Lt. Col. Anthony Aguilar drew it as three circles that refuse to meet.
The US-Iran MOU, the new Israel-Lebanon framework, and the simple fact of Hezbollah's existence inside Lebanon.
No common ground, no Venn overlap, a true impasse.
And impasses, he noted, break one of two ways: frozen conflict, or a war to force one circle into another.
The tell he's watching is Admiral Brad Cooper meeting Lebanese commanders in Beirut this week.
The U.S. already pours billions into the Lebanese army, so the question is whether these new talks aim to push that army into directly confronting Hezbollah, a fight he says it would lose.
If that's the goal, war is coming. If not, the impasse simply grinds on.
Then he zoomed out, and it got even darker.
Yemen's tribal alliances reassembling, UAE-backed against Saudi-backed, US-backed against Iran-backed, all of it hardening into proxy lines across Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen at once.
His phrase for where the region sits: everyone's in a bumper car and nobody has brakes.
He left me with the comparison that lingers.
Southern Lebanon, he said, is starting to look a lot like southern Vietnam.
