BEIRUT — The beik is staying in the mountains these days. To reach him, you take the highway south out of Beirut, heading along the Mediterranean coastline. From there, the route is vertical: A winding road takes you up the mountain range, past soldiers standing guard by a cement hut painted with the Lebanon flag, through scattered villages and over sharp cliffs that have denied would-be invaders for millennia. And there, in a 300-year old castle overlooking the town of Mukhtara, sits Walid Jumblatt.
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Jumblatt is the head of Lebanon's Druze, an esoteric Islamic sect whose entire population in the country could perhaps fill the Rose Bowl twice. Beik is an old Ottoman honorific, a holdover from centuries past, when the Jumblatts were the feudal nobility of the region. This current beik has ruled over Mukhtara since 1977 -- before Hezbollah existed, and when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was still in grade school.
Despite his community's small numbers, Walid Beik has emerged as a symbol of the tumultuous politics in Syria and Lebanon. He preserves his influence by being the swing vote in Levantine politics -- throwing his weight behind whichever power has the political wind at its back.
It can be a cold-hearted venture: After the Syrian regime assassinated his father during the Lebanese civil war, Jumblatt swallowed his anger and emerged as a staunch ally of President Hafez al-Assad. He abandoned Damascus in 2005 after his ally, former President Rafiq al-Hariri, was assassinated by a giant car bomb in downtown Beirut. Joining in an alliance with Rafiq's son Saad, he emerged as one of the most vociferous critics of Hezbollah and Assad, whom he dubbed the "Damascus dictator." He then reconciled with the Syrian regime in 2008 after Hezbollah and its allies invaded his mountain heartland -- only to shift again as the revolt aimed at toppling the Assad regime gained momentum.
Jumblatt shrugs off the implication that there is something objectionable about his political shifts.
"Politics is made out of change," he tells Foreign Policy. "There is no fixed status or rigid status. Sometimes you have to change through the environment. When the Syrian regime started killing its people, I supported the Syrian people."
One day after our interview, on Oct. 3, Syrian artillery opened fire on a Turkish border town, killing five civilians -- Ankara responded with a hail of retaliatory fire on Syrian territory. NATO issued a statement reacting to the shelling with just the sort of rhetorical assault that infuriates Jumblatt: The alliance denounced the Assad regime's "flagrant breach of international law," and pledged to "closely follow the situation," but gave no indication it was considering military action.
"As long as the West is not supporting the rebels with adequate weapons -- Stingers and anti-tank missiles -- [the conflict] will drag on," he says.
But even as he stokes the fires of revolt in Syria -- he has also attempted to rally the Syrian Druze against Assad -- he is not burning his bridges with all the regime's allies, or building new ones with all its enemies. His harshest criticisms in this interview were reserved for the United States, which he sees as hypocritically using fears of an Islamist takeover or a post-Assad dictatorship to justify its inaction.
"Who supported the jihadists and the Islamists apart from Washington, when they were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan? And who ruined Pakistan at one time except the policy of Washington, in the 1960s and 1970s?" he asks. "The West at that time supported all of the dictators from Hafez al-Assad to [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak to [Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine] Ben Ali, against the will of the Arab people. Let the Arab people decide their own fate."
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