On 5 August, the Lebanese government of President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam tasked the Lebanese Armed Forces with devising a plan for the disarmament of Hezbollah and other militias. The plan is due to be presented in early September. It has received strong support and input from the United States, whose envoy Tom Barrack was in Beirut last week. This is a bold political move that both President Aoun, a former head of the Lebanese Armed Forces, and Prime Minister Salam have pledged to see through. Hezbollah, supported by Iran, has been defiant and rejected the idea of disarming. Protesters supporting Hezbollah have taken to the streets. The stakes in this long-delayed show-down – between the legitimate government of Lebanon on the one hand, and an over-mighty militia and their backer, Iran, on the other – are now high for all sides.

Hezbollah is nothing without its weapons; indeed, without them, it is arguably no longer ‘Hezbollah’, a concept that entails commitment to armed struggle. With so much to lose, it is seeking to deter through rhetoric and public actions, but has nothing to gain by firing first. It may hope to wear the Lebanese government down to a negotiated compromise. In its characteristic blend of nationalist and religious rhetoric, it claims that it is ‘sinful’ for the Lebanese state to leave Lebanon unprotected against Israel. In Hezbollah’s view, only when Israel withdraws from Lebanese territory and stops attacking Lebanon would it be possible even to consider integration. For good measure, its new leader, Naim Qasim, is claiming that Hezbollah is fine and in good order to confront Israel. But Qasim leads a very different, and much weaker, Hezbollah to the one that his predecessor Hasan Nasrallah led for three decades. The degradation of its military capabilities inflicted by the IDF was severe and the Shia arc from Iran through Iraq and Syria that supported it, has collapsed.

More importantly, Hezbollah’s strategic priority now is less to avoid losing battles with Israel and more to avoid losing its license to operate, however grudgingly given, in Lebanon. That license is under direct threat. It has depended upon a combination of three factors: its military might, making it too strong for the Lebanese Armed Forces to dismantle; the support and guidance of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and of Assad’s Syria, which have previously stood watch over the Lebanese government; and the unwillingness or inability of successive governments of Lebanon to call it to heel.

All of these factors have now changed materially: Iran is a much reduced power in the region. In Syria, meanwhile, regime change has cost Hezbollah its strategic ally and brought them instead a government that is an ideological opponent. It is no coincidence that, after four decades of resenting and fearing the power of Hezbollah and Iran, the government of Lebanon now feels able to make its move.

This is a perilous passage for Hezbollah. If they lose the right they have arrogated to themselves to carry arms, at the scale of a sovereign state, they will lose more than just their attractiveness to recruits; they will also lose the means by which they control the population and economy of large areas of Lebanon, as well as the instrument with which they protect themselves, in the long Lebanese tradition, from sectarian rivals. In short, the organisation will lose its distinctive feature, while the leadership will lose the source of their political power at home and in the region. While it is likely that popular support for a Hezbollah-like group in some form will remain solid within its key geographic constituencies, disarmament combined with reduced funding from Iran could imperil longer-term recruitment and reduce its influence at the national level.

For Iran, losing Hezbollah as a fighting force would be the coup de grâce to its already battered strategy of fighting through third parties. It would be a spiritual blow, too, to the religious leadership in Tehran, whose authority and status has rested in part on their ability to mobilise and militarise Shia communities across the Arab world and Asia. The messaging from Iran has been firmly behind Hezbollah, pledging to support whatever Hezbollah decide and dismissing disarmament as unfeasible. It has also boasted that it will use its ‘new missiles’ if Israel attacks Hezbollah or Iran again, but this is likely to be more bravado, which doesn’t translate to deterrence.

As ever, Iranian rhetoric may be misleading. There has to be a question over the appetite in Tehran both for further conflict with Israel, as it tries to rebuild its own heavily damaged military infrastructure, and for Hezbollah plunging into a potentially deadly endgame with the Lebanese Armed Forces, Israel and the US. Iran’s current priorities are not in the Levant but in rebuilding relationships in the Gulf, where there is little sympathy for Hezbollah. A calculation for Hezbollah should they decide to fight is what, if anything, Iran can or will do for them.

For the Lebanese government, the important issue is sovereignty. President Joseph Aoun has something larger at stake than the taming of Hezbollah: preserving the government’s monopoly on the use of force. Aoun has repeatedly stressed this phrase since his election, seeking to cast the challenge of disarming Hezbollah as constitutional rather than sectarian. Ministers have gone so far as to state that force will have to be used if Hezbollah do not comply with the disarmament plan, an option no-one wants to pursue but, with US backing, one that the government may this time feel sufficiently emboldened to pursue. Aoun’s message has wide resonance within Lebanon, where the existence of sectarian armed forces serves only as a reminder of the dangers and damage of civil war, as well as leaving the door open for gangsterism and political intimidation. A recurring additional message is that Hezbollah, far from protecting the state from Israel as they claim, have brought war to Lebanon and are threatening to do so again.

Israel has, under Benjamin Netanyahu, committed itself to operations of unprecedented scale and tempo against Hezbollah, including deployments inside the southern Lebanon. The IDF chief, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, visited the south of the country on 13 August. Critics of the operation have pointed to previous Israeli experiences here, which show that the financial and political costs involved in an extended occupation of Lebanese territory are too high. But Israel can only credibly withdraw if it has ended Hezbollah in the same way as it seeks to end Hamas – that is, destroying the group as a fighting force that has the ability to grow back.

For the Lebanese government finally to close down Hezbollah’s military capabilities would offer Netanyahu the pivot he needs to scale back IDF operations and would present a concrete outcome to his northern war that he can leverage politically. Since the Israeli government allowed the return of the residents of the northern settlements on 1 March, displaced Israelis have begun to return. But the real test will be when the displaced residents of southern Lebanese villages return. Netanyahu needs strong active measures on the part of the Lebanese government to be in place for this not to hazard a return of Hezbollah and a renewal of the threat to Israel’s north.

There is a regional context for the disarmament and integration of militias. Lebanon, Israel, the US and many Arab countries want to see the disarmament of Hezbollah succeed, but precedents are mixed. In Iraq and in Assad’s Syria, this was possible because militias, overwhelmingly backed by Iran, were partly reintegrated into the government forces, but in both cases the militias shared strategic alignment with the state. Even so, in the Iraqi case, Iran insisted on maintaining a direct line to its re-badged militias. On the other hand, there is no strategic alignment between the Lebanese government and Hezbollah. Quite the reverse: Christian and Sunni politicians in Lebanon have made clear that they hold Hezbollah responsible for bringing war to Lebanon and for letting in a foreign power, Iran.

What is at stake is a vision of Lebanon. For Aoun, the US and the current government, the time has come to close a long and damaging chapter of Iranian interference in Lebanon and the deep compromise this has entailed of the government’s monopoly on force. Hezbollah would prefer to continue their asymmetric, armed struggle against Israel and to maintain the status quo of their disproportionate power within Lebanon. To many, that flies in the face of the new realities of the region, including Israel’s military dominance, Iran’s reduced status and, above all, US policy. Cornered and isolated, but still enjoying broad support in their constituency, there is a risk that Hezbollah may be prepared, as they have done before, to fight Lebanon as well as Israel.

Yet while there is potential for the two irreconcilable positions to lead Lebanon back into the bloody maze of sectarian conflict, there is also the potential for negotiated compromise if both parties are sufficiently prepared to take concessions: but for Hezbollah this would have to be on key matters touching on the group’s identity and, possibly, survival.