“De-escalate” — that’s what President Biden, along with a host of other world leaders, keeps urging Israel to do in its war with Hezbollah, even after the Iran-backed militia shot 181 ballistic missiles at the Jewish state on Tuesday night, sending the country’s citizens into bunkers and killing one Palestinian man. Rather than retaliate, Israel must focus on diplomacy, they say, and limit the risk of a larger war. 

According to some pundits on nuclear deterrence, though, now is not the time for Israel to stand down. Indeed, the escalating hostilities offer an opportunity to weaken Iran, the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world, and in turn defend the West against what Prime Minister Netanyahu calls “the axis of evil,” led by the nuclear powers of Russia and China, and potentially Iran soon, too. 

The Iranian Regime’s ballistic missile attack on Israel was “the least punishment,” Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared in a rare speech in Tehran on Friday. “The resistance in the region will not back down even with the killing of its leaders,” he said, adding that Iran will attack Israel again if necessary.

Israel hit back on Thursday night, striking an area south of Beirut and targeting Hashem Safieddine, the presumed successor of the assassinated Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah. It’s unclear if he was killed. The pressing question is whether Israel will soon move to destroy Iran’s quickly-building nuclear program, and whether America will aid Jerusalem in removing the biggest threat to the future of the Middle East and beyond. 

The White House’s catchphrase is that it supports Israel’s right to self-defense, but this commitment is wavering and its parameters murky. On Thursday, Mr. Biden said that the United States was “in discussion” about the possibility that Israel might strike Iran’s oil infrastructure. Yet the day before he said he would oppose a preemptive Israeli attack on the regime’s nuclear weapons program sites, and on Friday he reversed his previous statement, telling reporters Israel should think of “other alternatives than striking Iranian oil fields.”

Calls to restrain Israel are echoing among a chorus of foreign policy observers who assert that war in the Middle East is not in the interest of the United States, the region, or the world. 

“Israel is being driven by ‘reckless drivers’ who are steering toward a dangerous set of policies, in part for domestic political reasons,” a professor of international relations at Notre Dame and an advocate for “realism” in foreign policy, Michael Desch, tells the Sun. “True friends, when they see a friend too drunk to drive, take away the keys,” he says, pointing to Senator Sanders’ proposal that Washington withhold further military aid to Israel.

“The U.S. must avoid grand strategic hubris,” warns another realist,  a professor of intelligence and national security at Texas A&M’s school of government, Christopher Layne. “Washington does not have the magic bullet to end instability in these places and eliminate terrorism,” he tells the Sun, arguing that policymakers should insulate America from turmoil in the Middle East and avoid inflating the level of threat to national security.

To those who espouse the neoconservative paradigm of peace through strength, however, the future of the war unfolding in the Levant matters deeply for American interests. 

“Now that Israel has shown its strength and its ability to decimate Iran’s ring of fire in the region, it has now a pretty clear path to taking out the biggest threats that Iran poses, not just to Israel, but to the United States,” an official from President Trump’s National Security Council, Richard Goldberg, tells the Sun. While a staffer in the Senate and in the House, he led efforts to expand U.S. missile defense cooperation with Israel and impose sanctions on the Islamic Republic. “This,” he says, “is an historic opportunity.”

In addition to helping Israel defend its airspace, America should also provide intelligence and logistical support that would aid the country’s efforts to remove Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, Mr. Goldberg says. “We’re a superpower, and we need to act like it.”

Israeli inaction could actually raise the temperature of military conflict in the region. “You deal with actors like Iran and its proxies forcefully,” a senior fellow on the Global War on Terror at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Bill Roggio, tells the Sun. “Inaction merely spurs an escalated response from them.” 

Urging Israel to appease rather than retaliate to the Islamic Republic’s attacks on its own soil, Mr. Roggio says, is like assuming that if France handed over Alsace-Lorraine to Hitler, he would’ve stopped short of invading Europe. As seen in the four years of the Biden-Harris Administration rolling back pressure on state sponsored terrorist groups, he says, “when you appease, you only encourage bad actors.”

The Iranian Regime, meanwhile, is inching closer to obtaining atomic weapons.  In July, Secretary of State Blinken announced that Iran was probably one or two weeks away from having the breakout capacity of producing fissile material for a nuclear weapon. Also in July, a report on Iran’s nuclear program released from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence suggested that the American intelligence community can no longer say with confidence that Iran is not building a nuclear warhead.

If Tehran has the ability to put even a rudimentary nuclear device on the tip of one of its missiles, that will alter the calculus of its war with Israel. “If Israel is serious about trying to take out the Iranian nuclear program, there may not be a better time than over the next few weeks to months. It may only get more difficult,” a Heritage Foundation fellow on nuclear deterrence and missile defense, Robert Peters, tells the Sun. “Escalation is a tool. It can be bad, but it can also be very effective.” 

An effective use of force now could ultimately help return both Israel and America to a policy of deterrence. It could free them to focus on ensuring that Gulf allies stay in the orbit of America, not China, and on expanding the Abraham Accords, Mr. Goldberg says. “There is huge victory potential for American grand strategy.” 

Undercutting the power of the Iranian Regime could also allow Washington to dedicate more resources toward other regions such as the Indo-Pacific, Mr. Peters says. “America’s primary military challenge right now is China. If we get into a relatively high intensity shooting war with Iran, that’s going to deplete the munitions that we need to deter Chinese aggression.” 

America’s foreign policy discourse prefers de-escalation and diplomacy over military action. Yet as military historian Eliot Cohen writes in the Atlantic, “whether we wish it or not, we are again in the world of war, which plays by rules closer to those of the boxing ring than the seminar room.”

Take it from Winston Churchill: “historians often treat the decisions of the field as incidents in the dramas of politics and diplomacy,” as Mr. Cohen quotes him. “But great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.”