Studying the foreign policy of Lebanon's Hezbollah is no easy task. From a methodological standpoint, it is an exercise that first of all entails untangling a very tightly woven mix of internal and external strategies: More than any other Lebanese party, Hezbollah is a political apparatus whose reason for being, universe of meaning, and propensity for action are largely determined by a specific relationship with the external, in this case regional, world. Next, on the analytical level, the challenge consists of clearly grasping the multiple and multiform character of this foreign policy: Hezbollah's leadership does not just have one but diverse foreign policies; depending on the context, it does not hesitate to change its relationship with the world in an explicitly pragmatic logic, but it also projects its relations with the outside through different organizational and institutional supports. The red lines defined a priori by its ideological paradigms are not perfectly inflexible, and its relations with the national political system—of which Hezbollah, like other of the country's groups, is simultaneously a component and a competitor—lets it develop foreign policies from differing platforms that appear at times contradictory but are functionally quite complementary.

Difficult to dissect it may be, but the subject keeps its hold on the interest. Close to thirty years after Hezbollah's birth, the study of its foreign policy has in the main constituted a subordinate subject to the study of Western foreign policies, which has been content to view it as subcontracting on behalf of more important regional actors. Hezbollah's interaction with the world, thus limited to a series of anti-Western and anti-Israeli terrorist initiatives carried out on the orders of the Syrian and/or Iranian regimes, becomes a favored way for getting at the real nature of the organization, so that Hezbollah sees itself summed up as an essentially violent organization whose field of action is by nature extra-national. Indisputably, Hezbollah's foreign policy reflects a series of elements that reveal the organization's true identity; however, it is really nothing more than an evolving strategy hinging on other means of action, in the service of an order of priorities that are definitely Lebanese-centered: For Hezbollah, as for quite a few other political actors, its foreign policy is above all a domestic policy.