon’s political identity is an open file, not a settled fact. In this worldview, small nations are inevitably absorbed into larger narratives; sovereignty is a flexible negotiation; and the future of the Levant is not to be determined by its peoples but by the historical forces – or nostalgic fantasies – that outsiders believe ought to shape it.
To be fair, Barrack does not speak as the entire United States. The official language of the State Department still affirms Lebanese sovereignty, UN resolutions and institutional reform. Congressional positions remain cautious. But Barrack’s rhetoric is not an isolated quirk. It reflects a broader shift in Western thinking after the failures of the Arab Spring and the catastrophes of regional and international interventions. Increasingly, stability is prioritized over democracy, strong central authority over pluralism, and civilizational or sectarian frames over state-based ones. What Barrack says plainly, others often imply quietly.
Lebanon must take this pattern seriously. Our crisis is real. Our institutions have collapsed under corruption, sectarian fragmentation and elite misrule. But none of this negates Lebanon’s right to sovereignty, nor justifies treating it as an appendage of a larger “civilizational” project. Lebanon’s borders were not given to it; they were fought for, negotiated, contested and defended. Our political identity was not an accident of French cartography but the product of pluralism, coexistence and the painful effort to build a space where multiple communities could share a state without dissolving into each other.
Tom Barrack’s repeated comments invite us to imagine Lebanon’s future through someone else’s map. Our responsibility is to say clearly that the map is ours, not his. Stability may be necessary, reform urgent, external support indispensable; but Lebanon’s sovereignty is not a variable, and our identity is not a civilizational footnote.
Say it once, and we may overlook it.
Say it twice, and we may excuse it.
Say it three times, and we understand exactly what you believe, and why we must answer.
Ramzi Abou Ismail is a Political Psychologist and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Justice and Conflict Resolution at the Lebanese American University.
The views in this story reflect those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of NOW
