Former U.S. envoy Morgan Ortagus says Lebanon has a rare opportunity to reclaim political, economic and military authority from Hezbollah and establish normal relations with Israel, arguing that the weakening of the Iran-backed group has fundamentally changed the regional equation.

Ortagus, who served in 2025 as the Trump administration’s lead envoy on Lebanese-Israeli relations, described the current negotiations between Lebanon and Israel as being “halfway down the aisle,” while cautioning that no one can predict when they will produce a final agreement.

“This is not a football game,” she said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post, explaining why she could not say when the negotiations would reach their conclusion. “I don’t know when we’re going to spike the football in the end zone.”

For Ortagus, the possibility of peace between Beirut and Tel Aviv represents one of the Middle East’s most consequential and fragile opportunities in decades. She argued that the opening emerged after Israel dramatically weakened Hezbollah and the balance of power among Israel, Lebanon and Iran shifted.

But she insists the initiative did not originate in Washington.

“The genesis came from the Lebanese people saying to me, ‘We have to go for peace. It’s now or never,’” she said.

Ortagus said she saw a potential opening after Hezbollah was dramatically weakened in September 2024, when Israel targeted the group’s leadership and military infrastructure.

She drew a parallel with the 2020 U.S. killing of Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, saying she had believed Washington had been given a historic opportunity to increase pressure on Tehran but was disappointed that the Biden administration, in her view, failed to capitalize on it.

“When Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in 2024, I thought to myself, we cannot squander this opportunity,” she said.

For Ortagus, however, the opportunity was not simply to weaken Hezbollah militarily. It was to change Lebanon itself.

Her Lebanese contacts, she said, were enthusiastic about the possibility of peace and normalization because Hezbollah had been so dramatically weakened.

“Hezbollah has been a massive problem,” she said. “Obviously, it’s a security risk. But there’s so much more to Lebanon than just Hezbollah.”

Ortagus described Lebanon as a complex society divided among Christian, Sunni and Shiite communities, each with its own political history and relationship with Hezbollah.

She said Hezbollah had been able to establish itself in southern Lebanon not only through its weapons but also by filling a vacuum left by the Lebanese state.

“If you’re a mom in southern Lebanon, this is the entity that was providing health care, infrastructure, schooling for your children,” she said, arguing that the Lebanese government had “completely abdicated its responsibility.”

The weakening of Hezbollah, she said, could therefore give the Lebanese state an opportunity to reclaim that role — politically, economically and eventually militarily.

One of the biggest obstacles, however, is money.

Lebanon is emerging from years of economic crisis, while neighboring Syria faces enormous reconstruction needs and Gaza is expected to require billions of dollars in assistance. For potential Gulf donors, Ortagus said, rebuilding southern Lebanon could therefore appear to be another huge financial commitment.

That creates what she called a “chicken-and-egg problem.”

Why would donors spend billions rebuilding southern Lebanon if Hezbollah could eventually return and reclaim the territory and infrastructure?

The Lebanese government needs resources to replace the services and authority Hezbollah has exercised in areas where the state has been weak. But potential donors need confidence that the group will not simply return and take back what is rebuilt.

For Ortagus, one of the central questions surrounding any future Israel-Lebanon peace agreement is whether Lebanon’s Shi’ite population can be convinced that normal relations with Israel would improve their lives.

“The billion-dollar question is: How do you make the Shiites understand that their life will be exponentially better” through normal relations with Israel, she said, “as opposed to continuing more decades of being beholden to Iran?”

She said the answer did not necessarily have to be another U.S. security guarantee or international aid package. Instead, she pointed to the possibility of normal relations between two neighboring countries.

“Israel and Lebanon are neighbors,” she said. “If anyone’s going to have peace, that should be the two of them.”

Ortagus said one of the most important steps during her time as Trump’s deputy special presidential envoy to the Middle East and special envoy to Lebanon came not at a high-level summit but in small meetings between Israeli and Lebanese military officers.

After Israel released five Lebanese prisoners in March 2025, she sought to build what diplomats often struggle to establish: trust.

She revived a military mechanism created after the November 2024 cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, following more than a year of fighting. The meetings were intentionally small, with Israeli and Lebanese officers sitting face-to-face in the same room.

