- Middle East
Iran’s nuclear program remains a profound strategic challenge for both the United States and Israel, despite the consecutive joint aerial campaigns launched against it in June 2025 and February 2026. While these operations significantly degraded, temporarily, Tehran’s conventional military infrastructure, missile arsenals, and nuclear facilities, they failed to secure a medium to long-term resolution, due to Iran’s demonstrated capacity to rapidly reconstitute them.
In May 2026, the Trump administration attempted to resolve the impasse by negotiating an interim memorandum of understanding (MOU) intended to eventually lead to a permanent agreement with Iran. By early June 2026, the talks had stalled, with both sides reportedly hardening their positions. Iranian officials also conditioned any further progress on Israeli restraint in Lebanon and Gaza, effectively suspending the MOU track and turning Lebanon into the immediate diplomatic spoiler. At this stage, early June 2026, the conflict’s trajectory remains uncertain. Given the fluidity of events, the analysis offered here reflects the information available at the time of writing; a renewed outbreak of war cannot be ruled out, but at the same time, discussion of the MOU outline remains important.
According to media reports, some of which are conflicting, the MOU reportedly under discussion in late May included a formal 60-day extension of the April ceasefire, with both states immediately ending direct hostilities. It reportedly consists of a guarantee that both sides would work to reopen the Strait of Hormuz (SoH), and an immediate cessation of hostilities across all fronts, including Lebanon. US officials have noted that the framework preserves Israel’s right to act independently against any imminent threats in self-defense, but how this would translate against threats posed by Hezbollah is not clear. On the economic front, it incorporates a US agreement to issue immediate sanctions waivers allowing Iran to resume oil exports, primarily to China, a move that would inject cash into the Iranian economy. Pending Iran’s compliance during the extension period, the US also reportedly agreed to ‘unfreeze’ billions of dollars in Iranian assets held in banks worldwide, alongside long-term sanctions relief, and Qatar may transfer funds to Iran in the interim period.
As to the nuclear program, some reports maintain that Tehran has allegedly agreed in principle that its highly enriched uranium (HEU) stockpile, roughly 440 kg of 60% enriched uranium, will be entirely disposed of during this extension period. The exact details of this provision remain murky. In theory, this could be done either by removing it entirely from Iran’s territory, a move which Iran reportedly objects to, or by diluting some or all of it to a lower enrichment level within Iran, or by combining these two approaches. Since the May 2026 talks focused on immediate de-escalation, issues relating to Iran’s broader nuclear and missile programs remain untouched.
The late-May draft of the MOU purportedly imposes no constraints on Iran's missile development, enrichment capabilities, or its substantial inventory of uranium enriched below the 60%. It also makes no reference to Iran's demands for the withdrawal of US forces from the Middle East or the payment of war reparations to Tehran. It is not known whether and how these issues would be dealt with in any final agreement. The late-May draft also includes, according to journalist Barak Ravid, commitment from Iran to never pursue nuclear weapons, the exact same commitment that Iran undertook when it ratified the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a Non-Nuclear-Weapon State (NNWS) in 1970, and when it accepted the 2015 Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the ‘Obama Iran deal’.
It was The first reports of negotiations about an interim bilateral MOU appeared in the press in early May 2026. These reports detailed that the two sides were negotiating a ‘one-page memo to end the war’. This draft, from early May, included a more detailed nuclear framework than the one discussed in the press in late May, and it is not clear if the framework from early May was kept in the later draft. This more detailed framework may yet resurface as diplomatic talks progress and is worth reviewing. It outlined an agreement on a 12-to-15-year moratorium on all domestic Iranian uranium enrichment, stipulating that upon its expiration, Tehran would be permitted to resume enrichment capped strictly at the 3.67 percent threshold. This framework appears strikingly similar to the JCPOA (though not identical), which Trump withdrew from unilaterally in May 2018. These similarities suggest that the emerging ‘Trump Iran deal’, if it is indeed completed along these outlines, may resemble the JCPOA. Obama's former top aide, Ben Rhodes, used these reports in an attempt to publicly rehabilitate the JCPOA, framing it as a deal that had essentially resolved the issue, stating: “[T]he Iran Deal put a lid on the nuclear program”. Yet this is far from true.
