JOHN PODHORETZ: Swiss Cheese, the Sot, and the Ceasefire.

Knowing as he does that in two months he will not be facing a senile president and that president’s intellectually deficient secretary of state, his oft-AWOL secretary of defense, his neurasthenic national security adviser, his Hawaii-based vice-drunkident, and his increasingly anti-Israel party, Netanyahu decided to play the long game. He also may find it useful to have the time to regroup and figure out what that long game should be. But there is great risk here. Israel has momentum and is giving that up. But in the end, the battle here isn’t against Hezbollah anyway. It’s against Iran. And the incoming administration gives every indication that, unlike the present feckless crew, it sees Iran clearly as an enemy. The nominee for Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, declared that it was time to make America great again…and to make Iran broke again. And he isn’t even one of the leading foreign policy voices. The others—Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz, Pete Hegseth—are even tougher.

And who knows what the nation that came up with the pager attack has up its sleeve? What Joe Biden has done is unspeakable, if he can even be said to have done it. What Netanyahu and his government have done is tactical and strategic. They live to fight another day.

“Now It Makes Sense,” Noah Rothman writes:

Unless you were only rooting for Joe Biden to secure something he could plausibly call a cease-fire so he might burnish an otherwise historically klutzy legacy, there is little here to celebrate. Biden and his allies spent much of this administration sifting through the wreckage his policies produced for something resembling a victory they could tout for the cameras. The goal was only ever to win the news cycle, even at the expense of more salient objectives. Posterity will take a longer view of Biden’s dismal presidency.

Funny, that was Obama’s goal, as well. I hope he’s taking it in stride as his third term concludes so ignominiously.