Transcription
Why America Suddenly Wants Peace: Israel's Next Move Could Change Everything | Prof. John Mearsheimer
Today, I want to talk to you about something that almost nobody in Western media is explaining honestly. America, the country that has funded, armed, and diplomatically shielded Israel through 18 months of one of the most devastating military campaigns the world has seen since Vietnam, suddenly wants peace. Suddenly wants a ceasefire. Suddenly wants negotiations. And the question you should be asking is not whether that's good news. The question is, why now? And what does Israel do next? Because the answer to those two questions will determine the shape of the Middle East for the next generation. It will determine whether Iran survives as a regional power or collapses. It will determine whether China's influence in the Arab world accelerates or stalls. It will determine whether the United States can still credibly call itself the guarantor of global order or whether that era is simply finished. Let me walk you through this carefully. These are all layers here that the headlines are not showing you.
The American Reversal No One Is Explaining Properly
For more than a year, the United States did something extraordinary. It watched Gaza being demolished, watched the death toll climb past 40,000, watched famine conditions emerge in the north, watched hospitals get hit, watched journalists get killed, and it kept sending weapons. It kept vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the UN Security Council. It kept saying Israel had the right to defend itself. Now it's saying, let's talk about a deal. What changed?
The first thing that changed is something very simple and very uncomfortable. America lost. Not militarily. America didn't lose a single soldier in Gaza. But strategically, America lost badly. Here's what strategic defeat looks like when a superpower experiences it. It doesn't look like tanks burning in the desert. It looks like your credibility evaporating slowly in front of the entire global south while you insist you still have it. It looks like the countries you need to build coalitions with, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, telling you quietly and then not so quietly that they cannot be seen standing next to you right now. It looks like your Secretary of State flying to Riyadh and coming back with polite words and no substance. It looks like the Abraham Accords, the signature diplomatic achievement of the Trump era that Biden tried to build on, becoming politically radioactive across the Arab world. It looks like the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants for Israeli leaders and the United States, the country that has lectured the world about international law for seven decades, being unable to stop it. Not unwilling, unable. That is what strategic defeat looks like. And Washington understood by late 2024 that it was experiencing one.
There is also a domestic American dimension to this that is deeply important and that I think analysts in the Western press are still tiptoeing around because it touches on the politics of ethnicity, religion, and campaign finance all at once. The coalition that brought Biden into office in 2020 began fracturing publicly over Gaza. Arab American voters in Michigan, a state that decided the 2016 election, made very clear that they were not going to deliver their votes to a Democratic Party that was watching Gaza burn and calling it complicated. Young voters, the generation that grew up with social media and could see exactly what was happening in real time, started leaving. Muslim communities that had been reliable Democratic constituencies in swing states said enough.
Now, under the new Trump administration, you have a different political calculation, but a structurally similar problem. Trump needs the Arab states. Trump wants a grand deal in the Middle East, the kind of deal that comes with photo opportunities, with speeches about historic breakthroughs, with his name on it. He wants the normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel that his first term set in motion, but didn't finish. And he understands, because the people around him have told him clearly, that you cannot get Saudi normalization while Gaza looks the way Gaza looks. So, when America says it wants peace now, part of what it means is we need this to stop so we can get back to the bigger project. The bigger project is reshaping the Middle East in a way that contains Iran, integrates Israel into the regional economy, gives Saudi Arabia a security guarantee, and keeps China out of the picture. Gaza was always a distraction from that project in the American strategic imagination. And now the distraction has become so large, so impossible to ignore, so globally visible, that it is blocking the project itself.
Here's where things get genuinely dangerous. And I want you to pay close attention here, because this is the part that most commentators are getting wrong. Israel and America do not want the same thing right now. They are allied, they're dependent on each other, they have a relationship that goes back decades, but in this specific moment, their strategic interests have diverged in a very significant way. America wants a deal that ends the fighting, gets the hostages out, stabilizes Gaza under some kind of governing arrangement, and creates the conditions for the Saudi-Israel normalization that is the real prize. America wants a Gaza that is no longer a humanitarian catastrophe on the front page of every newspaper in the world. America wants, if we're being blunt about it, for people to stop talking about Gaza so the Middle East reset can proceed.
