Transcription
So today I want to talk about something that I think almost everyone is misreading right now, and I mean badly misreading, because over the last week, the United States and Iran signed an agreement to end this war. They are calling it the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, brokered, and I want you to notice this detail, brokered by Pakistan. And the moment it was signed, the narrative split into two completely different stories.
In Tehran, the Iranians are calling this agreement a declaration of America's defeat. And in the West, the headlines are saying, "America brought peace. America ended the war. America brought Iran to the table." But here is the story that almost nobody is telling you. And it is the most important one, because the most revealing thing about this deal is not what is in it. The most revealing thing about this deal is who got left out of it. And the answer is Israel. America made peace with Iran. And to do it, America walked away from Israel.
And I want you to sit with that for a moment, because if you have been watching this channel, you know that for the entire length of this war, the story we were told was that Israel was driving the bus, that America was fighting Iran on Israel's behalf, that the tail was wagging the dog. So, how do we get from there to here? To a deal that Israeli officials are openly alarmed about, a deal that waves sanctions on Iran while Israel watches from the sidelines. That is the question I want to answer today. Because once you understand why America abandoned Israel to make this deal, you understand something much deeper about how alliances actually work. And you understand who really had the power in this relationship all along.
So let me break this down carefully, the way I always do, using game theory and structural analysis. And let's start from the beginning with what is actually in this agreement, because the details matter enormously. Here is what the deal does. It halts the fighting. It opens a 60-day window for negotiations toward a permanent settlement. The United States agreed to wave sanctions on Iran for 60 days, which allows Tehran to sell its oil and actually get paid for it. The Strait of Hormuz reopens to commercial traffic, and in exchange, Iran agrees to come to the table and talk about its nuclear program. That is the headline version.
Now, here is what the deal does not do, and this is the part you need to pay attention to. The agreement does not address Iran's ballistic missile program. The agreement does not address Iran's support for its regional allies, its proxies, the network that Israel considers the single greatest threat to its existence. And the agreement, at least so far, has produced no clear, verifiable Iranian concession on the nuclear question. In fact, as we speak, the Americans are saying Iran agreed to let inspectors back in, and the Iranians are saying no such thing was agreed.
So, let's look at this from Israel's point of view. For the entire war, Israel had three core demands: End Iran's nuclear program, end Iran's missile program, and end Iran's support for the proxy network surrounding Israel. And the deal that America just signed addresses, at best, one of those three, and even that one is in dispute. So, of course, Israeli officials are alarmed. America fought a war supposedly on Israel's behalf and then signed a peace deal that gives Israel almost nothing it actually wanted.
Now, the Western media is treating this as a surprise. As if America suddenly changed its mind, as if Trump woke up one day and decided to abandon an ally. But it is not a surprise. It is not random. It is the logical, predictable outcome of the incentive structure. And game theory could have told you this was coming.
So, let me walk you through it step by step, because each step builds on the last. Let's start with the first step, which is understanding the difference between what an alliance says it is and what an alliance actually is. In public, the alliance between America and Israel is described in the language of values, shared democracy, shared history, an unbreakable bond. That is the language. But in game theory, we do not look at the language. We look at the incentives. And the truth about every alliance in history, every single one, is that it lasts exactly as long as it serves the interests of the stronger party. Alliances are not marriages. They are not friendships. They are contracts of convenience between states that have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. And the moment an alliance stops serving the interest of the stronger party, that alliance is abandoned. This is not cynicism. This is the iron law of international relations. And it has been true since Athens abandoned its allies, since Rome abandoned its client kings, since Britain abandoned everyone it ever promised to protect. The moment the cost outran the benefit.
So the real question is not why did America abandon Israel. The real question is, at what point did continuing this war for Israel stop serving America's interests? And to answer that, we have to go to step two, which is understanding what this war was actually costing America. Now, I have talked before on this channel about the economics of this war, and I want to bring it back, because this is the engine of everything. When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, it did something very clever. It did not attack America directly. It attacked the global economy, which means it attacked America indirectly through the one thing American presidents cannot ignore: the price of oil and the health of the financial markets. Every week the Strait stayed closed, oil prices stayed elevated. Every week oil stayed elevated, the American economy absorbed more pain. Inflation, fuel costs, shipping costs, the stock market, all of it under pressure.
