Trump’s Bold Military Strike and Strategic Cease-Fire: Breakthroughs Challenging Global Leaders to Choose Real Peace Over Hollow Diplomacy
The newly achieved cease-fire, brokered through American strength and strategic clarity, marks a potential turning point in the broader quest for lasting stability in the Mideast.
It demonstrates that force, when used with purpose, can halt violence and open a path to peace. But the cease-fire is only the beginning.
Transforming it into a durable agreement can be facilitated if onthe international community — especially America’s allies — choose to engage seriously or continue hiding behind empty diplomatic routines.
President Trump’s actions created a moment few expected: military force which de-escalated, rather than deepened, regional conflict.
He has reasserted a credible path to a Mideast where nuclear intimidation and proxy violence do not define diplomacy. Others — particularly in Europe can boost this opportunity will meet with the same conviction.
At the NATO summit in The Hague on June 24-25, and again at the European Council summit in Brussels on June 26–27, heads of state will face that choice directly.
American leadership has drawn a line.
The rest of the world must now decide: support a process rooted in clarity, or retreat into caution and ambiguity. The diplomatic "balancing act" dominating much of Europe is not nuance — it's paralysis.
The conflict’s roots are widely misunderstood.
The foundational cause of recurring violence in the region is not Israel’s military strength, but decades of efforts to eliminate the state of Israel entirely.
Historic peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan — signed in 1978 and 1994 — demonstrated that peace is possible when Israel’s existence is accepted.
But after those agreements removed the largest Arab armies from the battlefield, the locus of hostility shifted.
The violence which followed was not about borders; it was about ideology.
That ideology found its patron in Iran after 1979.
Tehran transformed itself into the chief sponsor of armed resistance against Israel — backing Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hafez al, and later Bashar al-Assad’s regimes in Syria, and more recently the Houthis in Yemen. These groups have not only targeted Israel but also spread instability across the Arab world and beyond.
One of the great failures of Western analysis has been its tendency to impose moral symmetry — to suggest that both sides bear equal blame in the name of "balance."
But this framework only empowers aggressors and punishes democracies for defending themselves. It also fuels a new form of antisemitism, veiled as critique of policy but rooted in denial of legitimacy.
Equally corrosive is the selective invocation of international law. Increasingly, the term is misused as a rhetorical tool to label Israel as the aggressor.
But the clearest violation of international law is the open call by Iran and its proxies to destroy another sovereign state.
No legal principle demands that a nation under siege forfeit the right to defend itself.
Despite these facts, a coalition of voices — some in the American political left, European governments, universities, and media — continues to frame Israel as the primary source of instability.
This isn't only a moral misjudgment.
It's a strategic error, one that confuses cause and effect and weakens the very foundations of international order.
The recent U.S.-led strike, following Israel’s operations against Iranian targets, was a clear message: peace is not served by stalling.
Endless dialogue with those who have no intention of compromise is not diplomacy — it's delay. And delay, history shows, leads only to deeper instability.
The cease-fire now in place is a beginning, not a conclusion.
Whether it's adhered to, depends in part by sustained diplomatic pressure, a coalition of states willing to confront not only Iran’s behavior but the international habits that have enabled it.
This includes pressuring Iranian proxies to stand down, continually emphasizing the violation of international law for Iran to call for the destruction of Israel — and pressing hesitant democracies to stand up.
The world must stop mistaking process for progress.
Moral neutrality in the face of terror is not diplomacy — it is complicity.
And without moral clarity, no peace process can succeed.
Israel, facing a reduced threat from Iran, will be in a far stronger position to consider policies which improve the lives of Palestinians. But that opportunity too depends on whether terror is called out and rejected without caveat.
This is a rare moment.
The forces of extremism have been pushed back.
The threat of nuclear confrontation has been reduced.
Now the test is not military — it is moral and political.
Will the world act on the opportunity it has been given?
Or will it again choose hesitation disguised as diplomacy?
The choice will shape not just the Mideast, but the direction of global order in the decade ahead.
Mark L. Cohen practices law, and was counsel at White & Case starting in 2001, after serving as international lawyer and senior legal consultant for the French aluminum producer Pechiney. Cohen was a senior consultant at a Ford Foundation Commission, an adviser to the PBS television program "The Advocates," and assistant attorney general in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He teaches U.S. history at the business school in Lille l'EDHEC. Read Mark L. Cohen's Reports — More Here.
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