Israel, or more precisely, the current Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, wants something different. Netanyahu's coalition includes parties that openly advocate for the permanent resettlement of Gaza by Israeli settlers and the complete elimination of any Palestinian political entity west of the Jordan River. These are not fringe voices in his government. They are cabinet ministers. They control budget allocations. They can bring the government down if Netanyahu moves in a direction they consider a betrayal. Netanyahu himself is a man facing multiple criminal charges in Israeli courts: corruption, breach of trust, fraud. His continued freedom from prosecution depends on his continued hold on political power. His continued hold on political power depends on keeping that coalition together. Which means he cannot make a deal that his far-right coalition partners see as surrendering the ultimate goals of the campaign.
So, Netanyahu is doing something that is extraordinarily dangerous, and I think Washington has only recently started to fully understand. He is using American pressure, the appearance of responding to American pressure, to buy time. He makes statements about being open to a deal. He sends negotiators to Qatar. He agrees in principle to frameworks. And then at the critical moment, he either adds new conditions or allows events on the ground to sabotage the process. The Rafah operation, the attack on the World Central Kitchen convoy, the expansion of the ground campaign into areas that were supposedly evacuation zones. Each of these moments, when examined carefully, came at a time when a deal seemed to be getting close. Each of them made a deal impossible for weeks or months afterward. I am not saying this is always deliberate. War has its own momentum. Commanders make decisions. Things escalate. But the pattern is there and it is consistent.
Now, I need to talk about Iran because Iran is the reason everything else in this region is connected. The conventional Western narrative about Iran is simple. Iran is a destabilizing force. It supports terrorist organizations. It is building toward nuclear capability. And the goal of American policy is to contain and weaken it. That narrative has a certain coherence to it. But it leaves out something important. Iran is also a nation of 85 million people with one of the most educated populations in the developing world, with a sophisticated political culture, with an economy that despite decades of sanctions has not collapsed, with a military doctrine that has proven remarkably effective at projecting power without triggering the kind of direct confrontation that would justify a full American military response.
The proxy network that Iran built over decades — Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, various militias in Iraq and Syria, and Hamas in Gaza — was always primarily a deterrent strategy. Iran could not match American or Israeli conventional military power. So it built a ring of threats around Israel specifically and around American assets in the region more broadly. That said, if you attack us, the cost is not just what happens in Iran. The cost is what happens everywhere. That strategy worked. For years it worked. It prevented an Israeli or American military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities because the retaliation calculation was too frightening.
Hamas' offensive on October 7th was, from Iran's strategic perspective, a disaster, even though Iran celebrated publicly. Because it triggered an Israeli response so overwhelming that it destroyed Hamas as a functioning military and governing organization, shattered the political legitimacy of the Palestinian leadership, and created conditions in which Hezbollah, the crown jewel of Iran's proxy network, was drawn into a war it was not ready for at a time when it was not ready for it. Israel's campaign against Hezbollah in the second half of 2024 was devastating. The intelligence penetration of Hezbollah's communications, the pager attack, was a humiliation unprecedented in the history of that organization. The targeted killing of Hezbollah's senior leadership, including Hassan Nasrallah himself, removed the most capable and experienced commanders the organization had. Lebanon entered a ceasefire arrangement that effectively ended Hezbollah's ability to operate as a state within a state in southern Lebanon in the short term. And then, crucially, the Assad government in Syria collapsed quickly. Shockingly quickly. The land bridge that Iran had used for years to supply Hezbollah through Syria was severed. So, Iran's deterrence network, the thing that protected it from direct attack, was substantially degraded in the space of about 14 months. And Iran knows this, and Israel knows Iran knows this.
