Recently the United Kingdom outlawed Hizballah’s “political wing,” thus abandoning the former British position that it ought to be treated separately from the terrorist organization’s “military wing.” But the French and German governments still cling to this distinction, which enjoys a pedigree in academic and policy circles in the U.S. Tony Badran writes:

For years, the literature on Hizballah put forward precisely such a false dichotomy about the organization. These were not simply academic exercises: at specific junctures, experts and journalists peddled bogus categories and distinctions, arguing that Hizballah was evolving from a mere terror group to something more nuanced. Unsurprisingly, these ideas purposefully obscured the group’s history and its nature, which isn’t surprising given that some of the experts on Hizballah, like the [late scholar of international relations] Augustus Richard Norton or the journalist Hala Jaber, were sympathetic to the group, or, like [the political scientist] Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, were outright supporters who shared its animosity toward Israel and today are having a meltdown over the UK designation.

These experts, writes Badran, have added another myth, which still exerts significant influence over U.S. policy:

[W]hile the old line about Hizballah having some sort of magical distinction between its political and military wings no longer cuts it for some, the story the bien-pensants in policy circles everywhere in the West tell themselves today is another convenient fiction—that you can separate the group that dominates the Lebanese government and all its institutions from the polity it dominates. In other words, today’s smart set believes that you can somehow designate the former as a terrorist organization while continuing to support and do business with the latter without interruption. . . .

The two fictions, which distinguish between Hizballah’s wings and between Lebanon and Hizballah, . . . are simply a cover for a predetermined policy decision, and a convenient way to bypass a reality we simply don’t want to acknowledge or deal with—namely, that Lebanon is run by a terrorist group tied to Iran. And that by supporting Lebanon’s Hizballah-dominated “state institutions,” [the U.S. is] supporting Hizballah’s state.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”