The JCPOA’s weaknesses
As opposed to Rhodes’ contentions, the JCPOA was deeply flawed. First, it included ‘Sunset clauses’ that imposed various restrictions on different components of Iran’s nuclear program, each with a different expiration date. The different Iranian centrifuge models the JCPOA addressed differ in how quickly and efficiently they can enrich uranium: the older IR-1 machines are slow, while newer models such as the IR-2m, IR-4, IR-6, and IR-8 can enrich uranium much faster, thereby shortening Iran’s potential breakout time. According to the JCPOA’s original schedule, in the agreement’s first 10 years, Iran was limited to operating 5,060 IR-1 centrifuges, the most basic model, in no more than 30 cascades at the Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant. It was also allowed to store 1,044 IR-1 centrifuges at Fordow, but was not allowed to install them, and was barred from conducting uranium enrichment there for 15 years; it was only allowed to conduct limited stable-isotope work at this site.
Iran was allowed, however, during these first ten years, to prepare for the deployment of more advanced centrifuges without deploying them; the agreement incorporated Iran’s long-term enrichment and enrichment R&D plan, which permitted limited work on advanced models, particularly the IR-2m, IR-4, IR-6, and IR-8, while sharply constraining Iran’s installed enrichment capacity during the first decade. Under this plan, the major deployment of more advanced centrifuges, IR-2m and/or IR-4 models, would have begun in early 2027. From 2027 through early 2029, Iran would have been allowed to retrieve IR-2 and/or IR-4 centrifuges from storage and deploy them for enriched-uranium production, with the objective of expanding enrichment capacity and phasing out installed IR-1 machines.
By the end of year 13 of the agreement, in early 2029, Iran would have been permitted to expand toward the production and installation of roughly 2,500–3,500 IR-2m and/or IR-4 centrifuges, with the precise number depending on their measured enrichment performance. This expansion was to be preceded by a gradual industrial build-up. From the end of year 8, in early 2024, through year 10, in 2026, Iran was allowed to begin preparing for the next stage of its enrichment program by expanding its manufacturing capacity and producing IR-6 and IR-8 centrifuges without rotors, at a rate of up to 200 machines per year for each type. After year 10, in early 2026, Iran would have been permitted to produce complete IR-6 and IR-8 centrifuges at the same annual rate. These machines were to be stored above ground at Natanz under continuous IAEA monitoring until needed for final assembly under Iran’s enrichment and R&D plan. Beginning in year 11, in early 2027, Iran would also have been allowed to install the infrastructure necessary for IR-8 centrifuges at Natanz.
After 2031, key JCPOA limits would have expired, potentially allowing Iran to expand enrichment capacity and stockpile size while still claiming peaceful intent. In other words, in 2031, had the agreement remained in force, Iran could have begun rapidly enriching and stockpiling uranium to a level of 90% or higher, with advanced centrifuges, in preparation for a ‘dash to the bomb’. In theory, it could have accumulated this stockpile without this being considered a violation of its JCPOA commitment, or its NPT commitments, had it been able to provide an ‘alibi’, and Iran was working on creating just that, although enrichment to weapons-grade levels would still be politically explosive.
Significantly, the NPT allows Non-Nuclear-Weapon-State members to develop nuclear infrastructure, but not for weapons development; Uranium enriched to over 90% can have dual-use. In addition to serving as fissile material for nuclear bombs, it can also be used for nuclear propulsion, as fuel for nuclear-powered vessels; the US Navy deploys submarines and aircraft carriers powered by reactors that use such fuel. Iranian officials had previously and repeatedly attempted to create such an ‘alibi’ for stockpiling 90% HEU by expressing interest, for the record, in producing such fuel for a hypothetical nuclear-powered submarine program.
The JCPOA also effectively granted Iran a de facto ‘free pass’ from fully accounting for its past nuclear activities and earlier violations of its obligations under the NPT. Although the agreement included provisions intended to compel Iran to clarify the so-called possible military dimensions (PMD) of its nuclear program, sanctions relief was not conditioned on a complete and truthful accounting of these past activities. In December 2015, the PMD file was formally closed despite Iran's failure to provide a full explanation of its earlier efforts, and Tehran faced no meaningful consequences for offering incomplete or contested answers. This weakness came into sharper focus in 2019–2020, when IAEA inspectors, drawing at least in part on intelligence obtained from documents seized by Israel from Iran’s nuclear archive, detected uranium traces at several undeclared sites in Iran. The IAEA concluded that Tehran had failed to provide technically credible explanations for the presence of this material. Crucially, the findings were not understood to indicate an active clandestine nuclear program, but rather to expose undeclared nuclear activities predating the JCPOA that had never been fully accounted for.