This is the part that should worry everyone, including people in Israel. There are people in the Israeli security establishment, and I'm not talking about the settlers. I'm not talking about the religious nationalists. I'm talking about serious military and intelligence professionals who believe that right now, for the first time in decades, there is a genuine strategic window to fundamentally alter the regional balance of power by striking Iran's nuclear program directly. The logic goes like this: Iran's air defense systems have been degraded by the Israeli strikes in October 2024. Iran's proxy network is in its weakest state in 20 years. Hezbollah is down. Hamas is down. The Houthis are under American military pressure. Iran cannot retaliate through its usual channels with the same force it could have 18 months ago. And if it retaliates directly, ballistic missiles at Israeli cities, it invites a response that could be genuinely existential for the Islamic Republic as a political system. So, the argument is strike now. Strike the nuclear facilities at Fordow and Natanz at Isfahan. Set the program back by years. Do it while the proxy network is weak. Do it while there is an American administration that has shown it will not fundamentally punish Israel for military action. Do it before Iran rebuilds.
Now, you want to be careful here. I am not saying the strike is going to happen tomorrow. I am not saying it is inevitable. There are serious people in Israel who think this would be a catastrophic mistake, that it would unify Iranian society behind the regime, that it would trigger a regional war that would cost Israel enormously, that it would permanently poison Israel's relationships with the Arab states, and that it would not actually destroy the nuclear program because the most critical parts are buried too deep for even Israeli munitions to reach without American assistance. But, the pressure for this option is real. And the window, as the hawks in Israel's security establishment see it, is closing. Because Iran will rebuild. Because Hezbollah will eventually reconstitute itself. Because the political conditions in the United States will eventually shift. And because once Iran has an actual nuclear weapon, even a crude one, the deterrence calculus changes permanently.
I study China. That's my primary frame. And I want to tell you what China sees when it looks at all this. China sees an America that is exhausted. Not militarily exhausted. America's military is still the most powerful on Earth. But strategically exhausted, diplomatically exhausted, morally exhausted in the eyes of the global South. China's brokering of the Iran-Saudi Arabia normalization agreement in 2023, the deal where Beijing brought Riyadh and Tehran together, was a signal. It was a signal that the Middle East major powers were hedging. They were not abandoning America. They were not turning to China. But they were creating options for themselves. They were saying, "We do not want to be dependent on a single patron anymore." And America's behavior over Gaza has reminded us why. China is not trying to replace America in the Middle East right now. China doesn't want to be responsible for Middle Eastern security. China wants to trade. China wants oil. China wants infrastructure contracts. China wants to demonstrate to the global South that there is an alternative to the American-led order. Not necessarily a better alternative, but an alternative. And every week that America's reputation suffers over Gaza is a week that argument gets easier for Beijing to make.
China is also watching the Iran situation with great care. China and Iran have a 25-year strategic cooperation agreement signed in 2021. China buys a substantial portion of Iran's oil, providing Tehran with economic oxygen that partially offsets the sanctions regime. China does not want Iran to collapse because a collapsed Iran could mean American military domination of the Persian Gulf in ways that would affect Chinese energy security directly. But China also does not want a regional war. A regional war disrupts the oil markets China depends on. A regional war destabilizes the Belt and Road corridors China's building through Central Asia and toward Europe. A regional war creates the kind of chaos that is bad for trade, bad for investment, and bad for the image of stability and competence that China is trying to project globally. So, China's position on a potential Israeli strike on Iran is: don't. And Beijing has communicated this through diplomatic channels, through public statements, through its relationships with both Tehran and Riyadh. But Beijing also knows that ultimately it cannot stop Israel if Israel decides to act. And it cannot stop America from enabling Israel if America chooses to do so.
