U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempts to find a way out of the war with Iran have suddenly become a lot more complicated.
The Israel versus Iran part of the conflict dramatically ramped up in intensity over a matter of hours on Sunday, exactly two months to the day since Trump announced a ceasefire.
- In response to Iran’s proxy militia Hezbollah firing rockets into northern Israel, the Israeli military struck what it called Hezbollah infrastructure in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
- Iran soon responded with a wave of missiles aimed at Israel, its first since April. The Israel Defence Forces said it intercepted all missiles.
- Israel then fired back, hitting Iranian targets that included air defence installations and a petrochemical plant.
The Israeli missile strikes came despite Trump saying publicly that he would urge Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to retaliate.
As badly as Trump wants an agreement that ends the war with Iran, the rapid escalation suggests he’ll be hard-pressed to reach the kind of long-term deal he wants with Iran until — and unless — he puts a lid on the related yet distinct conflict between Israel and Tehran/Hezbollah.
Iran’s military command says it’s calling off attacks against Israel — unless Israel’s strikes on Beirut continue. Thomas Juneau, a professor of public and international affairs, says the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah will likely continue to be a friction point in peace talks between the U.S. and Iran.
Both Israel and the U.S. clearly want to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon, but beyond that, the priorities of the two allies start to diverge, in part because of their leaders’ differing domestic political concerns.
Trump currently cares far more about getting the Strait of Hormuz reopened to oil tanker traffic than Netanyahu does. A major goal for Netanyahu is to protect Israeli security by crippling Hezbollah’s operations in Lebanon, something that Trump shows little interest in pursuing.
Iran feels ‘emboldened’
Hovering over all this is Iran’s position: that any deal it makes with the U.S. to end the war and curtail its nuclear program must include Israel stopping its military action against Hezbollah in south Lebanon.
Washington’s attempts to make a Lebanese ceasefire stick have had little success, with Hezbollah rejecting it and Israel refusing to withdraw its troops.
Natan Sachs, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a think-tank in Washington, D.C., says Iran appears to have calculated that Trump’s strong motivation to get an agreement to end the war meant it could strike Israel on the weekend without facing retaliation from the U.S.
“What we have here is a bit of a game of chicken. Iran feels that it is emboldened by the outcome of the war so far and that it holds the cards, because it thinks that Trump is very interested in this deal,” Sachs told CBC News.
“That means that [the Iranians] are willing to push the envelope. They do not think they’ll return to full-scale war with the United States if they do this,” Sachs said.
Sachs says Netanyahu and his government are very concerned about the prospect of Trump striking a deal with Iran that is too soft on Israel’s key priorities, including dismantling Iran’s support for Hezbollah.
“There is real potential here for a split [between Trump and Netanyahu] because the interests are fundamentally different,” he said.
Trump-Netanyahu tensions
While the Israelis “are very much afraid that Trump will flip on Netanyahu,” Sachs said the two countries remain allies, and the differences between the two leaders have not yet developed into a major rift.
That’s despite reports of Trump cursing at Netanyahu during a testy phone call last week about Israel’s strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon.
What Iran is doing “serves several purposes,” according to Michael Young, an author and editor of books on Lebanon and a member of the Carnegie Middle East Centre, a think-tank in Beirut. He says Iran is trying to create strains in the U.S.-Israel relationship.
“Trump wants a deal, while the Israelis are trying to torpedo any breakthrough in negotiations between Washington and Tehran,” Young wrote Monday in a social media post.
More than 10 weeks into the war and without a clear end in sight, U.S. President Donald Trump says the ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran is on ‘massive life support.’ Andrew Chang explains why the U.S. strategy to end the conflict — which Trump initially said wouldn’t last more than a month — is falling short.
(Photo credits: The Canadian Press, Reuters, Adobe Stock and Getty Images)
There is a gap between what the U.S. and Israel want next from their war with Iran, says Thomas Juneau, a former Middle East analyst with Canada’s Department of National Defence and now professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa.
In essence, Trump wants to wrap it up while Netanyahu believes the job isn’t done, Juneau says.
Israel’s fears about U.S.-Iran talks
“Israel is very anxious right now because it is not directly involved in these U.S.-Iran talks, and it seriously fears that the outcome of these talks could be detrimental to Israeli interests, or at least how Netanyahu perceives Israeli interest,” Juneau told CBC News Network on Monday.
But Juneau cautions against reading too much into the apparent differences between the two leaders.
“As real as that divergence is, it’s important not to exaggerate it. They do remain very closely aligned, mostly,” he said.
Juneau foresees the Middle East conflict continuing the way it’s been for weeks, with a fragile ceasefire that keeps getting broken every now and again.
“It’s a no-war, no-peace, no-man’s land,” he said.
Trump reportedly spoke to Netanyahu twice between Sunday afternoon and Monday morning.
“Israel and Iran must immediately stop ‘shooting,'” the U.S. president posted on social media shortly after 5:30 a.m. ET Monday, when the missiles were still flying.
By later in the day, Israel and Iran had in fact called off their strikes.
Still, the bigger challenge for Trump remains getting the deal with Iran that has eluded him since April, despite saying on multiple occasions that it was very close.
On Monday, he once again predicted an agreement is coming soon.
“Final negotiations on ‘Peace’ are proceeding, subject to ignorance or stupidity getting in its way,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Things should move quickly.”
