The Making of Lebanese Foreign Policy: Understanding the 2006 Hezbollah–Israeli War by Henrietta Wilkins (London: Routledge, 2013), 180 pages Reviewed by Nir Boms for the Israeli Journal of Foreign Affairs
In August 2013, seven years after the end of the Second Lebanon War, air raid sirens were again sounded in northern Israel. Four missiles fired from Lebanese territory struck residential areas. This time, it was not Hizbullah that was behind the attacks, but the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, an al-Qa’ida-linked group that took “credit” for similar missile strikes on Israel in 2009 and 2011. Lebanese President Michel Sleiman condemned the incident as a violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and Lebanon’s sovereignty. Hizbullah did not comment. Israel retaliated and launched an attack in Na’ameh, targeting a base of a Palestinian militant group. This incident can be seen as a microcosm of the Lebanese reality in which a president can only complain about the violation of national sovereignty by militias and terror groups that operate on his territory but are beyond his control. These recent events tie in with the volume under review. Henrietta Wilkins’ book, an adaptation of her PhD thesis at Durham University, seeks to explain Lebanon’s behavior in the international arena during the 2006 war between Hizbullah and Israel and, in so doing, to highlight the limitation of systemic theories in explaining foreign policy. On the one hand, this book is about Lebanon with a focus on the 2006 war and its ramifications for Lebanon’s foreign policy. On the other hand, it is also a treatise on International Relations (IR) theory and, even more so, about the limitation of systematic IR theories that often attempt to synthesize (and simplify) foreign policy principles but, at the same time, fail the “deduction” test. Continue reading