The time has come for Trump to choose between U.S. and Israeli interests in the Iran war

On Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump claimed, not for the first time, that an agreement with Iran had been reached to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, end the fighting, and begin talks on a permanent agreement between the two long-time enemies.

According to Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency, Iran’s leadership was likely to sign the agreement because the United States had accepted its contents. Whether any of this materializes remains to be seen. Hopes for the end of this calamitous war of choice by the United States and Israel have often turned to dust.

As usual, Trump made many claims, including that he had “spoken to” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He even listed Israel as among many countries that had accepted the terms of the agreement. 

But the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struck a different tone. Their statement read, in part, “Even though Israel is not a party to the memorandum of understanding, the Prime Minister expressed his appreciation for President Trump’s commitment that the final agreement at the conclusion of negotiations will include the removal of enriched material, the dismantling of enrichment infrastructure, limits on missile production, and the cessation of Iran’s support for its terrorist proxies in the region.”

It is highly unlikely that the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) contains the conditions Israel described. Trump may have told Israel that these were its contents, but more likely, this is Israel restating its own positions as a signal to Trump that it won’t accept any deal that doesn’t meet these terms.

Iran has made it clear that it will not consider negotiating on its missile program or its support for regional allies. It has also not changed its official position that while it has no interest in pursuing a nuclear weapon, it is not going to discuss its nuclear program until after the MOU is signed and the war is over.

There is no reason to think those positions, which Iran has held since the beginning of the war, have changed. 

Netanyahu made sure to distance himself from Trump’s claim of reaching an agreement, a move clearly intended to give Israel the freedom to act in Lebanon, and potentially against Iran directly, if it chooses. 

Equally clearly, such Israeli action would imperil the MOU both before it is signed and after. It is yet another indication that, particularly regarding this war of choice, American and Israeli objectives, needs, and policies are diverging widely.

It is also a reminder that, just as it has been from the beginning of this war, Israel will do all it can to prevent ending the conflict on anything but its own terms. If Trump wants to get out of this war, he will have to muster the political will he has not yet found to use the considerable leverage he, and every U.S. president, has to force Israel to leave Lebanon and end its attacks on Iran. 

Increasingly visible daylight between the U.S. and Israel

Speaking with the pro-Trump CBS News, U.S. Vice President JD Vance said of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “Sometimes we have interests that are perfectly aligned and sometimes we have interests that are misaligned. And what I’ve seen with the prime minister is that he aggressively asserts the interests of his country – sometimes that means we’re on the same page, sometimes it means we’re not.”

Those are unusual words coming from an American vice president. The typical refrain from the White House, through administrations of both major parties, has always emphasized the close alignment and shared interests of the two countries. 

Vance’s words reflect the increasingly visible gap between American policies and Israeli ones. But crucially, he places that gap within a personal rather than a policy framework. 

Personal friction between Israeli and American leaders is not at all unusual. What is unusual is for that friction to cause anything more than a minor rift in the policy alignment between the two allies. 

That’s not to say that there can’t be a break between the two. George H.W. Bush was willing to force then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir into the Madrid peace conference, and Barack Obama was able to override Netanyahu’s fierce opposition to secure the Iran nuclear deal. 

But such policy breaks have been exceedingly rare in the U.S.-Israeli relationship, while friction between Benjamin Netanyahu and American presidents has been much more common. Such personal confrontations make for marketable headlines but matter little in policy. 

So, when reports came out that Donald Trump had raged at Netanyahu over the phone, telling him, “You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this,” it was salacious but not noteworthy.

Trump also felt the need to state about Netanyahu, as he had done on occasion before, “If I tell him to do something, he does it.”

Trump needed to do that because Netanyahu had attacked the Beirut area in Lebanon, a red line that Iran had explicitly warned would lead to their own retaliation, and which Trump had forbidden him from doing. 

Eventually, Netanyahu backed off continued attacks on Iran after a round of missile exchanges between the two countries. But the fact that he went against Trump’s publicly expressed wish was notable. 

