Albania is the world’s newest narcostate threat

With thousands of dead in the latest flare-up in fighting between Hezbollah and Israel in Lebanon, it can be hard to conceive that Lebanon was once an oasis for peace and tolerance. Beirut once had a rightly deserved reputation as the Paris of the Middle East.

That status ended not with the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, but with the rise of the Assad regime in Syria several years earlier. President Hafez al Assad never renounced Syria’s claim to the entirety of Lebanon but was content to treat Lebanon as a special zone. While his terrorism sponsorship subjected Syria to U.S. sanctions in 1979, his autocracy began to suffocate Syrian society, and his embrace of state-dominant socialism further isolated his economy. Lebanon then became a lifeline, a pressure relief valve to allow money laundering, drug trafficking, and sanctions evasion. Syrian elites could escape to Beirut for a weekend