The Hostage Equation and Why It's Both Real and Being Weaponized
There are still Israeli hostages in Gaza. Families are waiting: parents, children, people who have been held for over a year in conditions that are genuinely horrific. This is not a political abstraction. These are real human beings. And I want to say this directly: the hostages matter. Any honest accounting of this situation has to hold that truth fully. The October 7th attack was an atrocity. The people taken that day were civilians. They deserve to come home. But I also want to say something that is uncomfortable. The hostage issue has become for Netanyahu's government a political instrument as much as a humanitarian one. Every time a deal gets close, every time negotiators in Qatar or Cairo produce a framework that could bring hostages home, there are voices within the Israeli government that find reasons to walk away. And those reasons, when you examine them, are often not actually about the hostages. They're about refusing to end the military campaign on terms that would require withdrawing from Gaza without achieving the political goals of the far-right coalition members. The hostage families themselves, many of them, have said this publicly. They have protested in Tel Aviv. They have accused Netanyahu of using their loved ones as a justification for continuing a war that serves his political survival rather than their return. This is one of the most painful dimensions of this entire situation. Because the genuine anguish of the hostage families is real. The political manipulation of that anguish is also real. And both can be true at the same time.
Something has happened to international law during this war that I think we'll be processing for a long time. The International Court of Justice issued rulings finding plausible genocide. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu himself. The first time the court had moved against the leader of a close American ally. The UN General Assembly passed resolution after resolution demanding a ceasefire. And none of it stopped anything. Now, international law was never enforced with perfect consistency. The United States invaded Iraq on false pretenses and faced no legal consequences. Russia invaded Crimea and faced sanctions, but no ICC warrants. Powerful states have always operated with more impunity than weak ones. But there's a difference between imperfect enforcement and complete collapse. And what the world watched over the course of 2023 and 2024 was something very close to a complete collapse of the enforcement mechanisms around the laws of war, at least as they apply to states that enjoy great power patronage. The consequences of this are not abstract. When the rules stop applying, when even the appearance of accountability disappears, other actors notice. China notices when it thinks about Taiwan. Russia notices when it thinks about Ukraine. North Korea notices. Every authoritarian government that is considering using force against a neighbor is watching and drawing conclusions. The argument that the American-led liberal international order is good for the world rests in large part on the claim that it makes aggressive war more costly, that it builds norms that protect civilians, that it creates accountability even for the powerful. Gaza did serious damage to that argument, not fatal damage necessarily, but serious.
What Actually Happens Next?
Three scenarios. Let me give you three scenarios for where this goes. Not predictions. I'm an analyst, not a prophet, but frameworks for thinking about what comes next.
Scenario One: The Deal Holds.
A ceasefire agreement is reached. Hostages are released in phases. Gaza enters a long and painful reconstruction process under some form of international administration that avoids both Israeli military occupation and Hamas governance, and the path to Saudi-Israel normalization is reopened. In this scenario, America partially restores its credibility in the Arab world. Netanyahu's government eventually falls under the weight of its own contradictions, and a different Israeli government begins the long and difficult work of figuring out what a viable future for both peoples in the territory west of the Jordan actually looks like. This is the scenario that American diplomacy is normally working toward. It is also the least likely scenario in the near term because it requires Netanyahu to make concessions his coalition partners will not accept and will punish him for making.
Scenario Two: The Strike.
Israel strikes Iran's nuclear facilities with or without explicit American authorization. Iran retaliates probably through a combination of direct missile and drone attacks and through whatever remains of its proxy network. The region enters a period of sustained escalation. American forces in Iraq and Syria come under attack. The Strait of Hormuz is threatened. Oil prices spike globally. The global economy, already fragile, takes a serious blow. And the fundamental question of whether Iran's nuclear program has been seriously set back or whether it has simply gone deeper underground and accelerated remains unanswered. In this scenario, the Middle East is transformed, but not in the direction that American policy makers hoped for. Saudi normalization with Israel becomes politically impossible for years. China deepens its relationships with the Gulf states as an alternative patron. And the United States finds itself managing a regional war while simultaneously trying to maintain deterrence against China over Taiwan and support Ukraine against Russia. The strategic overextension that American planners have feared for a decade becomes real.
Scenario Three: Slow Freeze, No Deal, No Strike.
