  In the late 1970s, in two celebrated papers, Aizenman and Higuchi
independently established that all infinite-volume Gibbs measures of the
two-dimensional ferromagnetic nearest-neighbor Ising model are convex
combinations of the two pure phases. We present here a new approach to this
result, with a number of advantages: (i) We obtain an optimal finite-volume,
quantitative analogue (implying the classical claim); (ii) the scheme of our
proof seems more natural and provides a better picture of the underlying
phenomenon; (iii) this new approach might be applicable to systems for which
the classical method fails.
