The UN's Vanishing Seat at the Levant Table

In June, an Israeli tank blocked a UNIFIL convoy in the southern Lebanese village of Tiri. One tank trained its weapon on a UN vehicle. The United Nations demanded "unrestricted freedom of movement." It did not get it. ^[1] The incident was small enough to escape most headlines. But it captured something larger: the physical marginalization of a UN security role that is being hollowed out across the entire Levant, on three fronts at once. In each case, the United States has installed itself as the replacement mediator. And on each front, the architecture it built is cracking. Lebanon is where the pattern is most complete. In August 2025, the UN Security Council made a unanimous decision to terminate UNIFIL, the 8,100-member peacekeeping force that had monitored southern Lebanon under Resolution 1701 since 2006. The move was one "previously demanded by the United States and Israel." ^[2] When Secretary-General António Guterres scrambled to propose a replacement UN force of between 1,980 and 5,525 personnel, the US State Department deflected.

Under all proposed options, a uniformed United Nations presence working to facilitate de-escalation, dialogue, liaison and coordination, and support for the Lebanese Armed Forces would be necessary... towards the overarching objective of a long-term solution to the conflict — António Guterres

What replaced UNIFIL was not a reconstituted UN mission. It was a trilateral framework signed in Washington on June 26, establishing "pilot zones" for phased Israeli withdrawal in exchange for Hezbollah disarmament. ^[3] The operational coordination is run by "teams from the IDF, the US military, and the Lebanese Armed Forces" — no UN role. ^[4] The negotiation venue itself told the story: the first-ever direct military-to-military security talks between Israel and Lebanon were hosted at the Pentagon, led by Under Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby, while the UN Security Council could only hold an emergency meeting called by France. ^[5] Syria followed a different path to the same destination. Here the hollowing out was not a Security Council vote but an Israeli tank column. In December 2024, Israel seized the 235-square-kilometer UN-mandated buffer zone that had been monitored under the 1974 Disengagement Agreement for half a century. Defense Minister Israel Katz declared the agreement void and said troops would remain "for an indefinite period." ^[6] The replacement being negotiated is a US-mediated bilateral security pact, physically underwritten by an American airbase in southern Syria. ^[7] Guterres visited Damascus in July — his first trip since 2009 — but his role was confined to humanitarian appeals and condemnations of Israeli violations, while the actual security architecture was being built elsewhere, without a UN chair at the table. ^[8] Iran is the cleanest case, because there was never a UN security framework to displace. The US simply never built one. Instead, Washington established a direct CENTCOM-IRGC communication line in Doha and convened working groups at the Lake Lucerne Summit on nuclear issues, sanctions, and reconstruction — all mediated by the US with Qatar and Pakistan as brokers, with no UN Security Council or IAEA framework governing the process. ^[9][10] Three tracks, one outcome: the UN's security role eliminated or bypassed, the United States the sole mediator of whatever comes next. The problem is what came next. In Lebanon, Israel continued conducting drone strikes, artillery shelling, and ground incursions throughout July despite the June 26 framework. The death toll reached 4,328 since March, with 1.2 million displaced. ^[11] When Israel began handing over the first pilot zones this week, Defense Minister Katz confirmed what the handover actually entailed.

Not house by house, not incrimination — all these villages, their destruction has been completed. — Israel Katz

The framework's core mechanism — Lebanese army deployment replacing Israeli occupation — is being undermined by Israel's refusal to withdraw. President Joseph Aoun made the contradiction explicit.

the occupation undermines the legitimacy of the (Lebanese) state and prevents the army from deploying, and the laying of foundations for achieving a just and lasting peace — Joseph Aoun

On the Iran track, the failure was more catastrophic. The US-Iran bilateral peace deal, brokered by Pakistan, collapsed in mid-July into full-scale war. Trump authorized eight consecutive nights of airstrikes; Iran retaliated against US bases in four countries; the Strait of Hormuz was closed. ^[12] The bilateral framework that was supposed to manage the conflict produced its resumption instead. The irony is that even the parties who need the framework have given up on the UN. Aoun, the Lebanese president whose country is living inside the US-brokered architecture, stated the matter plainly. ^[13]

the United States is the only party capable of exerting pressure on the Israeli government to prevent it from targeting the southern suburbs of Beirut, the infrastructure, or expanding the occupied territories in southern Lebanon. — Joseph Aoun

He is right about who holds the leverage. But the US is now the only chair at the table across three security tracks where the UN's seat has been eliminated or bypassed — by Washington in Lebanon, by Israeli military action in Syria, by the absence of any prior framework on Iran. And on every track, the architecture it built is not holding.