The following is nothing more than an educated guess.

The current military conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East will not likely end via negotiated armistice, though Mr. Putin may figure out a face-saving way to cut his losses, while Israel is truly committed to putting an end to Hamas and Hezb’allah once and for all.

For this to come about, the mullahs in Iran also have to be eliminated.  They have made their ancient nation the truly most responsible party for the Israel-Hamas conflict.  They are also not all that popular with their own people — especially those of the female persuasion.  Their nuclear weapons program provides an excellent selling point for us to enlist allies in this endeavor.

What is not mentioned when discussing Iran’s nuclear weapons program is the importance of the delivery system.  Hydrogen bombs are “old tech,” while all kinds of ordnance-transporting vehicles have been developed since.  Hypersonic guided missiles can deliver the weapon so quickly that a defensive response has a low probability of success.  Cruise missiles are fairly old-fashioned, being similar to the V-1 buzz bombs of WW2, but in the modern world, with their high-tech guidance systems, they have the potential of coming in under the radar and taking out a specific target.

It is also possible that the United Nations will wind up as collateral damage in all of this, and for good reason.  An old saying describes a camel as a horse that was designed by a committee.  Back in the aftermath of the First World War, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were carved out of the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire by the Treaties of St. Germain en Laye and Trianon.  Such artificial entities lasted almost exactly 75 years.  Today’s Middle East is largely a construct of the U.N., although its origin harkens back, as well, to the settlement of the First World War.  But instead of Versailles, the secret Sykes-Picot treaty divvied up the remnants of the Ottoman Empire between Britain and France.

Britain’s mandate over Palestine was ceded to the U.N., again, about 75 years ago.  This may turn out to be both the first and last important responsibility that ever involved the United Nations.  The grotesque viciousness of Hamas’s recent unprovoked attack on Israel has shifted the earth under the rest of the Western world.  Sure, the useful idiots on the college campuses rose up to protest the treatment of Palestinians by Israel.  But such protestations no longer inspire the pledges of support that they used to.  Rather, they expose the collaborators of such evil in the media, politics, and academe.

For a feeble nincompoop, Biden has walked this tightrope fairly well, all things considered.  But the United States has pretty much gone along with the U.N. throughout this process.  A former head of the Mideast desk at the Pentagon once complained to me that he resented America’s practice of supplying military aid to both sides of the conflict.  Again, the heinous evil demonstrated by Hamas has changed the emotional dynamic of this unfolding of events.

This brings us back to Iran.  Islam has been at war with the outside world (AKA infidels) since its inception.  But there has long been an implied containment on excesses.  Then came the mullahs and ayatollahs, and a new and particularly dangerous militancy swooped in to aggravate the pre-existing tensions.  Let me be clear: Islam does not need to be eradicated.  Its over-the-top violent zealots should be, however.

Israelis are mostly modern, integrated, worldly people.  They tolerate, if not outright respect, dissenters from their mainstream view of the world.  They too balked at vicious retribution when it came to discouraging their enemies.  And they seem to have been punished for that, but that is the price we all have to pay for being civilized.  We just have to work at lowering that price.

Image: Vladimir Putin.  World Economic Forum via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

UPDATE: This post has been updated to correct the treaties responsible for creating Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.