Why Morgan Ortagus Sounds More Lebanese Than Many
There’s something almost embarrassing, Lebanese-embarrassing, about watching an American stroll into our political house of cards and, within minutes, see more clearly than most of the people who claim to own it.
Enter Morgan Ortagus. A woman with precisely zero Lebanese ancestry, no village to romanticize, no uncle who once met Camille Chamoun, no grandmother who stocks up food “just in case.” And yet, somehow, she speaks about Lebanon with a clarity our own public figures can barely fake on their most caffeinated days.
You know it. I know it. And the public felt it the moment she strolled in. She speaks plainly. She doesn’t hide behind “regional stakeholder engagement” jargon or the mystical fog-machine rhetoric that lets everyone leave a room believing it was informative when, in fact, nothing was said.
Her style is clean. Her delivery crisp. Her words unpolluted by nostalgias or phobias that weigh down even our best and brightest. And that contrast is where our story truly begins.
The Art of Saying Nothing With Conviction
Enter Tom Barrack. A man of Lebanese origin in the same sense Coca-Cola becomes Lebanese when bottled in Zahle. A man whose ideological ancestry seems soaked in fascination for “stability,” also known as tyranny in black tie or robe longue.
Barrack speaks about the region like someone who read the wrong chapters of history and the right chapters of ICG policy papers. His emotional distance from Lebanon is so vast you’d think he was on a world tour auditioning for Mullahs in Tehran or Brothers in Ankara; determined to prove he has completely outgrown the country whose roots he selectively references when convenient
This is the Lebanese paradox. We produce a brilliant civil society and catastrophic public figures. Citizens who can run entire sectors while the state is collapsing, yet elites who cannot complete a coherent sentence without blaming “the system,” “sectarianism,” “corruption,” or whichever abstract noun is fashionable that week.
What they all avoid is the obvious: Lebanon has been held in a constant state of organized war for decades. Countries trapped in such conditions do not produce Einsteins and Mother Teresas in charge. They produce survivalists, opportunists, charlatans, and philosophers of selective amnesia. Woke in olive oil, if you will.
Meanwhile, the “resilience” of our people remains the product of that knowledge, culture, freedom, and moral capital cultivated by the pre-1975 Lebanon they despise, which has kept us just upright enough for our worst performers to lecture us about why we fell.
The Unbearable Weight of Clarity
Into this horrendously complicated mess walks Morgan Ortagus.
She is not Lebanese, yet she somehow avoids our national tendencies toward fatalism, guilt, historical paralysis, and what can be diplomatically called “dramatic intellectual self-sabotage.”
With unnerving American straightforwardness, backed by genuine geopolitical literacy, she saw, named, and articulated what our elites have spent decades dodging.
She grasped the stakes. Read the room. Understood the public mood; a feat in a country where most politicians struggle to interpret even their own voter base.
Audiences felt it immediately. You could read it in the cheers, see it in the eyes of the exhausted, and sense it in the way people paid attention. Finally, someone wasn’t here to manage expectations, massage trauma, or offer a soothing Aspirin. She was here to tell the truth plainly.
Morgan Contagious!
Her clarity casts an unflattering shadow over some of our own seasoned figures; General Joseph Aoun and Judge Nawaf Salam, for example. Both capable. Both respected. Both serious; at least theoretically.
Yet neither has spoken to the people— and by ricochet to Nabih Berri, with the moral weight and precision that Morgan delivers without the benefit of a single Lebanese chromosome. It may seem unfair, but the reason can be simple.
Where Lebanese leaders speak with exhausted superficiality, Morgan speaks with unburdened clarity. Where they carry 40 years of political trauma into every syllable, she arrives with an intact moral compass and a complete sentence structure.
Lebanon needs this sting far more than it needs another sedative. A sting of logic, not distortion.
Outsourcing Confidence
The Morgan phenomenon reveals something deeply uncomfortable. We no longer value our own voices.
Not after the wars. Not after one Megalosaurus after another turned state actors. Not after the economic implosion. And certainly not after the daily gaslighting from every brute claiming to represent decency, or God.
So when a foreigner speaks with moral clarity, we exhale. Not because she tells us anything we didn’t already know, but because she reminds us what it sounds like to be addressed as adults, not hostages.
Morgan simply brings what Lebanon hasn’t heard clearly in decades: strategic sobriety, emotional intelligence, and directness uncorrupted by either phobia or nostalgia. And suddenly, clarity feels like a foreign import.
A “Native Son” With His Compass Intact
Just when we were ready to declare the category of “native son” officially defunct, along comes Michel Issa, the new US Ambassador to Lebanon.
A first-generation Lebanese American, Issa speaks with the grounded calm of someone who knows the culture instinctively but is not suffocated by its political neuroses. He sounds like one of us, or rather, like the version of us that existed before exhaustion became a national identity, and BS a national sport.
He seems diplomatic without being allergic to meaning. Calm without being dull. Firm without slipping into theatrics. Issa may yet prove that clarity is not an imported commodity. It is a Lebanese virtue that survived by emigrating.
For to balance a King, Queen, and Valet, one needs Aces, not Jokers.
The Punchline
Morgan represents the Lebanon we once knew how to produce.
Tom represents the Lebanon we must politely, and urgently, outgrow.
Michel represents the Lebanon we may yet be able to recover.
Clarity is confidence. Obscurity is pretension.