Netanyahu was pushed hard by both his supporters and opponents in Israel to respond harshly to a Hezbollah attack on northern Israel, and then to Iran’s retaliatory missile fire. Trump probably understood the pressure Netanyahu was under, but he had already boxed himself into a corner by publicly calling on Netanyahu for restraint, rather than waiting until after Netanyahu had taken his shots at both Lebanon and Iran, as past, more intelligent American presidents would likely have done.

Netanyahu’s open defiance cast doubt on how much control Trump could exert over his Israeli partner. This was problematic for Trump on two levels.

First, Trump thrives on being the man in charge. He must, always, appear to his fanatical followers as not only the most powerful man in the room, but as the man who exercises that power in such a way that no one dares defy him. Few people believe that façade anymore, but it’s the key to those admirers Trump retains. 

Second, and more importantly, it reinforced significant doubt in the minds of Iran’s leadership that Trump could enforce a ceasefire that would include Lebanon. Given that Iranian confidence in the United States’ “good faith” was already around zero, this was most unhelpful, as it implied that even if Trump was sincere in agreeing to stop Israel’s Lebanon onslaught, he might be unable to fulfill such a promise. 

The U.S. can stop Israel, but will it?

Speaking on the news program, Democracy Now, Quincy Institute executive vice president Trita Parsi correctly noted, “Without a doubt, just a phone call or some angry quotes to the media is not going to be enough to get Netanyahu and Israel to back down. If Trump is serious about restraining the Israelis, it has to be combined with a restriction of arms sales, sharing of intelligence, and other measures that enable the Israelis to conduct these attacks in the first place.”

At this point, even Trump knows the truth of what Parsi said. We know that because he has, at times, forced Netanyahu to back down, as he did last year when Netanyahu tried to restart the 12-Day War with Iran and Trump ordered Netanyahu to “turn the planes around.”

He did it again last week when he told Israel to stop its retaliation against Iran. 

It can’t be stressed enough that the United States holds the ultimate power in this relationship. Regardless of what leverage Israel has, how much its lobby in the United States agitates, it cannot survive without U.S. support. The U.S., on the other hand, depends on Israel for absolutely nothing.

The only question is political will, and that, as has been the case for so long, has been sorely lacking. 

But Trump is going to have to muster that will if he wants to get out of this war. 

Just to get this MOU signed, Trump is going to have to press Netanyahu to pull back in Lebanon, at least to the extent of halting its attacks on Hezbollah and Lebanese civilians. More likely, Iran will insist that Israel pull out of Lebanon completely and allow the residents of the south to return to their homes, or what Israel has left of them. 

Trump will have to make that happen or at least do enough to mollify Iran temporarily. 

The most likely outcome, even if this MOU does get signed—which is far from a certainty—is that Israel will be able to do enough to make a permanent agreement impossible. 

Trump will, doubtless, be happy to settle for getting the Strait of Hormuz opened again. But that relief he will feel will be short-lived. That temporary agreement will lead to an unstable situation, not unlike the one we have seen for the past two months during this tenuous ceasefire. 

It will be an atmosphere that will be easily ignited back into warfare, and it is impossible to believe that Israel will not find a way to do that, whether by attacking Iran again or remaining in Lebanon and renewing its aggression there, as it also continues to starve Gaza and strangle the Palestinians in the West Bank.

What Iran is doing is an attempt to finally force the United States to choose between its own interests and defending those of Israel. Until now, the U.S. has borne the costs of sacrificing its own interests to protect Israel from the consequences of its own actions. 

But now the American public has turned against that policy much more forcefully, and that tide is growing. Iran is trying to capitalize on that by taking advantage of Trump’s and Netanyahu’s foolhardy war to drive a wedge between the two allies. 

Mitchell Plitnick
Mitchell Plitnick is the president of ReThinking Foreign Policy. He is the co-author of Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics and maintains the Cutting Through newsletter.