On Monday, Nawaf Salam—currently the president of the International Court of Justice—was selected to be Lebanon’s new prime minister. Like the new president Joseph Aoun, Salam was not Hizballah’s first choice; at the same time, the Iran-backed terrorist group finds him palatable enough to go along with the nomination. David Wurmser observes that reports that Aoun pledged to “disarm” Hizballah have turned out to be false. Rather, Aoun

was careful in his words and suggested it would be subsumed into the state rather than outright eliminated. Such an integration of Hizballah into the Lebanese Armed Forces is one of Israel’s greatest fears, because it could put Israel into a war not with a militia but with a sovereign country on its own border. . . .

Lebanon likely is far from out of the woods, far from adequately executing its obligations under the ceasefire plan, and certainly far from emerging as a calm state at peace with Israel.

In Wurmser’s view, the very “foundations of the Lebanese state” make it vulnerable to exploitation by external forces, whether Iran-backed Hizballah or others. He looks to the country’s origins following the battle of Ayn Dera in 1711—in which an alliance of Christian and Druze clans defeated local Ottoman forces—to understand the current predicament, and concludes:

Any current Lebanese government is likely to view an energetic push to confront what remains of Hizballah as a prescription for civil war and an invasion by the new Syrians and their Turkish overlords. This would be tantamount to willfully inviting the apocalypse. As a result, it is unlikely that the Lebanese government—an artificial institution anchored to a false equilibrium—will risk its existence by trying to rearrange the power structures.

For Israel, an alliance with Lebanon may be the most effective way to secure its northern border. And for the West, Lebanon offers an opportunity to preserve the oldest churches in the cradle of Christianity. But that would involve an upheaval that the Lebanese people now appear unwilling to entertain. After decades of civil war, even a bad equilibrium may appear better than intercommunal strife.

To Mathias Döpfner, a German and the publisher of the online magazine Politico, the war between Israel and Iran

is a central front in a global contest in which the forces of tyranny and violence in recent years have been gaining ground against the forces of freedom, which too often are demoralized and divided. In a world full of bad actors, Iran is the most aggressive and dangerous totalitarian force of our time.

But Israel is only the first target. Once Israel falls, Europe and America will be the focus. . . . It is therefore surprising that Israel is not being celebrated worldwide for its historic, extremely precise, and necessary strike against Iranian nuclear-weapons facilities and for the targeted killing of leading terrorists, but that the public response is dominated by anti-Israel propaganda. The intelligence and precision of Israel’s actions are not admired but are instead used here and there to perpetuate blatantly anti-Semitic stereotypes.

If Israel does not achieve its goals—destruction of the nuclear facilities, maximum weakening of the terrorist regime, and, ideally, the removal of the mullahs—the world will quickly look very different. China will seize this historic opportunity to annex Taiwan sooner than expected. Largely without resistance. . . . That is why America and Europe, in their own interests alone, must stand united with Israel and do everything in their power to ensure that this historic liberation is achieved.