The June 26 framework has generated endless debate about guarantees, sequencing, pilot zones, and the balance of political interests. Much of that discussion has focused on what different actors stand to gain or lose. Yet the central proposition of the framework itself is remarkably straightforward. It offers the Lebanese state an opportunity to reclaim its sovereignty and restore its monopoly over the legitimate use of arms. Not the triumph of one political camp over another, but the restoration of the state as the primary political actor.
But there is an elephant in the room, largely overlooked as everyone debates sequencing, guarantees, and pilot zones. So, let us ask the question directly: Is Lebanon economically ready for peace?
The crime of building roads
I ask this question with some personal history in mind. As a youth activist in Beirut in the 1990s, I watched one accusation follow Rafik Hariri wherever he went: he was preparing Lebanon for peace.
The Assad regime and its local clients led the prosecution, including leftist and secular groups that were always ready to offer ideological soundbites. Readiness itself became the crime. Every highway project was scrutinized through this lens. The road connecting the Al Masnaa crossing to Hasbaya was not just a road; it was a corridor for normalization. An airport expansion was not infrastructure; it was a landing strip for a warm peace. Somewhere in the 1990s, Lebanon became perhaps the only country on earth where paving a road was seen as a foreign policy position.
Then the Madrid peace process died a slow death for many reasons, one of them being the lack of committed peacemakers. The roads, tunnels, and highways, for the record, were completed anyway and, ironically, have not been upgraded since.
The world that was promised is gone
Here is what makes the question harder to answer today than before. The 1990s were the decade of globalization and connectivity. The entire logic of preparing for peace rested on a specific vision of the world: goods, capital, and people flowing across open borders, tariffs falling, the WTO expanding, and the internet promising to abolish distance itself. Rafik Hariri’s vision of making Lebanon ready for peace meant reclaiming the country’s position as a connector, translator, banker, and entrepot. Resurrecting the Eastern Mediterranean’s Switzerland or Singapore, pick your favorite overused metaphor. Peace was seen as an economic opportunity, and in a globalizing world, preparing for it seemed both logical and necessary.
Today, Lebanon is contemplating peace in an era of de-globalization and dis-connectivity. It is the era of geoeconomics. In today’s world, supply chains are being redrawn along political lines rather than cost-benefit analysis. Capital has become more selective and more heavily conditioned by compliance requirements and geopolitical risk. Trade routes are increasingly shaped not only by comparative advantage, but also by security and sovereignty. Lebanon today is a world away from the Lebanon of the 1990s. Beirut is not present on the India-Middle East-Europe corridor, nor is it part of the Gulf countries’ plans to bypass Hormuz.
The Lebanese lens: a country without a scanner
Let’s zoom in on Lebanon and see what remains of the old readiness business plan. The banking sector, the supposed comparative advantage in financial services, no longer functions in any meaningful sense. Seven years after 2019, there is still no gap law, no functioning credit, but plenty of digital wallets! The infrastructure tells the same story. State electricity remains a rumor, interrupted by occasional supply. The port, the airport, the roads, the water, and the internet: each one a case study in lack of maintenance, inefficiency, and non-transparent procurement.
The numbers provide a clearer picture: According to the 2025 Global Innovation Index, Lebanon ranked 90th out of 139 economies, 133rd in institutions, and 120th in infrastructure. The 2018 World Bank Logistics Index ranked Lebanon 79th out of 160.
Lebanon celebrated the lifting of the ban on its exports to Saudi Arabia, but the overland exports did not resume. Why? Because there is no scanner at the Al Masnaa border crossing between Lebanon and Syria. The trucks cannot be inspected as they are normally supposed to, so the goods do not move. The door was opened in Riyadh, and the opportunity died at Al Masnaa for lack of a single piece of equipment. This is the state of our readiness: we cannot fully monetize a diplomatic breakthrough that has already happened, at an existing land crossing, with an existing market, for existing products. How can we even ask whether we are ready for peace when we struggle to keep a scanner operational at the main crossing point with Syria?
So the readiness question is no longer rhetorical, and it deserves better than slogans. The crown jewel of the old model, banking, is a distant memory, and we live off it the way a family lives off the reputation of a grandfather’s business long after the shop has closed. This leads us to raise a question no one seems in a hurry to answer: Does anyone, anywhere in this country, have an economic revival plan to make Lebanon ready for peace? A plan with sequencing, financing, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), not a wish list for donors?
The pie before the oven
The cynical reading is that nobody is asking the readiness question because the political class is asking a different one. Not “how do we prepare the country for peace?” but “how do I position myself for the peace dividends?” Not readiness, but seating arrangements.
We have seen this movie before, and recently. When offshore oil and gas became the national obsession, the politically connected business elite did not wait for a single well to be drilled. Companies were incorporated, partnerships were formed, and logistics firms and service providers materialized overnight, each strategically positioned to capture its slice of a pie that existed only in PowerPoint presentations. The pie was divided before it was baked. Then Blocks 4 and 9 came up dry, and the only thing extracted from Lebanese waters was the exploration fees.
Would the elite do the same today with the peace pie? One can already imagine the sequence: the politically connected reconstruction consortium, the exclusive agencies, the teaming up with foreign investors, and the free-zone licenses, all distributed under the same logic that has governed everything in this country since Taif, with feasibility studies written after the contracts are signed. In this scenario, peace is not a national project to strengthen the state. It is a matter of who gets what.
Getting ready is the test
Last week, I wrote that the real question about the framework is whether the elite sees it as a genuine start or the latest kick of the can. Here is the economic version of the same test. A state facing the possibility of a major regional transformation should prepare for its economic spillovers rather than improvise after the fact. That means fixing the banking sector, because an economy without functioning capital flows cannot recover; investing in infrastructure, because connectivity is essential with or without peace; and asking the hard question of comparative advantage, because no political agreement can compensate for the absence of an economic model. The starting point could be to buy at least the scanner!
In the 1990s, we treated preparing for peace as an accusation. It would be a very Lebanese irony if, thirty years later, we treated it as someone else’s responsibility. Peace may or may not come. But preparing for it is already a test of whether the state and the political class have learned anything. The fear is that some are still waiting for the next regional crisis to spare them from having to answer that question.
Khalil Gebara is an academic and researcher.
The views in this story reflect those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of NOW.
