All nations, even very close allies, have strategic disagreements.

Israel’s strategic interest in Lebanon is the ability to return more than 100,000 of its citizens to their homes in northern Israel. Those civilians have been dislocated since last October, when the Lebanese Hezbollah joined Hamas’s war by firing rockets into Israeli settlements. The U.S. strategic interest is to maintain diplomatic efforts to end the rocket fire and Israeli counterforce. And while the Biden administration has been far too timid in the face of varied Iranian aggressions, thus encouraging further Iranian aggression, a full-scale war between Israel and Lebanon is manifestly not in the U.S. interest.