George Orwell memorably and presciently defined a cold war in 1945 as “a peace that is no peace.” His point was that, after the advent of the atomic bomb, an all-out hot war between two nuclear-armed superpowers would be very unlikely. (He correctly assumed that the Soviet Union would soon get a bomb of its own.)

In Cold War I, which ran from the late 1940s until the early 1990s, we inhabited a binary world: Either there was Armageddon, or there was not. Everything else, from Korea to Vietnam to Angola, was a peripheral, proxy conflict. And below that level were the covert operations.

In Cold War II — which began when Americans belatedly noticed that Chinese leader Xi Jinping was intent on challenging the United States’ primacy — the situation is different. Because of the proliferation of technologies that were in their infancy during the first Cold War, we now live amid a war that is no war.

Is Israel at war with Hezbollah? Yes, in the sense that Israeli government agencies are regularly killing Hezbollah operatives and Hezbollah is regularly trying to kill Israelis by firing rockets across the Lebanese border. No, in the sense that the level of violence we currently see is relatively low — lower, certainly, than the unambiguous war currently being waged between the defenders of Ukraine and its Russian invaders.

The larger-scale Middle Eastern war I anticipated — what would have been a Third Lebanon War — did not materialize this summer. It might yet happen. Then again, both sides have reasons not to escalate all the way to war proper, with all its unpredictability. If Israel had intended to launch an all-out attack against Hezbollah, the time would have been immediately after the pagers began to explode, when Hezbollah’s communications were in disarray.

To speak of “remote warfare,” then, is to miss the point. Ever since men worked out how to operate large catapults, it has been possible to kill enemies from a distance. The missiles that hit Ukrainian cities are weapons of remote warfare. So are the drones the Ukrainians send eastward toward Russian targets. So are the cyberattacks that are launched every day of the week by states against states, terrorists against states, crooks against corporations, and so on.

The Russian term “hybrid warfare” is also often mentioned these days. But in truth, there never was a time when warfare did not include nonmilitary activities such as espionage and disinformation. The big difference is that massive advances in satellite technology and computing, combined with the extreme vulnerability of global communications and supply chains, have hugely multiplied their possibilities.

This week, Israel has shown its enemies that it is still smarter than they are. If they can do this, what else might they have in store for Iran and its terrorist surrogates? The very fact that such a question has to be asked constitutes a notable victory in the war that is no war.

The writer is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a columnist for the Free Press.