It was worth maintaining despite its flaws
However, despite these flaws, many senior current and former officials in Israel’s strategic community argued before the 2018 withdrawal that the agreement should be preserved. These were not figures sympathetic to the Iranian regime, but officials who believed that the deal, imperfect as it was, bought valuable time. After Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018, many of them criticized the decision as a strategic mistake. Their criticism rested on two connected arguments: first, that the withdrawal wasted the time the agreement had bought; and second, that it was carried out without a clear strategic alternative.
Because these voices are rarely heard outside Israel, as media coverage often portrays the Israeli strategic community as monolithically supportive of Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA, it is worth pausing to examine them. Tamir Pardo, Former Director of the Mossad (2011–2016), and Eli Levite, Former Deputy Director General of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission and former Deputy National Security Adviser, both described the Israeli pressure to withdraw from the deal as a strategic mistake, which brought Iran closer to the nuclear threshold. Gadi Eisenkot, as Former IDF Chief of Staff during both the signing of the JCPOA and US withdrawal, framed the JCPOA, when it was signed, as an opportunity for Israel; later, as a member of the Israeli parliament and its Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, he called the withdrawal “disastrous” and a “terrible mistake”. Other critics include Sima Shine, former head of the Mossad Research Division, Maj. Gen. (Res.) Prof. Yitzhak Ben-Israel, to name a few, and the list goes on. While these critics voiced their opinions as former officials, Dror Shalom, Brigadier General (Res.), stated in his last formal interview while still serving as the head of the Research Division in IDF Military Intelligence (Aman), in 2020, that the withdrawal “has not yet been proven” as a move that “served Israel”.
These critics, combined, all noted that the JCPOA, despite its flaws, bought Israel valuable time to prepare, both operationally and diplomatically, for the possibility of an Iranian nuclear breakout following the expiration of key restrictions in 2031. They stress that during its first 15 years, the agreement imposed meaningful constraints on Tehran’s nuclear program and significantly delayed its ability to rapidly move toward a bomb.
They also stress that during the period of implementation, Iran was restricted to maintaining only a limited stockpile of low-enriched uranium, 300 kg of uranium enriched to 3.67 level, was prohibited from enriching uranium at Fordow, and was barred from deploying advanced centrifuges on an industrial scale. As a result, the breakout timeline, the period required to produce sufficient fissile material for a single nuclear device, was extended from roughly two to three months to approximately one year. Simultaneously, Iran’s nuclear facilities were subjected to an unusually intrusive inspection regime by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), significantly increasing transparency and constraining covert advancement.
Moreover, the agreement provided potentially valuable diplomatic leverage, which critics believe was squandered. Israel and the United States could have used the years leading up to the sunset clauses' expiration to pursue follow-on arrangements that extended key restrictions or supplemented the agreement with additional understandings regarding ballistic missiles, regional proxies, and the expiration of nuclear constraints. Specifically, Europe’s substantial economic ties with Iran during the JCPOA years provided a potentially meaningful source of pressure that might have been mobilized to secure modifications, extensions, or parallel agreements.
Indeed, as the agreement began to unravel in 2019–2020, European governments increasingly signaled a willingness to adopt a firmer approach toward Iranian nuclear violations. By early 2020, Britain, France, and Germany had formally triggered the JCPOA’s dispute-resolution mechanism and publicly signaled their readiness to invoke the agreement’s enforcement provisions should Tehran continue escalating its nuclear activities. As Levite and Shimon Stein, a former Israeli senior diplomat, have argued, Europe’s post-JCPOA economic role in Iran, through trade, finance, and investment, provided leverage that could potentially have been harnessed in support of follow-on negotiations or supplementary understandings. Iranian post-agreement access to European markets and investment was sufficiently valuable to Tehran to create an incentive. But this leverage was not exploited.
