Israel's reticence over the past three decades allowed its despotic adversaries to acquire military capabilities of ominous scope.

…if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. —  Winston S. Churchill, in "The Gathering Storm,"

...the proposition that democracies are generally at peace with each other is [so] strongly supported... [it] has led some scholars to claim that this finding is probably the closest thing that we have to a law in international politics—Profs. Zeev Maoz & Bruce Russett, “Alliances, Contiguity, Wealth and Political Stability: Is the Lack of Conflict among Democracies a Statistical Artifact?” International Interactions, Vol. 17, No. 3, 1992, pp. 245-6

The unprovoked atrocities that erupted on October 7^th, 2023, drove home to many how perilous it can be to embrace optimistic assumptions and benign perceptions of one’s adversaries' intentions—especially when those adversaries are governed by harsh autocratic regimes. 

Antithetical types of "peace"

With optimism (some might say, naivete) severely bruised (some might say, discredited), the focus of attention inevitably turned to assessing (or reassessing) the notion of…