The situation freezes in a condition of ongoing low-level conflict. Gaza remains devastated and ungoverned. Occasional Israeli military operations continue. Hamas or its successor organization rebuilds slowly. Hezbollah reconstitutes itself over several years. Iran continues its nuclear program at the pace it chooses. The international community gets used to a new normal of controlled catastrophe. This scenario is bad for Palestinians, obviously, but it is also bad for Israel in ways that are not always appreciated. A permanent state of low-level warfare degrades Israeli society. It drains the economy. It makes it harder to attract and retain the skilled, educated, internationally mobile professionals that a modern high-tech economy depends on. It accelerates the emigration of secular Israelis who have other options. And it gives Iran time to rebuild the deterrence network and the nuclear program that Israel would need to strike to prevent. The freeze is the most likely near-term outcome. It is also arguably the worst long-term outcome for everyone.
The Question No One Is Asking
I want to close by asking a question that I think is not being asked enough in the mainstream analysis of this situation. What do the people who live there actually want? Not the governments, not the militaries, not the intelligence services, and the diaspora funders, and the American think tanks, and the regional autocracies that use Palestinian suffering as a political instrument while doing nothing concrete to end it. The actual people: Israelis who built lives in a country their parents and grandparents created, and who have genuine security concerns that cannot simply be waved away. Palestinians who have been stateless for 75 years, who have watched every peace process collapse, who are living in the rubble of what was already one of the most densely populated and resource poor territories on Earth. Every serious survey of Israeli public opinion shows that a substantial majority, when asked about long-term outcomes rather than immediate politics, wants security, wants to stop being afraid, wants the wars to stop, does not actually want to govern Gaza forever. Every serious survey of Palestinian opinion shows that a substantial majority wants dignity, wants a state, wants to stop being treated as a temporary inconvenience, does not, when you ask them directly, endorse the method of October 7th, even when they understand the desperation from which it emerged. The tragedy is that what both populations say they want — security, dignity, and an end to permanent warfare — is structurally available. It is not available tomorrow. It would require enormous political courage, and it would require outside pressure, and it would require both peoples to make concessions that their most extreme voices will call betrayal. But it is not impossible. It is not utopian. Versions of it have been achieved in other seemingly intractable conflicts: Northern Ireland, the Balkans, South Africa. Imperfectly, but meaningfully. What is currently impossible is not peace. What is currently impossible is peace without displacing the political leaders whose power depends on the continuation of conflict. And that right there is the real problem. Not ancient hatreds, not religious differences that can never be bridged, not two peoples who simply cannot coexist. The real problem is that the people who have the power to make decisions do not have the incentives to make the right ones.
Why You Should Care
Wherever you are, you might be watching this from Southeast Asia, from Africa, from Latin America, from Europe. You might be wondering what any of this has to do with you. Here is why it matters. The global order that governed international relations since 1945, imperfect, hypocritical, but real, was built on a set of norms. Norms about sovereignty, about the protection of civilians, about the role of international institutions in managing conflict, about the accountability of even powerful states to something beyond their own interests. What happens in the next year in the Middle East will either stabilize or further erode those norms. If America succeeds in brokering something that resembles a just resolution, not perfect, but something, it will partially restore the credibility of the American-led order and the institutions associated with it. If the situation either freezes into permanent catastrophe or escalates into regional war, the lesson that every government in the world will draw is that the rules don't apply when the strong decide they don't want them to. And that lesson, once it is fully drawn, once it is fully internalized, changes everything. It changes how China thinks about Taiwan. It changes how Russia thinks about its neighbors. It changes how every middle power and regional hegemon thinks about the constraints on its behavior. I study power: how it works, how it fails, how it is contested, and what the consequences are when the institutions that are supposed to manage it break down. What I see right now is a hinge moment, one of those points in history where the decisions made in the next few months will constrain the options available for decades. America wants peace now. But wanting peace and making peace are very different things. And Israel's next move, whether it is a deal, a strike, or a drift into frozen conflict, will determine which kind of world we all live in next. Watch this space.