Transcription
Bahrain and Kuwait got hit this weekend, and I want to tell you right away why that matters. Because I think most of the commentary on it is reading the story backwards. The assumption you're hearing is that Iran just jeopardized its own ceasefire, that Tehran took a reckless risk three weeks after signing a memorandum with Washington. I think that gets it exactly wrong.
What that strike actually demonstrates, and demonstrates in the clearest possible terms, is that Iran survived eleven months of a war designed specifically to destroy it, and came out the other side with enough operational capacity to hit two American security partners in a single weekend and still keep its negotiators at the table. That is not a country teetering on the edge of collapse. That is a country that has already won in the only sense that actually matters in a war like this one.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again, because I think it's the single most important fact people are missing. For Iran to win this war, all it had to do was survive. It didn't need to defeat the United States militarily. It didn't need to sink an aircraft carrier or march on Tel Aviv. It needed to avoid regime collapse, keep enough of its missile inventory and enrichment capability intact, and refuse to become a client state that takes orders from Washington and Jerusalem. It has done exactly that. Its supreme leader was assassinated in February. Its nuclear infrastructure was struck repeatedly. Its economy has been battered by blockade. And it is still standing, still armed, still capable of reaching Manama and Kuwait City on a weekend of its choosing.
Judge this war by the four goals that were laid out before it started: regime change, disarmament, a subservient replacement government, an end to Iranian influence in the region. And Israel and the United States have achieved not one of them. Meanwhile, Iran has a stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz that it did not have before February the 28th. That is not what defeat looks like. That is what victory looks like when you're the weaker power fighting a war you didn't choose to start.
Let's be honest about how this war actually began, because the sanitized version you'll hear from the administration bears almost no resemblance to what happened. This was never a war forced on the United States by an Iranian threat. Iran was not a threat to the United States. There was no reason, none, for Washington to attack it.
What happened instead is that Benjamin Netanyahu spent years, literally decades, working to get an American president to do what Israel could not safely do alone: launch a full-scale war against Iran. And in February, he finally found a president willing to take the bait. Joe Biden was offered the same trap twice in 2024, once in April and once in October, and he refused both times. Donald Trump took it. Netanyahu convinced him that a quick, decisive strike, a decapitation of the leadership, would produce regime collapse within days and hand Trump the kind of historic legacy he clearly craves. Trump liked that story. He is not, and I say this plainly, surrounded by particularly wise advisers, and he believed Israel's intelligence, or what passed for intelligence, that the Iranian regime was brittle and would crumble the moment its head was cut off. It did not crumble, and what followed was not a quick war. It became exactly what serious students of this region warned it would become: a protracted war of attrition that the United States and Israel were never actually prepared to fight.
Trump and Netanyahu together, and I use the word "together" deliberately because this was always a tag-team operation, believed a heavy surprise strike, combined with what they called decapitation of the power structure, would produce shock and awe and a swift victory. They were wrong on every count. The Iranian state did not depend on a single individual at the top the way Washington's planners apparently assumed it did. Iran is a large country with dispersed military assets and enormous strategic depth, and dispersed deep states of that kind are extraordinarily difficult to dismantle through rapid strikes, no matter how sophisticated the weaponry doing the striking happens to be. That is a structural fact about the country, not a matter of luck or Iranian brilliance.
The United States has now run this same experiment twice in a generation: first in Iraq, where a similar theory of decapitation and quick victory produced a decade of chaos, and now in Iran, where it has produced a war Washington does not know how to end.
So, walk through what actually happened after the shock and awe failed to deliver its promised shock. Iran began closing the Strait of Hormuz, threatening to mine it outright, and that single decision has done more damage to the global economy than almost anything else in this entire conflict. Twenty percent of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas used to move through that waterway. Cutting that off doesn't just hurt Iran's neighbors. It triggers the kind of global energy shock that shows up in every filling station and every heating bill from Ohio to Osaka. And economists have started calling the resulting price surge the "Iran tax," a tax paid by ordinary households for a war they never voted for and never wanted.
Iran also out-sophisticated American radar installations across the Gulf and inside Israel itself, degrading Washington and Jerusalem's ability to track incoming drones and missiles in real time, which is precisely the kind of capability erosion that turns a short war into an indefinite one. By the time we reached the memorandum signing on June the 17th, Trump was not negotiating from a position of strength. He was negotiating because the global economy was heading toward a genuine precipice and he needed an exit before November, before the political costs of an endless war for Israel came due at the ballot box.
Understand also that the three main actors in this war have been operating on three completely different clocks, and that mismatch explains almost every strange decision made over the past four months better than any single day's headline can. Trump needs this resolved before November because he cannot carry an open-ended Middle East war of attrition into the midterms without paying a severe political price. Iran, by contrast, needs only to outlast him, just to survive long enough that Washington's own domestic calendar forces an American retreat, regardless of what happens on the ground. And Netanyahu needs the opposite of both of them. He needs the war to continue for as long as possible, long enough to redraw the security map in Lebanon, neutralize Hezbollah, and walk into his own fall election wrapped in the flag rather than facing defeat.
