The IDF has begun a trial pullout from parts of the Lebanon buffer zone. Lebanese Army units are moving into towns like Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh under an arrangement Washington brokered. President Joseph Aoun sat across from Donald Trump in the Oval Office this week and said Lebanon’s goal is to end the state of hostility with Israel forever. Everyone involved is using the language of resolution. That is precisely what should make an observer nervous.

Seth Frantzman’s reporting in the Jerusalem Post identifies the actual problem, and it is not a small one: Israel, Lebanon, and the United States all endorse the pilot-zone concept, and all three define success against Hezbollah differently. That is not a footnote to the arrangement. It is the arrangement’s central weakness, and it is the kind of weakness that tends to surface eighteen months after the cameras have gone home rather than at the signing ceremony, when everyone still has an incentive to describe convergence that has not actually occurred.

Consider what each party needs “success” to mean. For Washington, success is a deployable, low-casualty........

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