In recent years, a series of leaders have emerged who all share the same defining characteristic: an excessive use of force and the belief that their military superiority alone will be enough to secure peace. For them, peace is nothing more than the expression of their military victory. Netanyahu, Trump, and Putin are just a few of the representatives of this new generation.

When it comes to ceasefires, ignorance seems to reign supreme. They all claim to turn their force into a ceasefire, which is nothing more than a fragile truce, if it comes to pass.

For years, I had the impression that leaders were trying to apply certain principles to achieve a ceasefire. In recent years, that’s no longer even the case. They no longer bother to pretend to apply any principles. They threaten left and right, as if that were the only recognized way to move forward. Are they ignorant? Probably. Are they fools? Probably so, too, but they present themselves as the new geniuses of our time, claiming one day to be the king of peace and behaving the next day like the king of war.

Kissinger said that a leader limits himself to Reader’s Digest-style texts. A few pages, not too complicated, and above all, nothing scholarly.

Do these few pages actually exist, and are they available anywhere? Perhaps, but I don’t see them featuring prominently in our leaders’ general knowledge.

Imagine you have to broker a ceasefire tomorrow—what do you need to know to succeed?

First, you need a basic agreement, which might simply be to allow time for negotiations. Beyond this agreement in principle, you have to implement it.

You must understand that every ceasefire is initially violated, simply because not all combatants have been informed or are pretending not to be. The ceasefire must therefore be announced a few hours in advance (less than 24 hours). This time is needed for the order to be transmitted through the existing combatant chains of command.

Since there will always be incidents, orders must also be given not to respond to the enemy’s incidents or provocations.

To prevent every incident from escalating into a new war, a system for monitoring and enforcing the ceasefire is needed. It can be simple or complex, depending on the situation, but in any case, every incident must be resolved within minutes or an hour if the ceasefire is to hold. Today, most current ceasefires lack a monitoring and control system capable of responding within a few hours. Israel’s great specialty is to respond militarily to every misstep: this is the new Israeli monitoring system, the height of ignorance and sheer stupidity of an army that believes itself invincible, above all others, and thinks that the constant terror it inflicts is sufficient to guarantee a ceasefire. This results in the fragile truces in Gaza and southern Lebanon, the endless cycles of Israel’s “science of the ceasefire.” Each time, they occupy a portion of the enemy’s territory, claiming that this is the solution to ensuring a lasting ceasefire. We have lost count of the number of times the Israeli army has occupied and demolished part of South Lebanon in order to ensure a lasting ceasefire.

It is true that the ceasefire monitoring and control system has never functioned properly under UNIFIL. For it to work, every incident would need to trigger an almost immediate response from the military coordinators on both sides. Military coordination and ceasefire monitoring in South Lebanon takes several days, or even several weeks. The system cannot guarantee to the Israeli army that the combatants responsible for the incident will be identified and neutralized by the monitoring system. “Neutralized” does not mean militarily, but rather through hierarchical coordination.

The same applies to Gaza, only worse: there is no known monitoring system other than the Israeli command system aided by an AI target-identification system. This AI system turns toilet noises into certainties, and since there is no one left to verify whether the impact of the fire made any sense, it has devolved into utter chaos and military arbitrariness.

So will the US-Iran ceasefire hold? As usual, each side will ramp up its threats. Will these threats turn into a new round of war? If so, oil production and traffic in the Persian Gulf will be halted for several months. By constantly threatening, they risk feeling compelled to carry out their threats.

We are piling ignorance upon stupidity.

What about the Ukraine-Russia ceasefire? The Europeans’ current efforts are nothing more than amateurish. None of today’s European leaders has ever implemented a single ceasefire, and they naively believe that a credible military force alone would be enough to enforce one. Well-intentioned but ineffective. They have forgotten the 2014–2022 ceasefire in the Donbas and have forgotten that the ceasefire was never fully respected, nor did they even understand what would have been necessary to make it hold. This has always been a flaw in Ukrainian leadership: they seek the backing of a military force that would sweep away their opponents or keep them at bay, without building a political or diplomatic solution. This has been the case since 2014, and it remains so today. Their allies are not helping them build a future beyond the military.

Naej DRANER

April 21, 2026