Opinion | Three Global Challenges That Will Shape Trumps Legacy

Donald Trump left the White House nearly four years ago.Given his self-confidence, I suspect he is now thinking: “What could be so different? I’ve got this.”Well, I just traveled from a reporting trip in Tel Aviv to a conference in the United Arab Emirates to a deep dive with Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence team in London, and I think the president-elect would be wise to remember a famous aphorism: There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.What I saw and heard exposed me to three giant, shifting tectonic plates that will have profound implications for the new administration.The most significant geopolitical eventIn just the last two months, the Israeli military has inflicted a defeat on Iran that approaches its 1967 Six Day War defeat of Egypt, Syria and Jordan.

Full stop.Let’s review:Over the past few decades, Iran built a formidable threat network that seemed to put Israel into an octopuslike grip.

It became widely accepted that Israel was deterred from striking at Iran’s nuclear facilities because Iran had armed the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon with enough precision rockets to destroy Israel’s ports, airports, high-tech factories, air bases and infrastructure.Not so fast.It turned out that the Mossad and Israel’s cyber Unit 8200 had been forging what became one of the country’s greatest intelligence successes ever.

They planted explosive devices in the pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah’s military commanders, developed human and technological tracking capabilities to find Hezbollah’s top leaders, painstakingly identified storage facilities in Lebanon and Syria for Hezbollah’s most lethal precision rockets and then systematically took many of them out by air in October.The result is that Hezbollah looks likely to accept a 60-day cease-fire with Israel in Lebanon negotiated by the U.S.mediator Amos Hochstein.

This is a big deal.It means that, even if just for 60 days, Hezbollah a...