Third, the time bought by the JCPOA carried broader strategic benefits for Israel’s regional priorities. As long as Iran’s nuclear program remained constrained, Israel could afford to devote greater military, intelligence, and budgetary attention to nearer-term threats, particularly Hamas and Hezbollah. Under IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, the long-term force planning scheme, known as the ‘Gideon multi-year plan’, rested on the assumption that the JCPOA had extended the strategic window, thereby allowing Israel to prioritize force construction, intelligence gathering, and operational integration for future contingencies rather than an immediate confrontation with Iran.
The collapse of the JCPOA prematurely forced Iran back to the center of Israel’s strategic agenda. Former Mossad Director Tamir Pardo and former Defense Minister and IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon argued in 2021 that the withdrawal accelerated Iran’s nuclear advances and compelled Israel to redirect growing intelligence, operational, and financial resources toward the Iranian threat under significantly worse conditions. In this context, Levite explicitly proposed in early 2026 that the renewed urgency of the Iranian nuclear challenge contributed to a diversion of Israeli resources away from Gaza in the years preceding 7 October. This critique gained resonance in light of Hamas documents captured by the IDF in Gaza. These documents show deep coordination between Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran regarding a broader campaign against Israel, with Tehran involved in financing and strategic coordination. Israeli intelligence did not detect it.
When the 2018 JCPOA withdrawal took place, rather than producing a stronger ‘bigger and better’ agreement or an effective coercive alternative, it unfolded under conditions that pushed Iran toward nuclear-threshold status while leaving Israel and the United States without a coherent follow-up strategy. In the years that followed the 2018 withdrawal, Iran not only accelerated elements of its nuclear program, while steadily undermining the IAEA’s ability to monitor it closely; it also significantly expanded its aggressive activities throughout the Middle East and bolstered ties with Russia and China. The Israeli critics stress that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the loudest supporter of the withdrawal (who is often singularly blamed for it, as detailed below), failed to formulate a strategic Israeli alternative in the event of the agreement’s collapse, offering neither a diplomatic opportunity nor a military option. When Iran first crossed the 60% enrichment threshold in April 2021, during Netanyahu’s tenure, Israel had no effective answer.
Reports in the Israeli media from 2025 disclosed that Netanyahu delayed the funding and production of critical ‘game-changing’ capabilities intended to enable a credible independent strike option against Iran for at least three years. These operational capabilities reportedly included advanced remotely operated systems and covert operational infrastructure later activated in June 2025 through a “shadow army” of local agents and proxy operatives inside Iran. Although several of these projects had reportedly reached technological maturity by 2018, the government failed to allocate the billions of dollars required to transform them from theoretical concepts into operational capabilities. According to Israeli military sources, the IDF achieved an independent military readiness to carry out a large-scale strike against Iran only in May 2023, five years after the agreement’s collapse. By late 2020, according to reports, Netanyahu himself had come to believe that the post-withdrawal Israeli-American strategy, combining ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions with ongoing sabotage, had reached a dead end. During Trump’s lame-duck period following the 2020 presidential election, Netanyahu reportedly sought to persuade the outgoing president that the time had come for a military strike against Iran. Trump rejected the proposal.
Debunking the ‘Netanyahu as Trump’s puppet-master’ myth
In the context of Trump’s rejection of Netanyahu’s strike proposal in late 2020, it is worth noting that Netanyahu has been consistently framed in the media and by critics as being singularly responsible for Trump’s Iran policy, both for the 2018 JCPOA withdrawal and for the current Iran war. Advocates of the ‘Netanyahu as Trump’s puppet master’ narrative tend to discount Trump’s own agency and long-standing motivations in shaping his Iran policy. Similar allegations resurfaced during the second Iran war in March 2026, when Trump critics once again portrayed him as a pliant figure manipulated by Netanyahu, at times invoking rhetoric that verged on longstanding antisemitic tropes of hidden influence and control. Such interpretations overlooked not only Trump’s decades-long hostility toward Iran and the consistent trajectory of his Iran policy, but also the fact that he had clearly rejected the same approach by Netanyahu in 2020.
