The Killing of Nasrallah—and the Virtue of Escalation

What Israel has managed to accomplish over the past two weeks will long be studied by military historians.

In a series of brilliant operations—beginning with the simultaneous explosion of encrypted pagers belonging to Hezbollah’s commanders, and culminating with the coup de grâce on Friday that eliminated the organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and the rest of his high command—Israel managed to decapitate the entire leadership of the most fearsome terrorist army on the planet. In so doing, it ignored the advice of its allies in the West, and radically disrupted the balance of power in the Middle East.

Hezbollah’s war is not just with Israel. It has American, Syrian, and Lebanese blood on its hands as well. 

Recall that in 1983, the group killed 241 servicemen with a massive bomb at the Marines barracks in Beirut. The organization was also responsible for the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, in which 85 innocent people were murdered. In 2012, Hezbollah bombed a bus with young Israeli tourists at the port of Burgas, Bulgaria, that left five dead and 32 injured. 

But Hezbollah’s bloodiest campaign was reserved for Syria, where it became the shock troops for the country’s tyrant, Bashar al-Assad, during his brutal suppression of a democratic uprising. Hezbollah’s forces led the ground operations in the siege of Aleppo, a vicious campaign in 2015 and 2016 that starved the ancient city and reduced most of it to rubble. 

A day after Hamas launched its pogrom of October 7, Hezbollah began raining rockets and missiles into northern Israel, displacing up to 70,000 Israelis. Nearly a year later, those people have not been able to return to their homes. 

With this kind of butcher’s bill, one might think the response from the civilized world upon learning of Nasrallah’s death would be jubilation. But Western leaders have responded with reticence. In this they have revealed their profound confusion about the enemy. It is not a nation-state, a terror group, or even an ideology. From Washington to Paris, they seem to believe the real enemy is escalation.  

This united front against escalation began before the strike that killed Nasrallah. 

At the United Nations last week, twelve countries—including America, France, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—presented a plan for a 21-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon without mentioning Hezbollah, the terror army that holds Lebanon hostage. A joint statement reasoned that Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah’s leadership presented an “unacceptable risk of a broader regional escalation.” 

President Joe Biden and French president Emmanuel Macron later urged Israel to accede to a “settlement on the Israel-Lebanon border that ensures safety and security to enable civilians to return to their homes.” Meanwhile, British prime minister Keir Starmer called on “Israel and Hezbollah to stop the violence, step back from the brink.” An immediate ceasefire, he said, was necessary to “provide space for a diplomatic settlement.” 

Even after Hezbollah confirmed that Nasrallah had left this mortal coil, German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock warned that the strikes “weren’t in Israel’s security interests.” Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris made sure to say that Nasrallah’s killing provided justice to his many victims. But they too kept pushing for de-escalation as the way forward. “President Biden and I do not want to see conflict in the Middle East escalate into a broader regional war,” Harris said. 

The trouble is that the Middle East is already engulfed in a regional war. The party behind that war—Iran, which funds Hezbollah, Hamas, and other proxies—just suffered a devastating blow thanks to Israel. 

Indeed, by refusing to heed the council of Biden, Macron, and Starmer, Israel has brought the Middle East far closer to peace than it was before. 

Since the early 2010s, Iran’s strategy has been to arm and train proxies like Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon to encircle Israel in a “ring of fire.” This strategy is not just a traditional proxy war for Iran. It’s an insurance policy for its nuclear program, which is perilously close to building a bomb. If Israel decides to strike one of Iran’s nuclear facilities, Hezbollah has more than 100,000 missiles pointed at Tel Aviv, Haifa, and other major cities in the country. Knocking out Hezbollah’s leadership and targeting its rocket and missile launchers degrades that insurance policy and makes Iran’s nuclear program more vulnerable. 

And yet if you followed the diplospeak emanating out of Washington since October 7, you would believe that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran were distinct actors in this conflict and not part of the same coordinated attack. This helps explain the enormous pressure the Biden administration has placed on Israel’s government to accept a ceasefire with Iran’s proxies, but their refusal to pressure Iran.

“This administration, like the Obama administration, wants an equilibrium between Iran and Israel and our traditional Arab allies, as opposed to a strategy that rolls back Iran’s power in the region and thereby deters their nuclear and regional ambitions,” Mike Gallagher, a Republican who represented Wisconsin in Congress until resigning recently to run defense programs at Palantir, told The Free Press. “The obsession with de-escalation undermines deterrence.”

Gallagher is not alone. A number of analysts who have challenged the conventional wisdom, ranging from Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies to Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and his point person on the diplomacy that produced the Abraham Accords, have been warning that the old de-escalation playbook will only lead to war. As Kushner posted on X Saturday evening, “Over the past six weeks or so, Israel has eliminated as many terrorists on the U.S. list of wanted terrorists as the U.S. has done in the last 20 years.” 

This is why the celebrations are not limited to Tel Aviv. Listen to ordinary Gazans share their views on Hezbollah and Iran in a new video report: 

The problem with the Biden administration’s approach is that it in no way impedes Iran, which controls the purse strings and provides strategic direction to its proxies. It’s a great deal for the mullahs. Lebanese and Palestinians fight and die in Iran’s war to destroy Israel, while Iran is treated by America and the West as an outside observer, facing few consequences other than Israel’s occasional targeted strikes on its officers in Syria and Lebanon and its sabotage inside the country. 

Israel has now shown its most important ally a better way. By escalating the conflict with Hezbollah, there are now strategic opportunities to go after Iran’s nuclear program. If Harris and Biden were wise, they would shelve their strategy of endless ceasefire talks and instead embrace Israel’s escalation. Because the best way to end a regional war is to win it. 

How did Israel pull it off? The Financial Times has the best piece of reporting so far. Read it here. 

Eli Lake is a columnist at The Free Press. You can follow him on X @EliLake. His most recent podcast examines the lessons for America from the fall of Rome’s republic.