Israel intensified air strikes across southern and eastern Lebanon after its Prime Minister vowed to "crush" Hezbollah.

The claim is that Hezbollah lacks the capacity for restraint, or that the populations of southern and eastern Lebanon lack the capacity for self-preservation, thereby justifying the intensification of air strikes. The question Wollstonecraft would ask - and that this analysis asks - is what education, what system, what set of conditions produced that lack, and whether the lack is nature or manufacture. We are presented with a circularity so profound it threatens to swallow the very concept of reason: a group is deemed irrational because it acts in defense of its existence against overwhelming force, and that defense is then cited as proof of its inherent irrationality, which in turn justifies the force that necessitates the defense. This is not politics; it is a pedagogical failure of the highest order, where the teacher beats the student for failing to learn the lesson that the beating was designed to prevent.

To understand the escalation in Lebanon, one must first dismantle the ornamental education of statecraft. For centuries, the dominant curriculum of international relations has taught that power is the primary virtue and that reason is merely the language used to describe the exercise of that power. This is an education in ornament, not substance. It trains leaders to perform the gestures of diplomacy while preparing the machinery of destruction. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vows to “crush” an enemy, he is not speaking the language of reason; he is performing the role assigned to him by a system that equates security with domination. The education trap here is that the state is educated to believe that its security depends on the elimination of the other, rather than on the establishment of mutual understanding. The result is a leader who cannot conceive of a solution that does not involve violence, because he has never been educated in the tools of peace. He has been educated in the tools of war, and thus he applies them with the confidence of a man who believes he is acting rationally.

But the trap extends deeper, into the soil of Lebanon itself. The populations in the south and east are not naturally prone to conflict; they are products of a geopolitical landscape that has systematically denied them the education of sovereignty. For decades, these regions have been treated as buffer zones, as chessboards upon which larger powers play their games. The people living there have been educated by circumstance to expect violence, to prepare for it, and to resist it. When they resist, they are labeled as terrorists or militants, their actions interpreted as evidence of a natural disposition toward chaos. This is the classic circularity: deny a people the right to self-determination, then point to their struggle for that right as proof that they are unfit for it. The lack of stability is not a natural condition of the Lebanese character; it is the manufactured outcome of a system that refuses to grant them the tools of political agency.

Consider the distinction between ornament and reason . The air strikes are the ornament. They are spectacular, loud, and designed to impress upon the world the strength of the state. They are a performance of power. But they are devoid of reason, because they do not address the underlying causes of the conflict. They are a substitute for the hard work of political education, of building institutions that can mediate between competing interests. Reason requires patience, dialogue, and the willingness to listen to the other. It requires the humility to recognize that one’s own security is intertwined with the security of one’s neighbor. The current strategy requires none of these things. It requires only the capacity to destroy. And so, the cycle continues: the state destroys, the population resists, the state cites the resistance as proof of the population’s irrationality, and the cycle repeats.

The stakes are not merely regional; they are universal. If we accept the premise that violence is a rational response to perceived threats, then we abandon the Enlightenment project entirely. We admit that reason is not universal, but is instead the property of those who hold the weapons. This is a dangerous precedent. It suggests that the right to reason is contingent on power, and that those without power are naturally inferior, naturally chaotic, and naturally deserving of control. This is the same argument used to justify the subjugation of women, of colonized peoples, of any group deemed unfit for self-governance. The mechanism is identical: deny the tools of reason, then cite the resulting deficit as proof of incapacity.

What is required is not more force, but a new education. We must educate our leaders to see that security is not achieved through domination, but through cooperation. We must educate the international community to see that the stability of Lebanon is not a threat to be managed, but a right to be supported. This means dismantling the ornamental education of statecraft and replacing it with a curriculum of reason. It means recognizing that the people of Lebanon are not naturally violent, but are made violent by the conditions in which they live. It means understanding that the capacity for peace is not a gift bestowed by the powerful, but a birthright of every human being, currently obstructed by systems designed to produce obedience rather than understanding.

The escalation in Lebanon is a symptom of a deeper disease: the belief that reason is optional, that it can be suspended in the name of security. This is a lie. Reason is the only tool we have for navigating a complex world. Without it, we are left with force, and force is a blunt instrument that breaks everything it touches. The education trap must be broken. We must stop producing leaders who are educated only in the language of war, and start producing citizens who are educated in the language of peace. Only then can we hope to escape the circularity that has trapped us for so long. The alternative is a world where reason is dead, and where the only law is the law of the strongest. That is not a future worth building. It is a future worth avoiding, through the rigorous application of reason to the conditions that prevent it.