It is deeply unfair to the hard-working diplomats in Washington when people use a minor technicality like 25 daily bombings to suggest our peace framework is failing. We must learn to look past the casualty reports and focus on the triumph of the paperwork.
Yesterday morning, I was enjoying a perfectly lovely flat white on a sunlit patio in Georgetown, reflecting on the historic achievement of the US-brokered ceasefire in Lebanon. It is a triumph of modern statecraft, a testament to the tireless work of our diplomatic corps. But as always, the cynics have to ruin a beautiful moment. My feed was suddenly flooded with complaining reports from the Lebanese health ministry that Israeli airstrikes had killed 19 people, including four women and three children, across the south. And immediately, the armchair diplomats started screaming that the ceasefire was a failure.
I am frankly exhausted by this kind of unhelpful literalism. If you have never sat in a closed-door briefing at a major Washington think tank, you might naively believe that a ceasefire means a complete cessation of all firing. You might assume that when a fragile peace is brokered, it precludes dropping high-explosive munitions on the coastal Tyre province. But foreign policy is not dictated by the dictionary. A modern, mature ceasefire is a living, breathing document, one that is highly flexible and apparently accommodates the targeting of 25 distinct sites of Hezbollah infrastructure in a single Tuesday afternoon.
We must separate the emotional weight of ten people dying in a single strike on the village of Deir Qanoun al Nahr from the broader, more important reality: the paperwork has been signed. The framework exists. When the IDF drops precision munitions on southern Lebanon today, they are doing so firmly within the context of a ceasefire. That is a massive diplomatic upgrade from dropping bombs during a war, and it is incredibly disrespectful to the Biden administration not to acknowledge that distinction.
If we start defining a ceasefire purely by whether or not bombs are actively exploding in civilian neighborhoods, we set an impossibly high bar for peace.
Arthur is exactly right. I had lunch with him just last week at Le Diplomate to celebrate the agreement, and we marveled at the resilience of this delicate arrangement. The true threat to the peace process is not the near-daily attacks from both sides, which are merely kinetic expressions of ongoing security adjustments. The true threat is the people in southern Lebanon who stubbornly insist on dying in them, thereby generating terrible optics for the State Department.
It is profoundly selfish behavior. American envoys spent weeks flying back and forth across the Mediterranean, drinking stale coffee on government jets, missing their children's soccer games just to secure this pause in hostilities. To then go and get caught in an airstrike on Hezbollah infrastructure which unfortunately happened to overlap with three children in Deir Qanoun al Nahr is a slap in the face to the hard-working professionals who drafted this agreement.
Furthermore, the Israeli military has been incredibly restrained in its post-ceasefire bombardment. When pressed by reporters, the military did not even immediately comment on the casualties or the specific incidents. That kind of profound silence is the absolute hallmark of a de-escalatory posture. They are quietly and professionally executing two dozen targeted strikes a day, ensuring that the ceasefire is aggressively enforced from the air without making a big PR spectacle out of it.
So I am officially asking the international community to look past the smoke rising over southern Lebanon. Look past the hospital wards and the Lebanese health ministry casualty reports. Look instead to the triumph of the rules-based international order. We have achieved a historic peace. We just have to accept that this specific peace involves a steady, daily rhythm of fatal airstrikes. If you cannot see the beauty in that diplomatic achievement, then you simply do not understand how Washington works.