On the 18th of June, the scheduled technical talks in Switzerland were quietly postponed, and Trump found himself publicly denying reports of a $300 billion fund tied to the agreement, calling it fake news in the same breath he threatened to back further Israeli strikes if Iran provoked Israel again. Within days, Israel struck a Hezbollah target in Beirut, an operation so reckless that Trump himself told Axios that Netanyahu had shown, in his words, "no judgment whatsoever" in ordering it. And then this past weekend, the IRGC hit Bahrain and Kuwait directly, and Washington's response, delivered through an anonymous official rather than the president himself, was essentially to confirm the negotiating schedule was still intact. The country that had just been struck twice by its own supposed adversary was still showing up to the table asking for more talks. That is not the posture of a side that believes it's winning.
Economists are now warning that this so-called "Iran tax" on ordinary American households is not a one-time shock that fades in a quarter or two. It's a burden that's likely to persist for months, probably years, as fuel prices work their way through every downstream sector of the economy: freight, agriculture, and heating, air travel. That's an important detail because it changes the domestic political calculus in Washington. A war that shows up as an abstraction on the evening news is one thing. A war that shows up as $40 extra dollars every time you fill your tank is something else entirely. And it is precisely the kind of tangible, recurring cost that erodes support for a war of choice far faster than any casualty count does on its own. Trump understands that arithmetic better than almost anyone in his own party, which is exactly why he is under such intense pressure to resolve this before it becomes an even bigger liability heading into the midterms.
Now, let me actually explain the framework here, because I think this is where most of the coverage completely loses the plot. And it's worth taking a moment to be precise about it. There are two separate claims tangled together in almost every piece of commentary on this war, and they need to be pulled apart.
The first claim is about who started it and why. The honest answer is that this was fundamentally a war for Israel, not a war for American national interest. It had nothing to do with oil. Whatever bombast Trump has since attached to Iranian oil fields is just noise added late in the game to justify a war that never needed American blood or American treasure in the first place. It was Netanyahu's project, sold to an American president through Israel's extraordinarily effective lobbying apparatus, the same apparatus that has shaped American Middle East policy for decades, regardless of which party holds the White House. See, both the Secretary of State and the Speaker of the House have at various points more or less admitted as much publicly, whether they meant to or not. This is a war for Israel, fought with American soldiers, American ships, and now American household budgets.
And I want to be precise about what I mean by "the lobby," because it's a term that gets thrown around loosely and often unfairly. It isn't a conspiracy, and it isn't a single organization pulling strings in a back room. It's a loose, remarkably effective coalition of organizations, donors, and political networks that operates entirely in the open through campaign contributions, through media relationships, through sustained pressure on members of Congress from both parties, all working toward outcomes that align with what Israel's government wants from Washington, rather than what an independent assessment of American interests would recommend. See, that kind of influence doesn't need to be hidden to be powerful. It just needs to be persistent, well-funded, and largely unchallenged. And for decades now, on the specific question of American policy toward Iran, it has been exactly that.
The second claim is about who actually holds the advantage once the shooting slows down. And this is where a genuinely structural, offensive realist reading of the situation matters, because surface-level rhetoric about the memorandum being a diplomatic breakthrough obscures what's actually happened to the underlying balance of power. Israel's strategic objectives in this region have never been limited to stopping an Iranian bomb. They extend to expanding Israeli borders in the West Bank, into southern Lebanon, up to the Litani River, into parts of southern Syria. And they extend to keeping neighboring states as weak and fragmented as possible, either by keeping smaller states like Jordan and Lebanon subordinate to American and Israeli wishes, or by working to destroy and undermine larger, more capable states like Iran, Syria, and Turkey – states too big to simply subordinate. That is the actual strategic logic underneath the war, and judged against that logic, not against the press release language of the memorandum, the war has failed on every count that matters. Iran has not been destroyed. It has not been replaced with a subservient government. Its enrichment capability, whatever damage the strikes inflicted on specific facilities, has not been eliminated because nobody has produced a verified accounting of where its pre-war stockpile of highly enriched uranium actually sits. The sixty days to resolve that question is not urgency; it's an admission that resolving it was never really the point of the memorandum in the first place.
