The State Department designated Hezbollah a Foreign Terrorist Organization back on August 10, 1997. So why does America still pour cash into Lebanon, the Hezbollah-controlled failed state?

The United Nations secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, spent most of this week on a “solidarity tour” of Lebanon, where he met the president, prime minister, and Parliament speaker but not the real power, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s chief. Mr. Guterres’s top goal was to increase international support for Lebanon, and especially its army.

“I would like to stress that continued international support to the Lebanese Armed Forces is essential for the stability of Lebanon,” Mr. Guterres declared Wednesday.

Praising the LAF’s cooperation with the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, Mr. Guterres on Wednesday concluded his visit at that force’s Naqura headquarters. Oops: A day later Hezbollah supporters blocked and harassed UNIFIL peacekeepers at the village of Chakra. Lebanese army soldiers were nowhere in sight.

That tells the whole story. UNIFIL was re-created in 2006 to help Lebanon’s army disarm the country’s various militias. Hezbollah, however, was never disarmed. Instead, it now basically controls the Beirut government — including the national army — even while constantly increasing the size of its own army, which is much more powerful than the LAF.

A Tehran cat’s paw, Hezbollah, and its operatives train and fight alongside Iran proxies in Yemen and Iraq. In Syria, Hezbollah fighters have been instrumental in maintaining Bashar al-Assad’s hold on power since that country’s deadly and cruel civil war erupted in 2011.

While Hezbollah widened its regional and global reach, Lebanon’s currency has lost 90 percent of its value in the last two years. Foreign reserves have dwindled. Frequent electric power outages cripple the entire country. Garbage piles up everywhere and store shelves are often empty.

The Beirut port explosion in August 2020 killed 318 people, injured 7,000, and exacted more than $15 billion in property damages. An investigation into the event — widely believed to have originated in a poorly maintained cache of Hezbollah’s explosives — has been constantly blocked by Hezbollah’s Beirut supporters.

Regardless of its demonstrated inability to govern, Hezbollah controls all of Lebanon’s foreign and military policies. An interviewer on Lebanon’s MTV asked the foreign minister, Abdallah Habib, whether the government would ever comply with United Nations resolutions guaranteeing the disarming of militias or the end of Lebanese support of terrorism.

“Well,” Mr. Habib said, “there are things the government cannot control.”

Yet, even as everyone in Lebanon knows, Hezbollah runs the country, and America sends Beirut more than half a billion dollars a year.

“Today,” Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland tweeted while visiting Lebanon in August, “I’m pleased to announce an additional $67 million dollars in new U.S. support for the Lebanese Army, bringing our total of support this year to $187 million dollars. We have also provided over $300 million dollars in humanitarian support to Lebanon this year.”

That’s not all, says the top Lebanon watcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies,Tony Badran. America now seeks to boost the Lebanese Armed Forces through a U.N. back door.

In August, when the Security Council last renewed the mandate of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, America and France wrote in a resolution paragraph that asked the U.N. peacekeeping force to take “temporary and special measures” to support the Lebanese army. America funds 27 percent of the U.N. peacekeeping force, including UNIFIL.

President Biden’s administration is studying ways to bypass a law barring Washington from using American funds for foreign armies’ salaries. A special $86 million U.N.-managed fund has been proposed to supplement LAF shortages and pay the army’s salaries. America would be one of the fund’s top financiers. The Pentagon, additionally, is looking to underwrite Lebanese army procurement.

That is pure fiction, says Mr. Badran, as “almost all the LAF’s expenditures go toward salaries, pensions, and benefits, especially for its bloated officer corps.”

America’s partner on forging Lebanon policies, President Macron, meanwhile, attempts to convince the Saudis to renew financial support for Lebanon. In 2016 Riyadh withdrew its part of a pledged $4 billion grant from Gulf states for Lebanon, citing, among other reasons, Hezbollah’s aid to Yemen’s Houthis attacks on Saudi territory.

Led by France, the European Union maintains a fictional distinction between Hezbollah’s “terrorist” wing and its political arm — even as Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has publicly said there is no such separation.

So far, America has defined the entire organization as one of the world’s worst terror groups. The question remains, then, why do we insist on financially supporting a country under Hezbollah’s thumb, rather than sanctioning it?