The decision of the Lebanese government on August 6 to officially endorse the state’s monopoly over weapons was an important milestone. Yet it was also incomplete, because it didn’t really address a dimension that has been largely overlooked in public statements, namely that, today, Hezbollah’s weapons are effectively controlled by Iran.

In pushing for a decision allowing the council of ministers to address the party’s weapons, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam scored a significant point with regard to President Joseph Aoun. In April, the president had declared that he, not the government, would be steering the discussion with Hezbollah over its disarmament. Yet this went nowhere, leading to growing international impatience with the Lebanese. In late July, Salam reportedly got an earful from French President Emmanuel Macron, while the interim U.S. envoy to Lebanon, Tom Barrack, was also raising the heat on the Lebanese, tweeting, “As long as Hizballah retains arms, words will not suffice. The government and Hizballah need to fully commit and act now in order to not consign the Lebanese people to the stumbling status quo.”

Last week, the head of U.S. Central Command, General Michael Kurilla visited Beirut and discussed the state’s monopoly over weapons with Aoun. The net result of all this activity was that Aoun accepted that discussion of the weapons should take place in the council of ministers. He delivered a much-noticed speech on the 80th anniversary of the Lebanese army last week in which he specifically asked Hezbollah to “wager on the Lebanese state.”

Lebanon is presently under de facto international trusteeship, in which outside actors are pushing Lebanese officials and politicians to take decisions they had long avoided taking. This may be a good thing in absolute terms, but it is also unfortunate in what it reveals about the country’s sovereignty. It is also indicative of Lebanon’s fatal vulnerabilities. In light of this, one almost feels that the authorities, at a loss for ideas, have a single, albeit unwelcome, source of leverage over Hezbollah, namely that if the party insists on rejecting disarmament, Israel will continue to target its cadres and arms depots, as well as Shiite villages in the south and Beqaa Valley.

There are those demanding that the Lebanese move more quickly to disarm Hezbollah. Hanin Ghaddar, who is based at the influential Washington Institute for Near East Policy, described the government’s decision to set an end-of-the-month deadline for the army to present a plan to disarm Hezbollah by December “absolutely absurd” and “disastrous.” However, impatience is not a strategy, and such hyperbole ignores that the Lebanese authorities want to avoid using force with Hezbollah, and certainly do not want to create a crisis of confidence with the Shiite community. This makes eminent sense, and in a recent interview, Barrack admitted as much when he indicated that Aoun’s reticence to push too hard against Hezbollah was due to the fact that “[h]e doesn’t want to start a civil war.”

A lingering problem is that the Lebanese are not considering another path to move the process of disarming Hezbollah forward: talking with Iran. To a large extent, that is because the U.S.-led, Israeli-centered stranglehold on Lebanon does not allow room for doing so. But accepting this means several things, all of them bad for Lebanon. It means addressing disarmament while disregarding the ultimate decisionmaker on the matter; it means, potentially, allowing other countries to discuss Hezbollah’s disarmament, with the Lebanese forced to accept an outcome over which they have no say; and it implicitly recognizes that the main Lebanese interlocutor with Iran remains Hezbollah, denying the state a sovereign privilege.

It’s necessary to approach such a dialogue quietly, under the radar, even if Lebanon’s international partners might have to be kept in the loop at some stage. The purpose of such an exercise would be to gauge Iranian intentions and determine if there are possible openings to advance a mechanism for disarming Hezbollah. The Americans and Israelis want to expel Iran from Lebanon, but while the Lebanese have a great interest in curtailing Iranian interference in their affairs, they cannot realistically sever the ties between the Shiite community and Tehran—certainly not when there is a renewed sense of Sunni empowerment regionally because of the overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria.

No can one predict the results of such contacts. However, it is likely they would come up short, not least because there is factionalism in Iran and different interest groups with very different agendas related to Hezbollah’s future. But from Lebanon’s perspective it would be very useful to obtain a foothold in discussions with Tehran, even as Hezbollah’s margin of maneuver in Lebanon is gradually eroded, to get a sense of what the Iranians might be willing to accept. If countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates can open lines of communication with Iran, Lebanon can too.

However, Iran and Hezbollah should be very careful. If their aim is to block all steps that facilitate disarmament, the cost may be prohibitive. At a time when an expansionist Israel has been given a blank check by the United States to do whatever it wants in the region, Hezbollah and the Lebanese more generally should be conscious that the Israelis may well occupy more land in southern Lebanon if there is no progress. They could then demand Hezbollah’s disarmament, and even the conclusion of a peace treaty, as the price for their withdrawal. Who will put pressure on the Israelis to pull out if that happens? Washington? Dream on.

Hezbollah may feel that such a situation would extend the party a new lifeline to revive its resistance. But it shouldn’t be misled. The Lebanese in their majority have no interest in becoming entangled in new wars, and view Hezbollah with open hostility. Moreover, the party has no safe resupply route that would guarantee its ability to challenge Israeli onslaughts. If one thing was clear from the war last year, it was that most Lebanese blithely pursued a semi-normal lifestyle as Shiite areas of the country were being devastated by Israel. Hezbollah has spent years carefully avoiding isolation, so that if it now believes it can engage in resistance while surrounded by countrymen and regional states opposed to the party, then the party is suicidal.

Aoun and Salam must remain united if there is to be any positive evolution on Hezbollah’s weapons. There is a growing perception, fair or not, that Aoun has political calculations that make him hesitate on this front. Perhaps, but his speech on army day and his attitude toward the cabinet session discussing Hezbollah’s arms showed that he might be carving out a role for himself as the good cop to the government’s bad cop in negotiations with the party. That may not be such a bad idea, but only for as long as the ultimate result is that the state secure a monopoly over weapons.