And here is the thing about American politics that Iran understood perfectly. The American public has a very low tolerance for foreign wars that hurt their wallet. They will support a war that is quick, cheap, and victorious. They will not support a war that is long, expensive, and inconclusive. And this war had become long, expensive, and inconclusive. So the pressure on the American president was building from every direction at once.
And then something happened that I want you to pay very close attention to, because it is one of the clearest signals in this entire story. The United States Senate, for the first time, passed a war powers resolution rebuking the president over this conflict. Now, think about what that means. That is the American Legislature, the body that represents the American people, formally telling the president, "We do not authorize this. We want out." That is the political system itself beginning to crack under the weight of the war. And when a president sees his own Senate turning against him, when he sees the economy bleeding, when he sees the polls dropping, the calculation changes. The cost of continuing the war for Israel's benefit has now exceeded the benefit. And the moment that happens, game theory tells you exactly what a rational actor does. He cuts a deal. He takes the exit. He ends the war on the best terms he can get. And he does not let his allies' unfinished objectives keep him trapped in a war his own people no longer support.
So that is step two. The war became too expensive for America to keep fighting on Israel's behalf. Now, let's go to step three, which is the deeper and more uncomfortable truth. The question of who was really using whom. Because for the entire war, the dominant narrative was that Israel was manipulating America. That through lobbying, through political influence, through deep financial ties, Israel had captured American foreign policy and was steering the most powerful country on earth into a war that served Israeli interests. And there is truth in that. I have discussed those mechanics before. But here is what this deal reveals, and it is something that should make every small power in the world nervous. When the costs got high enough, all of that influence, all of that lobbying, all of those deep ties, none of it was enough. Because at the end of the day, Israel is the smaller power, and America is the larger power. And when the interests of the larger power and the smaller power diverged, when America wanted out and Israel wanted to keep going, the larger power did what larger powers always do. It served itself first.
So the lesson here, and I want to be very precise about this, is that a smaller power can influence a larger power right up until the moment the larger power's core interests are threatened. As long as the war was cheap for America, Israel could keep America in it. But the moment the war became a genuine threat to the American economy and the American president's political survival, the influence evaporated. The dog stopped letting the tail wag it. This is the structural reality of being a junior partner in an alliance with a superpower. You are useful. You are valued. You are protected right up until you become inconvenient. And then you discover that the bond was never unbreakable. It was always conditional. It was always a contract.
So that is step three. Now let's go to step four, which is to ask, why did America choose this particular exit, this particular deal? Because there were other ways out. And the way a power chooses to leave a war tells you everything about what it actually fears. And here is what I think America feared most. America feared escalation it could not control. Remember the structural problem of this war that I have laid out before. America could dominate from the air, but it could not win on the ground without a catastrophic invasion. America was burning through expensive interceptors trying to stop cheap drones. And every week the war continued, the risk grew that something would spiral, that a strike would hit the wrong target, that the Gulf States would be pulled deeper in, that the whole region would ignite in a way that no one could put back in the box.
So America did the rational thing. It took the off-ramp while the off-ramp still existed. And notice who built that off-ramp. Pakistan. Not the United Nations, which is paralyzed. Not the great Western institutions. Pakistan mediated this with the Gulf States and others in the room. And that detail, that the world's most powerful country needed a middle power to broker its exit from a war, that itself is a signal of the multipolar world. I keep telling you we are moving into an era when America could end its own wars on its own terms is passing. Now it needs mediators. Now it needs the help of regional powers. That is not the behavior of an unchallenged hegemon. That is the behavior of a great power that has learned the limits of its own strength.
