An Israeli airstrike on a Hezbollah bunker reportedly has killed Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah. If true, his death would cap an impressive ten-day campaign that began with the simultaneous detonation of Hezbollah pagers, continued to take out senior military leaders, and now has decapitated the organization itself.
Diplomats and human rights activists might hand wring, but what Israel did was not only right and wise, but should also be a lesson for a new generation of U.S. and European policymakers.
There is a tendency among diplomats either to exaggerate the benefits of dialogue or to declare its inevitability. In 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for example, spoke about the need to talk with the Taliban. “The starting premise is you don’t make peace with your friends,” she remarked at a conference in London. “You have to be willing to engage with your enemies….”
She was wrong. Some enemies are so odious, absolute defeat must be the goal. That was the driving belief during World War II, for example, in both the European and Pacific theaters. It was the right decision: Today, both Germany and Japan are reliable defenders of the post-World War II, rules-based liberal order. Imposing terms on Japan did not spark reactionary violence; rather, it gave Japanese a new start. The Japanese themselves showed that they were ready to move on from absolute fealty to the emperor, despite the beliefs of Japanese studies academics at the time.Europe thrived because no diplomat acting with a naïve belief in his own sophistication snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by believing that they should enter into talks with Karl Dönitz, who briefly succeeded Hitler after his suicide.
Other regimes ended with the killing or military ouster of their leader. Uganda rebounded after a Tanzanian invasion drove out brutal dictator Idi Amin, who then spent his retirement years in Saudi Arabia. The Khmer Rouge regime came crashing down after Vietnam invaded and drove Pol Pot into hiding.
The 18-year terror of the Baader–Meinhof Gang ended in that group’s ideological defeat, not in its co-option. The Islamic State ended not with a diplomatic deal, but rather with the death of its self-declared caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Perhaps had the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations not legitimized the Taliban and sought instead their absolute defeat, Afghanistan’s women would neither be prisoners in their own homes nor the country itself a safe-haven from which to plot new global terror.
Perhaps the lesson of Nasrallah’s apparent demise should be an indictment of what Western and UN diplomacy has become. No organization should have ever granted Nasrallah an iota of legitimacy, especially after his 2002 statement, “If they [Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.” Officials from George W. Bush-era Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to UN Secretary António Guterres who pushed ceasefire calls over the decades did the world wrong.
As Hezbollah collapses due to Israel’s ten days of hell, the terror group likely has greater support in Morningside Heights than in Lebanon. Not only could the decapitation of Hezbollah avert a wider war between Israel and Lebanon, but it could also bring freedom to the Lebanese people whom Hezbollah has for too long held hostage and whose aspirations for a Western-oriented state Hezbollah has blocked.
The lesson for Washington, however, is broader. Diplomacy and compromise empowered Hezbollah and Hamas. They also empowered the Taliban and North Korea to the tune of billions of dollars and the Islamic Republic of Iran to an exponentially larger amount. Rather than continue such engagement, the United States should map out its opponents’ command-and-control and enemy regimes’ vulnerabilities and exploit them with a goal of bringing each regime to its knees. If Nasrallah’s death collapses Hezbollah, what might Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s sudden death mean for Iran? Or, Qods Force Chief Esmail Qaani’s demise? Or every Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ general or admiral?
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demonstrated, terrorist groups and radical ideologies need not be permanent fixtures on the world stage; rather, Western leaders should view them as enemies to eliminate.
