Middle East

Bloomberg - The US and Iran are considering further negotiations to extend a two-week ceasefire, as Donald Trump presses ahead with his naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. The aim is to hold fresh discussions before the current truce expires next week. Futures gained and oil fell on the news. Meanwhile, a US-sanctioned tanker is testing the blockade. And China broke its silence on the war with President Xi Jinping telling the visiting Spanish prime minister that “the international order is crumbling into disarray.”

NBC News - Diplomats from Israel and Lebanon are set to meet today for rare high-level talks after more than a month of conflict and a week after the U.S. and Iran agreed to a ceasefire. Tehran-backed Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel after the joint attack on Iran, and Israel has retaliated with attacks across Lebanon that have killed more than 2,000 people. The U.S. is mediating what are the first high-level talks between the two countries since 1993. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon will take part, a State Department official said. Hezbollah has urged Lebanon to pull out of the talks. 

Mairav Zonszein, NY Times - In the days leading up to the two-week cease-fire between the United States and Iran, Israeli officials worried that the war might soon be over. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly ordered more strikes on Iran, as if trying to get in as much damage as possible before President Trump forced Israel to stop. No matter that Israel and the U.S. had been pounding Iran relentlessly for five weeks and Israel’s air force said it had nearly exhausted its vital targets against Iranian military and nuclear industries. Israel had already begun striking steel factories and petrochemical plants.

Then, on the day the cease-fire came into shaky effect — and most civilians across the region began to breathe a sigh of relief — Israel proceeded to launch one of the deadliest strikes on Lebanon ever, including in the heart of densely populated Beirut, without any warning. The operation, which the Israel Defense Forces say attacked Hezbollah command centers, hit 100 targets in 10 minutes, killed over 350 people and wounded well over 1,000, many of them civilians.

In most countries that have been at war, cease-fires are a welcome development, or, at the very least, something to which leaders aspire. But for Israel’s maximalist leaders, cease-fires are too often seen as getting in the way of efforts to finish the job. And even when Israel enters cease-fires, it continues to fire unilaterally — as with Gaza and Lebanon. War is increasingly the state’s go-to response to geopolitical challenges — not just the strategy but the norm. After the cease-fire with Iran was imposed upon Mr. Netanyahu, he issued a statement insisting that the job was not yet done. He then reiterated those comments in a speech on Saturday night: “The battle is not yet over.” When Mr. Trump forced a cease-fire in Gaza back in October, the Israeli prime minister said similar things declaring that Israel would eventually achieve its goals there — “the easy way” or “the hard way.”

For Israel’s leadership, if war is the status quo, the job is never done, and you can never lose, because you are always still in the fight.