These reports ignore the fact that, since the early 1980s onwards, Trump has consistently made hostile statements towards the Iranian regime, calling for a more aggressive posture towards Iran, seizing its oil, and derailing its nuclear program. They also ignore the fact that Trump was extremely and openly hostile towards President Obama’s legacy, namely Obamacare, climate crisis legislation, and the JCPOA; declaring, “One by one, it's going to come down”. During the JCPOA preliminary talks, he tweeted pro-deal messages, but once the 2013 interim deal was signed, he called it “rotten,” “imbecilic,” and a “bad deal”, and expressed similar views regarding the final deal. The Iranian nuclear archive documents supplied additional political ammunition for withdrawal, but certainly not his main motivation. Trump rejected this narrative, telling journalist Barak Ravid, “I would withdraw from the nuclear deal even if Bibi hadn’t existed…I did it. He didn’t convince me the same way he didn’t manage to convince Obama from the other side.”
Rather than scrutinizing Trump’s decision-making process, these critics framed Netanyahu’s ‘hard sell’ of the Iran strike during his February 2026 visit to the White House as the sole factor shaping Trump’s decision, casting Netanyahu as an all-powerful manipulator who guided an otherwise passive and unsuspecting president. Obama’s former secretary of state, John Kerry, fuelled these claims when, in April 2026, he purported to reveal a bombshell scoop to the press: Netanyahu had repeatedly proposed military action against Iran to previous US administrations. In recounting the episode, Kerry mistakenly confused Netanyahu with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when referring to Israeli discussions with the Bush administration.
Yet the problem with this ‘scoop’ was precisely that it revealed nothing. These were not previously unknown initiatives, but rather well-documented episodes of Israeli diplomacy that had long been discussed in memoirs, biographies, journalistic investigations, and press reports. That Israel wanted to attack Iran before it crossed the nuclear threshold was no secret. The discussions between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and President George W. Bush during his May 2008 visit to Israel had been extensively documented at the time in the press and later in the relevant memoirs. Netanyahu’s approaches to Obama were detailed by US Defense Secretary Robert “Bob” Gates and Netanyahu himself, and were also covered in the press. Netanyahu’s subsequent attempts to convince Trump during his first term, as well as later discussions with the Biden administration, had likewise been reported in the press; the Israeli approach to Biden in late 2024 was recently revealed by former Israeli official Tzachi Hanegbi on Israeli television.
This narrative also overlooks Trump’s highly centralized and personalistic leadership style, as well as the asymmetric nature of his relationship with Netanyahu. In practice, Trump has generally been the actor setting the terms of engagement rather than the one being directed by them. He accepts Netanyahu’s proposals when it suits him. Trump pressured Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire agreement with Hamas despite Netanyahu’s reservations. Similarly, he forced Israel into the current, limited (and rather violent) ceasefire in Lebanon and, according to reports, has marginalized Israel in his current diplomatic engagement with Iran. Far from depicting a president subordinate to Netanyahu’s wishes, these episodes suggest that Trump has repeatedly demonstrated both the willingness and the ability to impose constraints on Israeli policy when it suited his own strategic or political objectives.
Looking forward, what would a good Trump-Iran deal look like?
In an ideal world, a ‘good’ new Trump/Iran deal, as outlined by Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington-based think tank focused on national security and sanctions policy, would include measures far more coercive than those in a revised JCPOA. Instead of temporary restrictions, ‘sunset clauses’, and limited Iranian enrichment, such a deal would include permanent dismantlement of Iran’s entire enrichment capacity, backed by sustained military and economic pressure. Such an ideal deal would include zero Iranian enrichment capability, it would eliminate all of Iran’s existing stockpile of enriched uranium, and not only the 60% HEU. It would entail restrictions on Iran's construction of underground facilities, which have proved relatively resilient to aerial bombing, and on future centrifuge production and assembly. It would also entail intrusive IAEA inspections, restrictions on missile and drone development and deployment, and limit Iran’s support of its regional proxies. It would link sanction relief to Iran’s regional behavior and guarantee maritime freedom. Yet such a framework remains largely aspirational. A tougher, more enforceable final agreement aimed at constraining Iran over the long term while preventing the reconstitution of its nuclear threat remains elusive.
However, as of early June 2026, there are no meaningful indications that Iran is willing to accept an agreement of this scope, or that Trump is prepared to apply the sustained military pressure likely required to move Tehran in that direction, and to pay the political, economic, and military costs this would entail. If the war does not resume, it is possible that Trump would move toward a flawed final deal, although this movement is by no means final and conclusive, and fighting may well erupt again. Consequently, there are no ‘good’ options for a deal with Iran, instead only a range of bad ones to choose from.
