On October 17th, 2019, hundreds of thousands of people around Lebanon poured into the streets, demanding an end to the sectarian-clientelist regime. The promise of collective action, however, soon buckled under the weight of state repression, economic collapse, and global pandemic. More importantly, the apparent unity of the protestors gave way to antagonisms, exposing the diversity of people’s affectively charged political commitments, desires, and fears. A year later, many Lebanese believe the revolution has failed, having failed to accomplish a change in the political structure of the nation. Interestingly, this disillusionment condemns collective politics for even trying to transform a country that was and will always be controlled by foreign powers. In fact, the notion of Lebanon as a “chessboard” for broader geopolitical games is one that has become quite prevalent and popular in explaining the “failure” of the Lebanese Revolution. Here, politics is imagined as only existing in an international state of nature, where the material interests of interested great powers are executed in Lebanon through a sectarian regime that is itself a client of foreign nations. This de facto proxy status of Lebanon is one that is lived and imagined in the everyday, constraining the possibilities for political action in the country, while producing myriad affects and discourses through which subjects experience and interpret their political helplessness. The following paper/presentation will explore these discourses and affects, with a focus on the subject’s imaginary relationship to geopolitics, the structures of feeling that mediate this relationship, and the consequences of this relationship on the possibility of political transformation. More, this paper aims to theorize political helplessness as part of the affective architecture of political sectarianism, while also theorizing Lebanon’s “proxy condition” as a particular, 21st century manifestation of globalization and empire.