So that is step four. America chose the exit that minimized the risk of uncontrollable escalation, and it needed help to do it. Now, I can already hear the counterargument, and it is a serious one. So let me address it directly. Someone is going to say, "But this is not abandonment. America did not betray Israel. The two are still allies. America will still arm Israel, still defend Israel, still stand with Israel. This is just a pause, a tactical ceasefire, and the alliance is as strong as ever."
And to that I say, you are partly right. America and Israel will remain allies. Nobody is tearing up the relationship. But here is what matters, and I want you to really hear this. An alliance is not measured by what partners say in good times. An alliance is measured by what the stronger partner does when its interests and the weaker partner's interests collide. And in this war, when those interests collided, when Israel wanted the war to continue until Iran's missiles and proxies were destroyed, and America wanted out because the war was crushing its economy, America chose itself. It signed a deal that leaves Israel's core threats intact. That is the revealed preference. That is what actually happened when the chips were down. And revealed preferences, what a player actually does under pressure, always tell you more than declared preferences, what a player says in public.
So the alliance survives, yes, but Israel just learned, in the most expensive way possible, that the alliance has a ceiling. That America will fight for Israel only up to the point where it starts to genuinely cost America. And beyond that point, Israel is on its own.
Now, I want to zoom out, because I want to put this in the context of something much bigger than this single deal. Because what we are watching here is a pattern that has repeated throughout the entire history of empires and their client states, the powerful protector and the smaller dependent. And the smaller dependent always, always makes the same mistake. It assumes the protection is unconditional. It assumes that because the protector has stood by it so far, the protector will stand by it forever. And then the day comes when the protector's own interests change, and the smaller power discovers, too late, that it had built its entire security on a promise that was only ever conditional.
Think about the allies of Athens during the Peloponnesian War, the smaller city-states that tied their fate to Athenian power and were abandoned or sacrificed the moment Athens calculated that they were no longer worth the cost. Think about the client kingdoms of Rome, propped up and protected for as long as they were useful and discarded when the strategic math changed. Think about how many times in the 20th century a great power encouraged a smaller ally to take a hard line, promised to stand behind it, and then, when the larger geopolitical picture shifted, left that ally exposed.
This is one of the oldest patterns in all of statecraft. The strong use the weak as instruments, and instruments are kept only as long as they are useful. And what makes it tragic every single time is that the smaller power usually cannot see it coming, because it has confused being valued with being protected unconditionally. Israel right now is learning the difference between those two things.
So let me bring this all together and give you the clear, simple framework you can carry with you. America did not abandon Israel because America is fickle or because of any single decision by any single leader. America abandoned Israel's war aims because the structure demanded it. The war became too expensive economically. The political will at home collapsed, signaled most clearly by the Senate's rebuke. The risk of uncontrollable escalation grew too high. And when all of that pressure converged, the larger power did what larger powers have always done. It served its own interest first, took the exit, and left the smaller power's unfinished objectives unfinished.
And the deal it signed, the Islamabad Memorandum, reflects exactly that. It ends the war America could no longer afford. It reopens the oil America needed flowing. And it quietly leaves Israel's deepest fears – the missiles, the proxies, the nuclear ambiguity – unresolved. So when you hear Iran calling this a declaration of America's defeat, understand what they are really saying. They are not just saying they survived the war. They are saying they broke the alliance's resolve. They forced the larger power to choose between its smaller ally and its own economy. And they correctly bet that America would choose itself. That is the real story of this deal. Not peace, not victory, but the moment the most powerful alliance in the modern world discovered its own limits, in public, for everyone to see. And every other small power that depends on American protection is watching this very carefully right now and asking itself a very uncomfortable question: If America did this to Israel, its closest partner in the region, what would it do to me?
Okay, so that is my analysis for today. And I want to be very clear about what this is and what it is not. This is not prophecy. I am not telling you the alliance is finished or that I know exactly what comes next. The negotiations could collapse. The war could reignite. New pressures could pull America back in. I could be wrong. And if I am, we will come back and analyze why. But I want you to think about this carefully. Question it, push back on it, test it against what you see happening in the world. Because the goal here is never to tell you what to think. The goal is to give you a framework so that you can think for yourself.