Last week, Israel launched a wave of air attacks against Lebanon as part of an attack on Hezbollah, heavily bombing densely populated areas south of Beirut. Israeli military leaders have claimed that the attacks have left Hezbollah “a different organization.”

Israel seems determined to expand its campaign in Gaza to a regional war, though. As Axios reported, “Israeli officials said their increasing attacks against Hezbollah are not intended to lead to war but are an attempt to reach ‘de-escalation through escalation.’”

Commenters grabbed onto the nonsense logic of this last bit of phrasing, the kind of obvious, contradiction that seems to suggest a source that doesn’t feel they need to convince anybody. But “escalate to de-escalate” has always been a bad idea. It has a long lineage in American foreign policy thinking as a powerful, but ultimately made up, theory of Russia’s own nuclear strategy.