It's worth being blunt about what those broader Israeli objectives have actually looked like in practice, because the Iran war did not happen in isolation from the rest of Israel's regional strategy. It happened alongside it. In Gaza, the stated aim after October 2023 shifted from a punitive military campaign into something that, given the scale of bombardment and the deliberate restriction of food, water, and medical supplies, increasingly resembles a campaign of forced displacement through mass suffering rather than a conventional counterterrorism operation. Palestinian resilience has kept that campaign from achieving its apparent territorial objective, but the human cost has been staggering, with the Palestinian death toll in Gaza now reported above 70,000. I raise that not as a digression from the Iran story, but because it is the same actor pursuing the same underlying strategic logic of territorial expansion and regional weakening of its neighbors. And the Iran war cannot be properly understood as a team effort.
The weaker state does not need to win in any conventional military sense to come out ahead strategically. It needs only to survive with its core capabilities intact and its sovereignty unbroken, because every month it survives is a month in which the costs to the stronger side – economic, diplomatic, reputational – keep compounding, while the stronger side's actual war aims remain unachieved. Iran has now collected that survival verdict. It absorbed the assassination of its supreme leader, absorbed strikes on its nuclear infrastructure, absorbed a blockade, and it is still capable of reaching Gulf capitals on a weekend of its choosing. Every additional month this drags on without regime change is another month in which the survival verdict compounds in Iran's favor, regardless of what any signing ceremony in Versailles claims to have settled.
There's a nuclear dimension to this that I think deserves more attention than it's getting, and it concerns Israel, not Iran. Israelis have historically viewed an Iranian nuclear weapon as an existential threat, not a mere strategic inconvenience. Existential threats produce a different category of response than ordinary ones. My honest assessment is that at some stage in this conflict, if Israel comes to believe Tehran has actually reconstituted meaningful weapons-grade capability, we cannot rule out Israel resorting to nuclear weapons of its own. And not as a distant hypothetical, but as a live possibility that ought to be factored into how seriously the international community treats this sixty-day clock. That is an extraordinarily dangerous place for this conflict to be sitting in, and it is not a place that gets discussed nearly enough in coverage focused entirely on shipping lanes and stock market reaction.
Let's talk about who is actually absorbing the political cost of all of this, because it is distributed in a way that should embarrass everyone who told the Israeli public this war would be quick and decisive. Start with Netanyahu, because his position right now is about as exposed as I have seen an Israeli Prime Minister in wartime. He promised total victory. He delivered a memorandum he apparently had not even read in full before it was digitally signed. A public rebuke from his own patron over the reckless Beirut strike. And an election four months away in which his own coalition's hardliners are demanding he keep fighting in Lebanon regardless of what Washington wants. Ehud Barak, his old rival, said on Israeli public broadcasting that Israel is paying the price of Netanyahu's hubris, that Iran emerged stronger and Israel emerged weaker, and that reading is no longer a fringe position inside Israel; it is close to becoming the emerging consensus. Yair Lapid, who will challenge him this fall, has framed the entire deal as a verdict on Netanyahu's whole wartime strategy, and it's difficult to argue with that framing, given how thoroughly Netanyahu was sidelined from the actual negotiating process.
Listen to what Netanyahu himself has been reduced to saying publicly, because the language tells you more than the substance does. "In the United States, they say, 'Trump does everything I ask.' He told reporters. And in Israel, they say the opposite, 'that I do everything he asks.' Neither is true. We have a relationship of partners who know each other." That is not the language of a leader in command of an alliance he built. That's the language of a leader trying to manage the perception of dependency, because he can no longer credibly deny the dependency itself. And notice, too, that Israeli troops remain in a buffer zone in southern Lebanon that Netanyahu insists will stay occupied for as long as necessary, boasting that he stood "very, very firm" against Iranian demands to withdraw. Repeating "firm" twice is not the language of a man who feels secure in his firmness; it's a tell.
It's also worth noting that Washington's own military establishment appears to have understood the risks here better than the civilian leadership that ordered the operation. Every time the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has been put in front of cameras throughout this war, he has not looked like a man celebrating an imminent victory. He has looked like a man managing an operation he privately doubts. And I think that instinct reflects a broader unease inside the Pentagon about exactly what this war was actually for. To his credit, he has conducted himself professionally under difficult circumstances, but the visible discomfort tells its own story. When the people actually running the military campaign look less confident than the civilians who authorized it, that's usually a fairly reliable signal about how the war is really going, regardless of what the press releases say.
It helps to understand why Netanyahu keeps choosing escalation over restraint, even when restraint would clearly serve Israel's own long-term interests. And I think the honest explanation runs deeper than this particular war. He is facing ongoing domestic legal proceedings alongside the election. And a wartime prime minister facing corruption charges has every personal incentive to keep the country in crisis mode for as long as legally and politically possible. The veteran Haaretz columnist, who has spent decades as one of Israel's most relentless internal critics, has argued that militarism isn't simply a tool Netanyahu reaches for when convenient; it's closer to his defining worldview, a political culture in which war is treated as the first option rather than the last one. Watching Netanyahu operate over these past four months, insisting on continuing in Lebanon, even as his own patron in Washington pushes for de-escalation, I don't think that reading is unfair.
