“It looks like they didn’t hit anything but military targets,” President Joe Biden stated approvingly on Oct. 27, hours after Israeli fighter aircraft flew 1000 miles in an historic operation to strike Iranian air-defense systems, drone and missile production facilities, and launch installations. “I hope that this is the end,” the president added.

Biden’s is a vain hope, since Iran shows no signs of desisting from its multi-front war against the Jewish state. For its part, Israel has begun to reckon with the wishful thinking that left it vulnerable on Oct. 7, 2023, to the thousands of Iran-backed Hamas jihadists who burst across the border at dawn and massacred some 1,200 persons, mostly civilians and including Americans, and kidnapped around 250 persons, mostly civilians and including Americans. However, the wishful thinking that typifies the Biden administration’s approach to Middle East diplomacy gives little evidence of abating.

In late October, U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein conducted “talks with Lebanese officials in Beirut on conditions for a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.” Hochstein declared “that the conflict has ‘escalated out of control.’” Yet the Biden diplomat remained unbowed. He endeavored to work with the governments of Lebanon and Israel to find “a formula that brings an end to this conflict once and for all.”

Instead of speaking vaguely of “conditions for a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah,” Hochstein should emphasize securing an agreement that enables Israel to achieve its war aim in the north, which is to return to their homes more than 60,000 internally displaced Israelis. Since Oct. 8, 2023, Iran-backed Hezbollah’s daily aerial bombardment has rendered a swath of northern Israel uninhabitable. Hezbollah opened a northern front in support of Hamas, whose Oct. 7 invasion in the south was one phase of the Gazan jihadists’ longstanding war of annihilation against the Jewish state.

Furthermore, the conflict was far from having, as Hochstein put it, “escalated out of control.” To the contrary, in mid-summer Israel went on the offensive with a series of remarkable operations. In cooperation with the nation’s intelligence agencies, the Israel Defense Forces decimated Hezbollah’s leadership starting with Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah. In addition, Israel took out of commission thousands of Hezbollah fighters by detonating from a distance their pagers and walkie-talkies. Israel substantially degraded Hezbollah’s enormous rocket and missile caches – by 80%, estimated Defense Minister Yoav Gallant – through targeted airstrikes. And in early October, the........

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