Lebanon’s voters will go to the polls Sunday in a parliamentary election that, while making few changes in the country, will enable Washington maintain the fiction that America supports legitimate political bodies, rather than Hezbollah terrorists. 

Sunday’s vote is hailed in some quarters as an opportunity to mend a failed state. Lebanon is under enormous economic pressures, its infrastructure is crumbling, and public services are nonexistent. Those who haven’t escaped abroad have little access to food, medicine, or other necessities. 

Sunday will mark the first election since 2019, when protesters filled the streets demanding an end to the sectarian-based political structure. It also will be the first parliamentary contest since 2020, when a Hezbollah arms cache at the Beirut port exploded, razing vast parts of the city. 

Yet Lebanese voters are unexcited, expecting little change in the schlerotic political system. The street demonstrations, quickly dispersed by armed Hezbollah henchmen, are a distant memory now. The cause for the port explosion was covered up. Rather than change, Hezbollah, which calls the shots in Lebanon — figuratively and literally — is expected to consolidate its hold on power.

America nevertheless continues to treat Lebanon as a country with all the trappings of a legitimate state and to ignore the real power there. That power is one of the most prominent entities on the State Department’s list of foreign terror organizations. 

“Lebanon is not under sanctions,” a top adviser to President Biden, Amos Hochstein, told the Dubai-based al Arabiya last October. “But Hezbollah is,” the interviewer shot back. “I see Lebanon as a country,” Mr. Hochstein said, adding he never thinks of “Hezbollah as Lebanon.” 

That is the problem, a Lebanon watcher at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Tony Badran, says. America, he says, “is dealing with a front entity called the Lebanese government, and the only function of the Lebanese government is to be that front entity.”

Beirut’s  parliament speaker, Nabih Berri, is an example. As part of the sectarian-based system that in 1990 ended a 15-year civil war, the speaker must be a Shiite. The 84-year-old Mr. Berri was elected in 1992 and has held the post through all the turmoil, wars, and civil unrest of the past 30 years. 

No one doubts Mr. Berri will hold the gavel after the Sunday election as well. Another sure bet is that the speaker will do exactly what Hezbollah’s chief, Hassan Nasrallah, tells him to do. This structure allows America to “negotiate with Hezbollah through Berri,” Mr. Badran says. 

By now Hezbollah controls all institutions in Lebanon, including the premiership, which is allotted to the Sunni community, and the presidency, which is held by a Maronite Christian. 

When Sunni politicians objected to the selection of Hezbollah’s hand-picked presidential candidate, Michel Aoun, Hezbollah political operatives and gunmen forced a government shutdown. After two years during which the country was paralyzed the crisis finally ended, and Mr. Aoun was crowned president.     

Another vaunted institution is the Lebanese Armed Forces, which according to the State Department’s website “has historically served as a pillar of stability in a country facing extraordinary challenges.” Since the end of the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war, according to the department, America has contributed $2.5 billion to the LAF. 

In reality, the army is controlled by Hezbollah and its allies in the Beirut government. Beyond political control, Hezbollah — the real military power in the country — is much better equipped, trained, and battle-ready than the LAF. 

France, the former colonial power, maintains major financial interests in Lebanon. After Paris contended there was no evidence that a Hezbollah arms cache was responsible for the Beirut explosion, a French firm, CMA CGM, was awarded in February a 10-year, $33 million contract to rebuild the port. 

Meanwhile, Israel has suffered a recent uptick in attacks from Lebanon. As in the political system, Hezbollah maintains the facade that those attacks are committed by organizations it does not control, such as an Iran-backed Hamas group in southern Lebanon. 

“Israel must change its attitude and, instead of seeing Lebanon as a country it can negotiate with, consider it the enemy state that it is,” the founder of ALMA, Sarit Zehavi, says.

Ms. Zehavi’s think tank concentrates on threats in northern Israel. The former army officer now details recent rocket attacks from Lebanon, as well as a stream of drugs and arms that Hezbollah operatives smuggle through the border to Arabs in Israel and the West Bank. 

In recent years Israel has cooperated with Mr. Hochstein’s attempts at settling a dispute with Lebanon over Mediterranean gas drilling. When Beirut recently demanded sovereignty over a gas-rich field discovered by Israel, Mr. Hochstein proposed a Lebanese-Israeli joint venture. 

Mr. Nasrallah — who, like his Iranian patrons, is more interested in erasing Israel from the map than in negotiating cooperation — immediately rejected the offer with an antisemitic slur.

“I am saying to the Lebanese state: If you want to continue negotiating, go ahead,” the Hezbollah chief said, adding, “but not with Hochstein, Frankenstein, or any other Stein coming to Lebanon.”