More than 500 years ago, the philosopher and forerunner of modern political science and Italian nationalism Niccolò Machiavelli argued, in his works Discourses on Livy and The Prince, that if you strike an enemy, even severely, but fail to crush him, you endanger yourself and should expect harsh revenge.
Does this not now apply to Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah? To the Islamist forces in Syria, Yemen and Iraq? These passages are notorious because they have often been read as a recommendation to annihilate an internal or external enemy entirely. In fragmented 16th-century Italy, there was no clear distinction between "inside" and "outside."
But the recommendation to crush the enemy can and should be understood not as a call for the destruction of a population, God forbid, but as the complete denial of the enemy's future capacity for action, political, military and institutional.
One can learn something about this dilemma by examining the historical trajectory of the defeat of Egyptian Nasserism. Israel struck Nasserist Egypt in 1956, but US President Dwight D. Eisenhower forced Israel and its allies, France and Britain, to withdraw. As a result, Gamal Abdel Nasser remained in power.
In the summer of 1967, after a decade of quiet that the Israeli left has nostalgically clung to ever since, Nasser completed a process of rearmament and encirclement through alliances with Syria, Iraq and Jordan. An existential threat loomed over Israel. Even the victory of 1967 did not remove it. It was followed by the War of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War. Nasserism was indeed stripped of its ability to attack Israel in an absolute sense, but not permanently. This only happened when the Sinai Peninsula was demilitarized under the 1979 Camp David Accords, which were the cumulative outcome of the victory in the Yom Kippur War and the three wars that preceded it.
Only the demilitarization of Sinai crushed Nasserism, meaning the possibility that Egypt could assemble a coalition for a war of annihilation against Israel.
From this chain of events, and from similar episodes in the histories of other states and peoples, two pragmatic principles emerge. First, it is impossible to determine in advance what "complete denial of future operational capability" will actually entail. Prime ministers David Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin could not have known how their successor, Menachem Begin, would ultimately neutralize Nasserism on the basis of their actions. Even Begin himself, while serving in Eshkol's national unity government, could not have foreseen the decisions he would later make as prime minister.
Second, one must understand that the complete denial of an ideological enemy's capacity for action is not an eternal redemption. Egypt, for example, fell into Islamism and could fall into it again, potentially returning to Sinai. The Ottoman Empire was dismantled, and now Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is trying to revive it.
The Netanyahu–Trump alliance must therefore recognize that a wounded Iran, following "Operation With the Strength of a Lion" and "Midnight Hammer," is highly dangerous. Its allies, China and Russia, may also try to rehabilitate it.
It appears that Netanyahu and Trump understand this danger, but how will they address it? We do not know whether through another direct strike on Iran's missile and nuclear industries, attacks on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the regime's repression apparatus, pressure on Iran's economy, covert action aimed at undermining the regime, or a combination of these measures.
The same logic applies to Hamas and Hezbollah, especially from Israel's perspective. The possibility that Hamas or Hezbollah, both terrorist organizations, could recover is intolerable and demands preventive action in the short term.
So far, there is no real sign that the US is disavowing this aspect of its alliance with Israel. Even if it were to do so, God forbid, Israel must not shy away from the necessity of destroying these two enemies militarily, politically and institutionally.
Exactly when this should happen, and which action should precede another, is difficult to determine.
But one thing is clear. Israel cannot allow itself a return to anything resembling the illusory "decade of quiet" between 1957 and 1967, or to the relative tolerance that prevailed until October 7. Iranian Islamism and its proxies must be crushed in the near future.
