There is a difference between using force and having a strategy. Israel and the United States may be very good at the first. Right now they are doing a miserable job of proving they have the second.

Let us get the obvious out of the way. Iran is a dangerous regime. It has menaced Israel for decades, built proxy networks across the region, pursued nuclear capabilities, and treated diplomacy less as a path to peace than as a way to buy time. Nobody serious denies that. Nobody serious thinks Israel should shrug and hope for the best. The hawkish case begins there, and on that narrow point, it has reality on its side.

But that is also where the hawkish case begins to fall apart. Because identifying a real threat is not the same thing as having a coherent response to it. And what the Trump administration and the Israeli government are offering right now looks less like a strategy than a rolling improv act with missiles.

The White House has framed the war in sweeping language, saying Operation Epic Fury will destroy Iran’s missile threat, annihilate its navy, cripple its proxies, and guarantee that Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon. That is a maximalist list, not a focused war aim. It sounds tough. It also sounds suspiciously like the kind of thing governments say when they want credit for resolve without having to define what success actually looks like.

And that problem is not just rhetorical. Reuters has reported that inside the administration there has been active debate over how to define victory, how soon Trump can claim it, and whether this is truly a limited campaign or something broader and far more open-ended. In other words, the confusion is not a hostile-media invention. It is embedded in the policy itself.

Israel’s own messaging has hardly improved the picture. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said this week that Israel has effectively “won” the war, while also saying the campaign will continue until its goals are met and declining to offer a timetable. That is the sort of statement that is meant to sound reassuring, but actually does the opposite. If you have won, what remains? If the goals remain unmet, what exactly has been won? If the endpoint is undefined, then victory becomes whatever leaders say it is on a given news cycle.

This is where the liberal critique wins out, and it wins out not because it is softer, but because it is more serious. A liberal foreign policy at its best is not pacifism in a suit. It is the insistence that force must serve a political objective, not replace one. It asks the basic adult questions that war enthusiasts never seem to enjoy answering: What is the end state? What is the off-ramp? What political order is supposed to emerge when the bombing stops? How does this end in a way that leaves the region more stable, rather than merely more shattered?

Those questions matter because the hawkish view has one genuine strength and one fatal weakness. Its strength is that it understands Iran is dangerous. Its weakness is that it keeps assuming military punishment is self-justifying. It is not. Military action can degrade capabilities, yes. It can buy leverage, yes. It can restore deterrence in the short term, maybe. But if it is not tied to a diplomatic and political endgame, then it becomes a form of drift masquerading as toughness.

That is exactly what this war increasingly looks like. Trump threatens escalation one day and predicts a quick end the next. The White House speaks in grand language about crushing Iran once and for all. Israeli leaders speak of patience, objectives, and eventual success, but without telling the public what measurable outcome would actually mark the campaign as complete. This is not clarity. It is the foreign policy version of “trust me, bro.”

And the diplomatic costs are not abstract. European allies are already warning that escalation without a clear political horizon is a dead end. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said on March 17th that the United States and Israel should end the war and that diplomacy is the likeliest way to stabilize the Strait of Hormuz and contain the fallout. When even allies are looking at Washington and seeing improvisation rather than strategy, that is not a side issue. That is the issue.

This is also why the “bad faith actor” critique lands. No, that does not mean Iran is trustworthy. It means that if Washington and Jerusalem invoke diplomacy only when it is useful for public relations, but repeatedly default to expanding military logic without a transparent diplomatic destination, they should not be surprised when the world concludes that negotiations were never meant to be a serious lane in the first place. Diplomacy without leverage is weak. That much is true. But war without diplomacy is blind. And blindness is not strength.

The opposing view will insist that short-term instability is worth it if it prevents a more dangerous long-term reality, namely a stronger Iran with more missiles, more proxy reach, and a clearer path to a bomb. That argument is not crazy. It is the best case the hawks have. But it still loses, because it quietly assumes the current war is actually producing a better long-term outcome. That has not been demonstrated. What has been demonstrated is wider regional instability, allied anxiety, a public lack of clarity about objectives, and a U.S. administration that appears unable or unwilling to articulate a credible endgame. A doctrine of “we will keep hitting things until history thanks us” is not strategy. It is hope with air cover.

And hope, as Americans should know by now, is not enough. The United States spent years in the Middle East mistaking tactical success for strategic wisdom. Targets were destroyed. Orders were given. Victory was always just one more escalation away. The result was not durable stability. It was exhaustion, cynicism, and a region that remained broken in new and inventive ways. There is no reason to assume this time the script magically gets smarter just because the slogans got louder.

So yes, concede the obvious. Iran is dangerous. Israel has every right to defend itself. The United States is not wrong to worry about Iranian power. But once those concessions are made, the liberal critique becomes stronger, not weaker. Because the real question is not whether Iran is bad. Of course it is. The real question is whether this war, as currently conceived and publicly explained, makes the region safer and makes America and Israel look like credible guardians of order.

Right now, the answer is no.

They do not look like guardians of order. They look like governments confusing force with foresight. They look like states demanding trust while refusing to define success. They look like actors who want all the moral legitimacy of diplomacy and all the freedom of permanent military improvisation.

That is not realism. That is not prudence. And it is not stability.

It is a war without an endgame. And a war without an endgame is not strength. It is just a more expensive form of denial.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)