Trump envoy: Lebanon wanted peace. Israel was slow to see the opening - interview

Morgan Ortagus has a simple way of describing the situation between Israel and Lebanon.

“We’re halfway down the aisle,” she says.

Then comes the inevitable American analogy. “This is not a football game,” the senior diplomat says, explaining why she cannot predict when the negotiations will produce a final agreement. “I don’t know when we’re going to spike the football in the end zone.”

It was a small group of officials working behind the scenes, often without knowing whether their efforts would succeed. “We knew that it was something that would last for, we hoped, generations. That this would be a new era for Israel,” she says.

When Trump returned to the White House in 2025, the ambition remained. But the Middle East had changed. “The backdrop was Oct. 7,” Ortagus says. “Things had changed so fundamentally for both Israel and America since the Abraham Accords.”

The new administration entered office facing multiple wars and crises. Gaza dominated the headlines. Iran remained at the center of regional strategy. And Lebanon, once again, presented Washington with an intractable problem.

But Ortagus saw something others might have missed. The transformation began with the dramatic weakening of Hezbollah in September 2024. For decades, the terrorist group had been treated as one of the most powerful non-state armed groups in the world, deeply embedded in Lebanon’s political system and backed by Iran. Then Israel went after its leadership and military infrastructure.

During Trump’s first administration, Ortagus watched the US eliminate Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force. She said she believed Washington had been handed a historic opportunity to increase pressure on Tehran. “I was disappointed to see [the Biden administration] squander that opportunity,” she says.

The opportunity, in her view, was not merely to weaken Hezbollah militarily. It was to change Lebanon itself. And that is where her Lebanese contacts entered the picture. “They were so excited about the prospect, potentially, for peace, for normalization,” she says. “Principally because the boogeyman had been taken out in such a dramatic fashion by the Israelis.

It was an extraordinary moment. For years, Hezbollah had been the dominant military force in southern Lebanon, while Iran used the organization as one of its most important regional proxies. But suddenly, the political equation looked different. “Hezbollah has been a massive problem,” she says. “Obviously, it’s a security risk. But there’s so much more to Lebanon than just Hezbollah.”

She describes Lebanon as a complicated society divided among Christians, Sunnis, and Shi’ites, each with its own political history and relationship with Hezbollah. For decades, Hezbollah was able to establish itself in southern Lebanon not simply through its weapons, but by filling a vacuum left by the state. “If you’re a mom in southern Lebanon, this is the entity that was providing health care, infrastructure, schooling for your children,” Ortagus says. The Lebanese government, she argues, “completely abdicated its responsibility.”

BUT AFTER the war and Hezbollah’s weakening, she saw an opportunity for the Lebanese state to reclaim some of that territory – politically, economically, and, eventually, militarily. The problem is money.

Lebanon is emerging from years of economic crisis. Syria has its own enormous reconstruction needs. Gaza will require billions of dollars in assistance. For potential Gulf donors, southern Lebanon can therefore look like another enormous bill.

And there is a second problem: Why spend billions rebuilding southern Lebanon if Hezbollah is eventually going to return? “That’s the chicken-and-egg problem,” Ortagus says.

The Lebanese government needs resources to replace Hezbollah. But potential donors need confidence that Hezbollah will not simply reclaim what is rebuilt. Ultimately, Ortagus believes the most important audience for any future Israel-Lebanon peace agreement may be Lebanon’s Shi’ite population. “The billion-dollar question is: How do you make the Shi’ites understand that their life will be exponentially better” through normal relations with Israel, she asks, “as opposed to continuing more decades of being beholden to Iran?”

That alternative, she says, is not necessarily an American security guarantee or another international aid package. It is the possibility of normal relations with their closest neighbor. “Israel and Lebanon are neighbors,” she says. “If anyone’s going to have peace, that should be the two of them.”

The most revealing part of Ortagus’s story may not be a dramatic summit or a secret diplomatic meeting. It may be a small room in southern Lebanon, during the time she was Trump’s deputy special presidential envoy to the Middle East and his special envoy to Lebanon.

After Israel released five Lebanese prisoners in March 2025, Ortagus decided that the next step was to build something that diplomats often speak about but rarely manage to create: trust. She revived a military mechanism established following the November 2024 cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah after more than a year of fighting. The meetings were deliberately small, with Israeli and Lebanese officers sitting together, face-to-face, in the same room.

Ortagus pushed for the meetings to happen regularly. She describes herself jokingly as “the annoying teacher” forcing everyone to attend class. “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 recalls.

The point was simple: Get Israelis and Lebanese to see one another as “humans.” “Sharing the same coffee, looking across each other, realizing that your neighbor is not the boogeyman,” she says.

At one point, an Israeli officer told the Lebanese delegation that he lived only 15 minutes from Lebanon. His children and family were there. For Ortagus, the comment captured the strange reality of the Israeli-Lebanese relationship: two societies living incredibly close to one another while knowing remarkably little about each other. The meetings eventually helped lead to civilian negotiations. “We didn’t make peace,” she says. “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 POINTS out that there is a generational problem on both sides of the border. A 20-year-old Israeli was born around the time of the 2006 Lebanon War. That young Israeli has grown up knowing Lebanon primarily through the threat of Hezbollah. The same is true in reverse. “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?”

