Time & Perspective Quote by Walid Jumblatt

Jumblatt’s line lands like a weary field report from someone who’s spent decades watching Lebanon get treated as a chessboard and a battleground at the same time. The phrasing matters: “engulfed again” implies not a crisis but a cycle, a return of the same fever. It also subtly absolves local actors of full agency without quite letting them off the hook. Lebanon isn’t merely “in” a power game; it’s swallowed by it, suggesting forces larger than any cabinet, militia, or election.

Calling it a “huge power game” is bluntly unsentimental. He doesn’t dignify it with ideology or even strategy; it’s a game, played by regional and international powers who can afford to treat Lebanese lives as pieces. That word choice carries contempt, but also a politician’s pragmatism: he’s signaling that moral appeals won’t stop the machinery of influence, patronage, and proxy conflict.

Then comes the loaded fatalism: “tragic destiny.” In Lebanese political speech, destiny is never just poetry; it’s a warning and a positioning device. Jumblatt is a veteran of the civil war era and of Syria-Iran-Saudi-Israel-U.S. crosscurrents that repeatedly surge through Beirut. The subtext reads as both lament and pre-emptive justification: don’t expect clean sovereignty, don’t expect quick fixes, and don’t misread Lebanon’s crises as purely domestic failures. He’s also speaking to Lebanese audiences primed by trauma and to external players who prefer the myth that Lebanon can be “stabilized” on a timetable. The bleak power of the quote is that it refuses optimism as a kind of propaganda.