In 2012, after rounds of national dialogue led by then-President Michel Suleiman, Hezbollah agreed to what became known as the “Baabda Declaration” and its seventeen clauses.

Among those clauses was the adoption of the “dissociation” principle, Lebanon’s neutrality from external conflicts. By the time of that declaration, however, the party had already begun its involvement in the Syrian conflict. Hezbollah plunged into the war in Syria to an extent that, had it required the party’s secretary-general himself to be one of its “soldiers,” he would have done so, as Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah declared in one of his speeches.

The Baabda Declaration later became an object of mockery, inaugurated by MP Mohammad Raad, who said: “Soak it and drink the water”—i.e., toss it aside as worthless.

Before the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Nasrallah had promised Saad Hariri, the leader of the Future Movement, a cool summer that would undercut Israel’s pretexts for war and create a favorable economic climate. But Hariri—and the Lebanese with him—awoke to a hot summer unleashed by Operation “The Truthful Promise”, in which the party captured two Israeli soldiers. What followed was a 33-day war that left Nasrallah’s pledge to Hariri looking like a promise “soaked” in water.

On Raoucheh Rock, the party “soaked” its latest promises to the state—embodied by Prime Minister Nawaf Salam—and it was rumored that the promise entailed a symbolic act where Salam’s circular and the party’s celebration would intersect.

The party then staged a celebration whose many messages included this one: the party’s promises to the authorities are destined to be soaked. It seemed that the Beirut sea, vast and deep as it is, had swallowed past, present, and future promises alike.

These three promises sum up the inverse relationship between the Lebanese state and Hezbollah, even if the latter is a substantial component of that state. They also encapsulate the party’s role in a borderless geography on which it has built and from which it has moved, a trajectory that always seems to require collision between two visions with no sign of convergence.

Yet an exhaustive dissection of a party that appears to renege on promises may also reveal something that dispels that trait: reneging on promises to the state has often coincided with fulfilling promises to other states, entities, and legal personalities outside it.

Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon was a bloody sequel to a promise of freedom Nasrallah made to Samir Kuntar, a prisoner whose release became one of the war’s outcomes. We were thus before two promises: one to Saad Hariri, situated on the shores of the state, and another to a resistance figure with a sentimental resonance that transcended Lebanon’s borders. It doesn’t take much acumen to see which promise best fit Nasrallah’s thinking and his party’s self-conception. He went to war and cast its conclusion as a “divine victory.” And between God’s satisfaction and Saad Hariri’s, one can imagine the inevitability of such a choice for a man entrusted on earth with the leadership of Hezbollah.

Also in 2006, the Mar Mikhael Understanding between the party and the Free Patriotic Movement carried an implicit promise from Nasrallah to Michel Aoun to bring him to the presidency. That promise was delayed until 2016, whereas prior realities had installed the sponsor of the Baabda Declaration, Michel Suleiman, as president in 2009.

Bringing Michel Aoun to the presidency in 2016 was both the fulfillment of a 2006 promise and, at the same time, a kind of “settling of scores” with Michel Suleiman, whom Nasrallah and the party’s collective memory recorded as a man with three faults:

As army commander, Suleiman had crossed Nasrallah’s red line during the Nahr al-Bared battle against Fatah al-Islam.

He had become, through the Doha Agreement, a forced point of intersection with the March 14 forces.

Most grievously, in Nasrallah’s view, Suleiman had described Hezbollah’s “golden formula” of “Army, People, Resistance” as a wooden formula.

In this sense, Michel Suleiman in the past intersects with Nawaf Salam in the present. A president and a prime minister, each with the symbolism of authority and statehood, have represented from their positions a condition incongruent with a party that believes its loyalty to the state and its “symbols” only flows from their alignment with the party’s vision—as was the case with President Michel Aoun.

In the most recent war between Hezbollah and Israel, the “cessation of hostilities”—under the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 1701—explicitly, and with the party’s consent, includes restricting arms to the Lebanese state.

The party’s approval amounted to a “promise” that ought to be honored before the Lebanese—and Shiites in particular, who bore the tragedies of that war. The party’s current intransigence necessarily summons the intransigence of a wounded community that does not want to let it down.

And each time Sheikh Naim Qassem emerges to lampoon the state and the “promise,” the voice of his Shiite constituency staggers between two hardships: the hardship of disappointing a party that has bound most of them by a bond of blood, and the hardship of fearing another war whose tragic outcome they already know.

Now, more than any previous promise, whether its effects were negative or positive, Hezbollah knows that reneging on its latest promise would be the harshest blow to itself and to its base. Yet it is likely to do so because it has become the victim of the very promise for which it came into being, and for which it may one day perish. It knows the cost to itself and its Shiite community—no less than Karbala-like in magnitude. Such is the condition of a party with a Walī al-Faqīh (the Supreme Jurist-Guardian) who commands—and the promise is to obey.