Ortagus says social media could become an unexpected diplomatic tool. Israeli and Lebanese citizens already interact abroad. They discover that they share interests, culture, food, and a sense of humor. But those encounters remain largely confined to elites. The next step, she argues, is to bring that interaction to ordinary people – particularly those living closest to the border. “Those communities are the most crucial and the most important to understand why peace will be beneficial for them,” she says. And, eventually, she hopes, Israelis drinking coffee in Beirut and Lebanese visiting Tel Aviv.

When asked about mistakes made by the Israeli government, she pauses before replying that Israel initially viewed Lebanon too tactically. “There was so much going on with Gaza,” she says. “Israel had a seven-front war to deal with.”

As a result, she says, the Israeli approach was often focused on individual Hezbollah threats. “Where is Hezbollah moving a weapon? Where are they? What’s buried under a house? Is there a tunnel there?”

Those questions were necessary for Israel’s security, she says, but they did not constitute a broader strategy for Lebanon. “I was almost like a cheerleader with pompoms,” she recalls, trying to convince Israeli officials that there was a historic opportunity.

She points to Lebanese President Joseph Aoun’s speech right after his inauguration. “It was clear that he was very open toward making history between Israel and Lebanon. 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.”

Now, however, she is more encouraged. She points to the current talks led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, US Ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa, and other officials. But she cautions against expecting instant results. The Abraham Accords themselves took many years. “Everybody wants to know where’s it going, where’s it going,” she says.

None of this, however, can be separated from Iran. Ortagus describes the Islamic Republic as the “thousand-pound elephant in the room” when discussing Lebanon. Hezbollah’s money, weapons, and equipment come from Tehran, she says, and the IRGC has increasingly taken operational control.

For that reason, she says she believes Hezbollah’s eventual demilitarization will have to be connected to the wider US strategy toward Iran. But Ortagus also cautions against using sanctions as the whole game plan. “Sanctions in and of themselves never bring any regime down,” she says. “Sanctions are tactics, not a strategy.”

“Economic, military, and diplomatic steps have to work cohesively together,” she says. “President Trump has said that his overarching goal is to make sure that Iran never obtains a nuclear weapon on his watch.” For Ortagus, that is not simply an Israeli concern. A nuclear Iran, she argues, would fundamentally alter the entire Middle East.

FOR ALL the strategic calculations, Ortagus’s approach to the region also has a deeply personal dimension. Raised as an Evangelical Christian, she began her journey to Judaism while serving in Iraq and later in Saudi Arabia. While she once had to practice her faith quietly in those closed societies, since Oct. 7, 2023, Ortagus has made a conscious effort to visibly express her Jewish identity. She wears Jewish symbols – a necklace, a ring, a bracelet – wherever she goes, even in the official meetings she had in Beirut with the most senior officials in the Lebanese government. It is not, she stresses, a political statement. “It is about my daughter,” Ortagus says.

Her daughter recently started kindergarten, and Ortagus says Oct. 7 changed how she thinks about raising a Jewish child. She wants her daughter to grow up seeing her mother openly proud of her faith. “I wanted her to grow up knowing that we are proud to be Jews,” she says.

The message is one she carries into diplomatic meetings, including in countries where being openly Jewish can carry a very different meaning. “I will live as a proud Jew, and I will die as a proud Jew,” she says.

There is another personal motivation behind Ortagus’s continued involvement in regional diplomacy: the memory of Sen. Lindsey Graham. The longtime supporter of Israel and a major voice on American foreign policy was a close friend and mentor to Ortagus. “His belief in the American-Israeli alliance was a deep core conviction,” she says. “It wasn’t about electoral votes.”

Ortagus traveled with Graham to Saudi Arabia and Israel as part of efforts to advance quiet negotiations between Riyadh and Jerusalem. Later, she brought him to Lebanon. She recalls that he was among the first major American politicians to see the possibility of a deeper US-Lebanon relationship, including eventually a defense agreement.

Their final conversation took place only hours before his death. They spoke about Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Lebanon. He was, she says, optimistic. “He died, I would say, in his final moments... with hope,” Ortagus recalls. “He believed this was going to happen.”

Graham had also told her something that she has not forgotten. “You have to carry this forward.” And that is exactly what she says she intends to do.

Ortagus has not been back to Beirut since December. She misses it. Her description of Lebanon is strikingly warm for someone whose career has largely revolved around one of the country’s most difficult security problems. “It’s a beautiful place,” she says. “It’s a historic place.”

She talks about the food, the hospitality, the nightlife, and the resilience of the Lebanese people. “They’ve been dealt a terrible hand with all of these wars and economic catastrophes,” she says. “Yet everybody in Lebanon keeps a smile on their face.”

She hopes that one day Israelis and Lebanese will be able to visit one another openly, without fear, and without the shadow of Hezbollah or Iran hanging over every interaction. She does not want that moment to belong to the next generation. Her hope is that it happens now. “I don’t think this is a conversation we’re going to have in 20 years,” she says.■