The deeper Israeli concern, therefore, lies not only in what the emerging MOU contains, but in what it appears to leave outside its scope. Even if Iran removes or dilutes its stockpile of 60 percent highly enriched uranium, the retention of enrichment capacity, together with a larger stockpile of lower-enriched uranium, could allow it to rebuild its enrichment program relatively quickly. If this period were less than a year to breakout capacity, it would be a worse deal than the JCPOA. A similar concern applies to Iran’s missile program and its support for regional proxies, both of which Trump appears to frame as Israel’s problem rather than as matters to be addressed in the bilateral agreement.
An agreement that freezes Iran’s ability to enrich uranium for 15 or 20 years to 3.67% in a verifiable way would be preferable, but it would have to entail a highly intrusive inspection regime, and Iran would be required to ‘mothball’ or dismantle its centrifuges in a verifiable way. A strong IAEA inspection regime would go beyond monitoring Iran’s declared nuclear sites by giving inspectors rapid and enforceable access to the full nuclear supply chain, including centrifuge production, uranium processing, facilities, and suspicious undeclared or military sites. Like the JCPOA, it would buy time to prevent Iran from rapidly reconstituting its enrichment program and perhaps buy time for the Iranian people to overthrow the regime, while deferring the harder question of what to do once restrictions expire. But there are currently no indications that Iran is willing to accept such parameters.
As I noted above, it remains unclear whether Trump will ultimately resume the war with Iran or press ahead with an MOU. Several factors, however, appear to shape the choice before him. As former US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro has noted, the US entered the May 2026 talks with Iran with greatly diminished leverage. The approaching US midterm elections may further reduce Trump’s appetite for renewed large-scale kinetic operations, a constraint Iran appears to understand and exploit. Tehran’s handling of the Strait of Hormuz, through the deployment of mines, drones, and missiles, has demonstrated its asymmetric leverage over the US and its partners. Iran has shown that it can threaten a vital artery of the global economy and impose costs far beyond the military battlefield. In effect, it has acquired a proven economic kill switch, one it can now threaten to activate whenever diplomacy or deterrence turns against it.
From Jerusalem’s perspective, this raises a troubling question: can the military gains achieved during the war, above all the degradation of existing nuclear infrastructure, survive a prolonged diplomatic pause, or does the emerging arrangement mark the beginning of a gradual retreat from the leverage the war created? The fear in Jerusalem is that if concluded, the MOU could, in effect, become a narrow “Hormuz for Hormuz” deal: Iran would reopen the strait and ease the immediate economic crisis, while receiving sanctions relief or access to frozen funds that could help it recover and rebuild after the war. For Israel, such an outcome would ease pressure on the regime precisely when it would prefer to preserve that pressure, and if possible, intensify it.
The emerging MOU exposes the widening gap between Israel’s maximal war aims and what Washington might be willing to accept, though again, the picture is not completely clear, and things still may change, as Trump has proven before. Israel entered the war seeking to inflict lasting damage on Iran’s nuclear program, missile capabilities, and regional threat network. The emerging MOU, by contrast, appears to signal a far narrower final agreement: reopening the Strait of Hormuz, removing or addressing Iran’s highly enriched uranium, and postponing, or leaving unresolved, many of the broader threats that Israel had hoped the war would neutralize.
For Netanyahu, this outcome is particularly damaging, especially in light of the approaching Israeli elections, expected to be held during September or October 2026. It undercuts the central Iran doctrine on which he built much of his political identity: the argument that the military option could decisively answer the Iranian nuclear threat. Under Netanyahu, Israel went to war against Iran twice, both times with the US backing, yet did not manage to achieve its aim. Unless the Iranian regime is toppled in the coming months, an outcome Netanyahu likely hopes would unfold before the Israeli elections, the bottom line for Israel is difficult to avoid: even a large-scale US-Israeli aerial campaign failed to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue. The question, then, is no longer whether Trump can secure a good Iran deal, but whether he can prevent a bad one from becoming the foundation of the next crisis.
Or (Ori) Rabinowitz (PhD)
Tenured senior lecturer (US Associate Professor) at the International Relations Department of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and a Visiting Fellow of Israel Studies at Stanford University, 2025-2026.
