Lebanon announced this month it was defaulting on all of its outstanding debt payments for the year, including $1.2 billion in eurobonds due in March. There are another $3.4 billion worth of eurobonds coming due after that. Those, too, will go unpaid.

It's a burgeoning crisis that deserves attention — but it does not warrant the blind bailout that Beirut is trying to secure.

The defaults come as no surprise. The foreign currency reserves of Lebanon's central bank are running on fumes. Beirut must now negotiate with bondholders to restructure its debt. Desperate for cash, the government seeks billions of dollars in assistance and handouts from international donors, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.

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The coronavirus has Israel in lockdown. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has so far managed to contain the crisis through extreme measures. The crisis will almost certainly get worse, but it will at some point get better. When it does, Israelis will be eager to get back to the innovation and economic growth that the Start-Up Nation has enjoyed in recent years.

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Yesterday during remarks at the AIPAC annual conference, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo referred to the recent publication by the UN Human Rights Office of a database of companies that operate in the West Bank. Pompeo defined the report as "a real threat" that "only serves to facilitate the BDS movement and delegitimize Israel." Pompeo declared that the United States will take actions on behalf of the "members of our business community that are being threatened by this release."

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When the United States killed Qassim Soleimani at the Baghdad airport in the early hours of January 3, the head of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was not the only target. With Soleimani was a handful of other Iranian brass as well as Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the leader of the Iraqi Shiite militia known as Kata'ib Hezbollah. Only days before, that group had fired on a base in Kirkuk and killed an American contractor. The group was also involved in the siege of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad just days later.

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The man once celebrated in Tehran as "the living martyr," Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, is now just a martyr in the traditional sense. Felled by a U.S. drone strike in Iraq, his life ended in the conflict zone that launched his career nearly 40 years ago. As the leader of the deadly Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force, Soleimani was the lynchpin in Iran's transnational terrorism apparatus, stretching from Yemen to Lebanon to Latin America and beyond. His death therefore marks a significant political and strategic setback for the Islamic Republic.

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