Here's what makes this moment genuinely different from prior US-Israel friction. And I want to be careful to distinguish between two things that move on completely different timescales. Policy-level influence, the actual power the pro-Israel lobby exerts over decisions made in Washington, is not going anywhere in the short or even medium term. Steve Walt and I wrote the book on that lobby back in 2007, and neither of us imagined that by 2026, that influence would remain as durable as it has, even as Israel and the United States proved foolish enough to launch a war with consequences this catastrophic for both countries.
But public opinion is a completely different animal, and it is moving fast, faster than I think anyone predicted. Support for Israel is eroding sharply across nearly every demographic in American politics, but particularly as Trump absorbs the political cost of a war his own base increasingly views as one he was manipulated into fighting on Israel's behalf rather than America's. The damage extends well beyond the bilateral relationship, too. European allies and NATO partners watched what Washington got talked into: a war of choice that wrecked the security architecture the United States had spent decades building with Gulf states. And that erosion of trust does not repair itself quickly. Gulf states themselves are now hedging rather than deepening ties with Israel, quietly exploring their own channels back to Tehran instead of racing to join an expanded Abraham Accords the way Netanyahu spent years hoping they would. The UAE, historically the most hawkish Gulf state on the Iran question, has moved toward the regional consensus favoring this deal rather than standing with Netanyahu in opposition to it. A regional integration project premised on a permanently weakened Iran does not survive contact with an Iran that just hit two Gulf capitals in a single weekend and still kept its seat at the negotiating table.
There is a Lebanon-shaped complication sitting underneath all of this that I don't think gets nearly enough attention. And it may end up being the actual trigger for whatever comes next, rather than anything happening directly between Washington and Tehran. Iran wants the fighting in Lebanon stopped entirely, folded cleanly into the broader ceasefire framework, and Hezbollah has made clear it will not accept a return to the pre-war arrangement in which a nominal ceasefire coexisted with continued Israeli strikes. The Israelis, for their part, are not going to be happy about that demand because ending the Lebanon campaign on Iran's terms would mean walking away from Netanyahu's other major war aim: the redrawing the security map along the northern border before he faces voters. That disagreement over Lebanon is arguably a bigger threat to the whole framework right now than anything happening in the Gulf, precisely because it sits at the exact point where Washington's desire to wind everything down collides head-on with Netanyahu's need to keep at least one front open.
So, where does this actually go from here? I think the honest answer is that there is no clean off-ramp, and anyone promising you one is selling you something. Trump has essentially three options left, and none of them is attractive. He can resume full-scale war, which is not practical given where American and Israeli capacity and domestic appetite currently stand. He can accept something close to the current framework, which functionally means accepting defeat against Iran while calling it a diplomatic achievement. Or he can maintain something like the current blockade posture indefinitely, relying on economic pressure rather than bombing, which keeps damaging the global economy every single day it continues.
My honest expectation, and I want to be direct rather than hedge on this, is that Trump increasingly leans toward the second option, dressed up in whatever language lets him claim a legacy achievement before November. Because the pressure from a world economy heading toward genuine crisis is simply too severe to sustain the alternative for much longer. Watch the sixty-day clock on the uranium stockpile, not because I expect Iran to actually surrender that material inside the window – I don't – but because how that deadline gets handled, extended, quietly abandoned, or turned into another round of indefinite talks, will tell you everything about whether Washington has actually accepted what already happened here.
Diplomatic historians were asked a couple of years back by the Council on Foreign Relations to name the worst American foreign policy decision of this century. And they settled on the 2003 Iraq war. I believe history is going to record the decision to attack Iran on February the 28th as considerably worse, by a wide margin. A colossal blunder that will be remembered as this century's defining cautionary tale about letting an ally's threat perceptions substitute for your own national interest. Even Robert Kagan, about as committed a supporter of the Iraq invasion as you'll find anywhere in Washington, has called this decision "catastrophic," and I agree with him completely. This is now the third major American failure in the wider Middle East after Iraq and Afghanistan, and I think it's going to make future American military intervention in this region far less likely for a generation, which, frankly, may end up being the one genuinely useful consequence to come out of the entire catastrophe.
The line I'd leave you with is this: Iran did not need to win this war in any conventional sense to have already won it. It needed only to survive, keep its capabilities intact, and refuse to bend. And this weekend's strikes on Bahrain and Kuwait are Tehran proving in the clearest terms available that it has done precisely that. The war was sold as a war for American security. It was never that. It was a war for Israel, fought at American expense, and the bill for that miscalculation is only beginning to come due. Remember the four goals laid out before the first bomb ever fell: regime change, disarmament, a subservient government, an end to Iranian regional influence. Not one of them has been achieved. That is the only scorecard that actually matters, and it is the one nobody in Washington wants to read out loud.