On pointlessness – The Economist:

‘The Biden administration says it will not support a ground invasion of Lebanon. But after months of warning Israel against escalation, it now endorses Israel’s tactics. “We very much see them in the context of trying to create conditions for people to be able to return home,” Jon Finer, the deputy national security adviser, told npr, an American broadcaster.
Mr Biden has also largely abandoned his push for a ceasefire in Gaza, which he long argued was a prerequisite for calming the Israeli-Lebanese border. Neither Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, nor Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, is eager to make a deal.
Instead America seems willing to let Israel test its belief that Hizbullah can be pounded into a separate truce. Their optimistic scenario is that the group discreetly agrees to implement un Resolution 1701, the agreement that ended the 2006 war, which called for Hizbullah to withdraw its forces to the Litani river, 30km (19 miles) north of the Israeli border.
Whether Mr Nasrallah will agree is open for debate. Backing down would boost his standing among Lebanese: “He could say he did it for the good of the nation,” says one diplomat. Iran probably wants him to hold his fire as well, although it may not give such an order directly.
Yet to do so would be humiliating for Mr Nasrallah. He has spent years touting a concept he calls the “unity of the arenas”, the idea that Iran’s proxies across the region could coordinate joint military action against Israel. For Iran’s strongest proxy to abandon the fight under Israeli fire would be to admit that the concept has failed.
If he digs in, the fighting could get much worse. Hizbullah has lost some of its arsenal to Israeli bombardment but still has tens of thousands of rockets and missiles. Israel could expand its strikes in Hizbullah’s stronghold in south Beirut, a neighbourhood it reduced to rubble in 2006. Neither side would achieve its goals: Israel would not end its war in Gaza, and residents of northern Israel would not feel safe to return home. A truce might be embarrassing for Mr Nasrallah—but the alternative is a ruinous and pointless war.’

Read the article here.

Too many leaders prefer pointless wars to embarrassment.

But who knows, maybe the French-American plan for a three-week truce will become reality.

You never know.