While Israel was planning Friday’s spectacular attack on Hizballah, U.S. diplomats were scrambling to achieve a temporary cease-fire in Lebanon, as if their goal was to stop Israel just as it was gaining the upper hand over a terrorist group that has killed hundreds of Americans. Naturally, these efforts culminated on Thursday with a joint statement calling for “a diplomatic settlement that enables civilians on both sides of the border to return to their homes in safety.” Matthew Continetti comments:

I’ve consumed a lot of multilateral mush during the Biden years. Never have I encountered a statement as disingenuous, deluded, and feckless as this.

Notice who signed it: the United States, Australia, Canada, the EU, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Not Israel. Not Lebanon. And, most significantly, neither Hizballah nor Iran. The terrorist army and its patron aren’t mentioned. How do you negotiate a cease-fire without naming the belligerents?

In 2006, Israel, Lebanon, and Hizballah agreed to UN Resolution 1701. It said that Hizballah would move its forces north of the Litani River, creating a buffer zone between Iran’s proxy and Israel’s north. Hizballah never complied. And the multinational UN force that operates in southern Lebanon never bothered to enforce the agreement.

Diplomacy hasn’t worked. Biden’s joint statement reads as if negotiations haven’t been tried. On the contrary: the U.S. special envoy Amos Hochstein has been traversing the region for months. He’s been as ineffective as Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the quest for a Gaza truce. It’s not Israel that has made Hochstein and Blinken look like fools. It’s the terrorist psychopaths they treat as good-faith interlocutors who won’t take yes for an answer. . . . Peace is elusive because Hizballah’s not interested. Hizballah doesn’t exist to make friends. It exists to destroy Israel and America.

Continetti wrote this before Hassan Nasrallah’s death, but this development, and the contrast it draws between Israeli military effectiveness and American fecklessness, makes his point that much stronger.

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.