Larijani's pager diplomacy: Saving the shattered remnants of Iran's regional proxies

Al Arabiya

4 days ago

When senior Iranian official Ali Larijani arrives in Beirut this Wednesday, it will be under the banner of diplomacy, but the subtext is far less ceremonial. The former parliament speaker, now Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, is stepping onto a Lebanese political stage at a moment when Tehran's regional network of allies is showing visible cracks. His visit appears aimed at shoring up Hezbollah's position in Lebanon – not as a matter of routine engagement, but as part of a broader effort to protect what remains of Iran's influence in the Levant, even as its military and political assets steadily erode.
Larijani's presence signals Tehran's determination to maintain its hold on Lebanon through Hezbollah, despite the fact that the 'golden triad' the group once boasted – the army, the people, and the resistance – has collapsed into a hollow slogan. Hezbollah now stands in open confrontation with the Lebanese state and the Lebanese people alike. The fiction that its weapons serve the nation's defense is no longer tenable. Larijani's mission is to remind Lebanese leaders, and Washington by extension, that Iran still claims the right to speak for Lebanon's Shia – and that any engagement with Hezbollah must pass through the gates of Tehran.
This claim to diplomatic legitimacy is especially hard to swallow in light of recent events. The Israeli pager attack against Hezbollah – a fait accompli that exposed vulnerabilities within the group's command structure – also revealed something Tehran would rather keep hidden: among those injured was Iran's current ambassador to Lebanon, was in possession of a pager linked to the targeted network. The image of a senior Iranian diplomat physically entangled in Hezbollah's operational communications blurs the line between diplomacy and covert coordination, underscoring why Tehran's envoys cannot plausibly present themselves as neutral state actors.
This is not a position of strength. Across the region, Iran's web of militias and client movements – from Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces to the Houthis in Yemen – is fraying. Years of attrition on the battlefield, combined with shifting regional dynamics, have stripped away much of their military dominance. In Lebanon, the situation is even more dire. Hezbollah's armed power is diminished not only by military setbacks but also by the collapse of the Lebanese economy, which has gutted the patronage networks the party once sustained with state resources and illicit revenues.
For years, the narrative was that Iran bankrolled Hezbollah's operations. But investigations and public records tell a different story: Hezbollah siphoned off funds from Lebanese state institutions, exploiting taxpayer money to buy political loyalty. When Lebanon's financial system imploded, Hezbollah's parallel economy – built on smuggling, drug trafficking, and black-market fuel – also began to crumble. The collapse of Bashar al-Assad's Syrian economy has further tightened the noose, choking off critical smuggling routes and drug revenues once worth billions.
Stripped of its ability to offer social services and economic patronage at the scale it once did, Hezbollah's hold over Lebanon's Shia community is no longer guaranteed. Larijani's mission is to delay this erosion by reinforcing the perception that Hezbollah is not just a militia, but a political representative of Lebanon's Shia – a claim that ignores both the diversity within the community and the constitutional reality that MPs represent the nation as a whole.
Yet this political veneer cannot disguise the strategic weakness. Without the cover of 'resistance,' Hezbollah's weapons have become tools of domestic coercion, aimed at silencing dissent and blocking reform. Militarily, the group is no longer a revolutionary vanguard but a heavily armed faction defending a corrupt order. Politically, it is boxed in – unable to reinvent its narrative, yet too deeply entrenched in Lebanon's governing system to disengage without risking collapse.
Larijani's visit also reveals Iran's broader regional calculation. As in Iraq, where Tehran fears losing control of the Shia political space to rivals, Iran in Lebanon seeks to preserve at least a political foothold even if the military dominance of its proxies' wanes. The strategy is defensive, not expansionist – a stark contrast to the confident, interventionist posture Tehran projected a decade ago.
However, Iran's ability to achieve even this limited goal is uncertain. In Lebanon, Hezbollah faces growing public indifference, even within its sectarian base, toward the old scare tactics of 'May 7, 2008, coup'–style street power. The memory of those clashes once deterred opponents; today, the threat of militia violence is weighed against the daily grind of economic collapse, and it no longer carries the same force. In Iraq, similar dynamics have eroded the PMF's capacity to monopolize Shia political life.
Ultimately, Tehran's effort to protect its crumbling assets faces a convergence of structural challenges. The collapse of its financial pipelines has drained much of its economic leverage, eroding the patronage systems on which loyalty once depended. At the same time, the once-vaunted aura of 'resistance' has given way to a far less inspiring image – that of armed groups turning their weapons inward to bully and silence their own citizens. Compounding these weaknesses is a tendency toward political overreach, as Iran and its proxies insist on speaking for entire sectarian communities, a claim that alienates rivals and moderates alike and steadily undermines any remaining pretense of legitimacy.
Larijani's message – to Lebanon, to the United States, and to the wider region – is that Iran still holds the keys to stability, and that bypassing Tehran is impossible. But the reality is that Iran's regional project is in retreat. In Lebanon, Hezbollah remains dangerous, but it is no longer untouchable. Its decline is gradual, but visible, and no high-profile visit from Tehran can reverse that trajectory.
The challenge for Lebanon is to resist being drawn into Iran's final defense of its shrinking sphere of influence. That means refusing to allow Tehran's envoys to define who speaks for Lebanon's Shia, rejecting the normalization of parallel armed authority, and reclaiming state sovereignty from all external patrons. For the United States and regional actors, it means recognizing that while Hezbollah's military threat may have ebbed, its political role is being carefully curated by Iran – and that without countervailing political engagement, that role could survive the loss of the gun.
Larijani will arrive in Beirut this week to keep a dying project on life support. The question is whether Lebanon will once again be the host body – or whether it will finally refuse to bear the cost of another's imperial ambitions.