Ortagus pushed for the meetings to take place regularly, joking that she became “the annoying teacher” making sure both sides attended.

“I said to both sides, listen, I don’t care if I have to kill myself to do this, but I will get on a plane, and every two weeks I will be here, and we’re all going to sit here,” she recalled.

The goal, she said, was to make Israelis and Lebanese see each other as “humans” rather than enemies.

“Sharing the same coffee, looking across each other, realizing that your neighbor is not the boogeyman,” she said.

During one meeting, an Israeli officer told the Lebanese delegation that he lived only 15 minutes from Lebanon and that his children and family were there.

For Ortagus, the exchange underscored the paradox of the Israeli-Lebanese relationship: two societies living extremely close to one another while knowing remarkably little about each other.

The military meetings eventually helped pave the way for civilian negotiations.

“We didn’t make peace,” she said. “But I think what we did is we put into motion ... we took away the stigma that Israelis and Lebanese could sit in the same room and talk to each other directly.”

Ortagus also pointed to a generational problem on both sides of the border.

A 20-year-old Israeli was born around the time of the 2006 Lebanon War and has grown up viewing Lebanon primarily through the threat posed by Hezbollah.

The same dynamic exists in Lebanon, she said.

“If you’re 18 or 20 years old in Lebanon, what do you know about Israel except the propaganda that you see from Al Jazeera and other places?”

She believes social media could become an unexpected diplomatic tool by allowing ordinary Israelis and Lebanese to discover shared interests, culture, food and humor.

Israeli and Lebanese citizens already interact in other countries, she said, but such encounters largely remain confined to elites. The next step would be to bring those interactions to ordinary people, particularly communities living near the border.

“Those communities are the most crucial and the most important to understand why peace will be beneficial for them,” she said.

Ultimately, she said, the goal would be to see Israelis drinking coffee in Beirut and Lebanese visiting Tel Aviv.

Ortagus acknowledged that Israel itself initially viewed Lebanon too tactically.

“There was so much going on with Gaza,” she said. “Israel had a seven-front war to deal with.”

Israeli policy consequently focused heavily on individual Hezbollah threats: where weapons were being moved, where Hezbollah operatives were located, what might be buried beneath a house and whether a tunnel existed.

Those questions were necessary for Israel’s security, she said, but did not amount to a broader strategy for Lebanon.

“I was almost like a cheerleader with pompoms,” she recalled, trying to persuade Israeli officials that a historic opportunity had emerged.

She cited Lebanese President Joseph Aoun’s speech after his inauguration as an important indication that Beirut was open to a new relationship with Israel.

“It was clear that he was very open toward making history between Israel and Lebanon,” she said. “He was very open to a path towards peace. But with so many competing interests for the State of Israel, Lebanon was dealt with extremely tactically.”

Ortagus said she is now more encouraged by the negotiations being led by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa and other officials.

But she cautioned against expecting immediate results.

The Abraham Accords themselves took years to develop, she noted, even as observers continually demanded to know how negotiations were progressing.

“Everybody wants to know where’s it going, where’s it going,” she said.

Any discussion of Lebanon, Ortagus said, ultimately leads back to Iran.

She described the Islamic Republic as the “thousand-pound elephant in the room” in discussions about Lebanon, arguing that Hezbollah receives its money, weapons and equipment from Tehran and that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has increasingly exercised operational control.

For that reason, she believes Hezbollah’s eventual demilitarization will have to be connected to the broader U.S. strategy toward Iran.

At the same time, Ortagus cautioned against treating sanctions as a comprehensive strategy.

“Sanctions in and of themselves never bring any regime down,” she said. “Sanctions are tactics, not a strategy.”

“Economic, military, and diplomatic steps have to work cohesively together,” she said.

Trump, she noted, has said his overarching goal is to ensure that Iran never obtains a nuclear weapon while he is president.

For Ortagus, the consequences would extend far beyond Israel.

A nuclear-armed Iran, she argued, would fundamentally alter the balance of power across the Middle East, making the future of Lebanon inseparable from the wider regional struggle between Iran, Israel and the United States.