"... Now there are two possible explanations for why Hizballah dedicates an entire third of their manifesto to whining about American hegemony after the rest of the world -- including U.S. policy-makers -- got the memo that U.S. power is on the wane. The first explanation is that Hizballah is simply saying, like a good proxy, what they think the Iranians want them to say. Iran wants to frame all tensions in the region in terms of U.S. hegemony, which allows it to avoid talking about internal tensions and answering questions like why all Iran's Arab neighbors can't buy U.S. weapons systems fast enough in the face of Iranian ascendancy. (Even though that's kind of tough to do on a day when -- oh, irony -- U.S. oil companies get frozen out of Iraq's largest oil rights auction in years.) And lord knows, it serves the interests of no one in either Iran or Hizballah to start saying something real about the security environment in the Middle East, because that would mean talking about things like Saudi-Iranian tensions, Saudi-Syrian tensions, Sunni-Shia tensions and a host of other politically sensitive topics that might offend your sponsors or further upset sectarian tensions in Lebanon and elsewhere. Focusing on the American imperial project is, intellectually and politically, a lot easier. This means, of course, that an organization that's plenty brave on the battlefield is pretty cowardly when it comes to rhetorically confronting, head on, what's really going on in their country and in their region.
There's something else here, though.
Reading the manifesto alongside the 2025 report, I came to the conclusion that Hizballah is, while steadily maturing as a military actor, still hopelessly immature as a political actor. There is absolutely zero introspection in this manifesto, and whereas the NIC report was war-gamed in countless planning exercises and workshops -- including one held in China, for goodness sake! -- and arrived at conclusions most U.S. policy-makers would find inconvenient at best, Hizballah's manifesto reflects an organization that basically sat down among themselves to write a bunch of stuff that confirms all previously held assumptions and takes no brave or ground-breaking stand on any major issue confronting the Middle East.
If you look at Hizballah's flag, you'll note it says "The Islamic Resistance in Lebanon" at the bottom. Once upon a time, though, it read "The Islamic Revolution in Lebanon". I think they changed this because it made everyone so nervous. Well, everyone can sleep easy, because there is nothing revolutionary about this militia-cum-political party anymore. Hizballah is just as much a part of the calcified political landscape of the Middle East as Hosni Mubarak. This cliché-spewing manifesto -- "American terrorism is the origin of all terrorism in the world", says the organization that popularized suicide bombings -- only serves to confirm that. Maybe this manifesto was intended to appeal to Western leftists -- until, presumably, those leftists remember Hizballah is a religious fundamentalist organization. But the effect is to make Hizballah seem stuck in 2003, unable to confront the hard internal challenges facing the Middle East as a region and still reliant on a U.S. bogeyman to justify all its actions and rhetoric."
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