Sami Al-Arian, MEE, 5 June 2026 08:33 BST
As Washington and Tehran edge towards a ceasefire, the Israeli prime minister is determined to sink it, believing any settlement that leaves Iran standing amounts to defeat
A protester holds a placard depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a demonstration in Milan on 21 May 2026 (Piero Cruciatti/AFP)
Israeli prime minister and indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu does not adapt to imposed realities.
He tries to smash them through brute force, permanent escalation and manufactured crises. Throughout his career, war has been a favoured strategic instrument for preserving Israeli supremacy and his own political survival.
Most recently, his priority is to prevent US President Donald Trump from signing a near-complete memorandum of understanding with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Should diplomacy prevail, he will deploy every political, military, diplomatic, media and lobbying tool to sabotage it.
His obsession with what he calls “absolute victory” reflects a rigid doctrine that rejects compromise. No settlement is acceptable to him unless it disarms Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, dismantles Hezbollah in Lebanon, and ends in the neutralisation or destruction of the Iranian state itself.
His horizon extends well past temporary ceasefires to the end of all resistance and a region restructured around Israeli dominance under American protection.
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The wars across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran were never isolated confrontations. They are part of a single offensive to establish “Greater Israel” and consolidate Israeli regional hegemony.
Netanyahu knows these goals remain unfulfilled despite vast destruction. Rather than prompting a rethink, that failure has convinced him the problem is an insufficient application of force, not the objectives themselves.
For him, the war is far from over, and what force could not achieve yesterday becomes the target of wider escalation tomorrow.
Having already drawn Trump into earlier confrontations with Iran, Netanyahu appears convinced he can pull the lever again – this time aiming past a limited strike for a decisive, total war that permanently shifts the regional balance of power.
A divided home front
Trump faces a more complicated reality. He may believe earlier confrontations weakened Iran and the axis of resistance, but the political landscape is shifting fast at home and abroad.
Domestically, a growing share of the public openly questions the wisdom of these wars. Recent polling shows support for prolonged Middle Eastern entanglements falling steeply, alongside deep scepticism of “forever wars” seen as serving foreign agendas rather than American interests.
This anti-interventionist sentiment has crossed party lines and is fracturing Trump’s own coalition. Influential voices around the Maga movement, including political commentators Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly and Joe Rogan, have questioned policies that subordinate American blood and treasure to Netanyahu’s agenda.
More Americans are asking why the US should bear the economic, military and political costs of another regional war for a foreign power, with vague aims and doubtful benefits
The campaign to unseat Congressman Thomas Massie and other non-interventionist conservatives who question pro-Israel policies reflects these tensions.
More Americans are asking why the US should bear the economic, military and political costs of another regional war for a foreign power, with vague aims and doubtful benefits.
These questions sharpen amid mounting economic strain. Energy markets remain vulnerable, and inflationary pressures are rising again.
Petrol prices have become a political landmine: reports in early May put the national average near $4.50 a gallon, up sharply from the sub-$3 level before the war. Driven by energy costs and supply chain disruptions, inflation has accelerated, weakening consumer confidence and turning the economic mood toxic for the White House.
Trump knows foreign adventures cannot be detached from domestic realities, and with the midterms approaching, blunders carry immediate consequences. Both the House and the Senate are within reach of Democratic majorities.
If he loses Congress, the rest of his presidency will be paralysed, and the threat of impeachment will return to the centre of Washington politics.
What Hormuz exposed
Internationally, the pressures are even more severe. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz transformed the strategic landscape.
Before the attacks intensified after 28 February, Hormuz was the vital maritime artery of global energy, carrying about a fifth of the world’s oil flows and liquefied natural gas trade, with Qatar‘s LNG exports acutely exposed. Its disruption laid bare the vulnerability of the Arab Gulf states and the wider global economy.
As shipping routes faced chaos, insurance premiums surged, energy markets reacted sharply and supply chains buckled. More than that, it shattered decades of assumptions about American power.
Iran has won the war. Trump and Netanyahu now face a reckoning
For generations, Washington had sold itself as the indispensable guarantor of Gulf security and freedom of navigation. Yet the crisis exposed the limits of military superiority in the face of unforgiving geography, asymmetry and political complexity. America could strike, bomb and threaten, but it could not force Hormuz open without triggering a global economic shockwave.
The military record is more revealing still. During the 39-day war, Iranian and allied strikes damaged at least 16 US military bases across eight countries, leaving several nearly unusable.
A Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery found Iranian strikes damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures and pieces of equipment at US bases across the region: hangars, fuel depots, aircraft, radar networks, communications gear and air-defence assets.
This marks a foundational shift. For decades, the US used its network of Gulf bases as instruments of deterrence and intimidation, platforms to punish adversaries and shield allies. The war showed these bases are now exposed targets, calling into question the architecture of American regional dominance.
Strain on US missile defences compounded the crisis. Reports after the 39-day war indicated serious depletion of interceptor stocks, including Patriot, Thaad, Tomahawk and other missiles.
The Pentagon has warned that rebuilding these inventories could take years, with some not likely to be replenished until the decade’s end. That is a dangerous vulnerability for a country that must also plan for confrontations with Russia and China. A war meant to project dominance instead exposed industrial and technological limits.
A strategic deadlock
Washington and Tel Aviv entered with maximalist goals: force Iranian capitulation, dismantle its nuclear infrastructure, end enrichment, seize its enriched uranium, destroy the axis of resistance, and topple or fragment the Iranian state.
None of these goals has been met. Iran did not surrender, its government did not collapse and its regional alliances, though under heavy pressure, were not eliminated. Iran and its allies absorbed painful blows, but damage is not defeat: a state can suffer heavy losses without surrendering its core objectives.
Robert Kagan, an establishment strategist, recently acknowledged this gap between American ambitions and what military force can actually achieve. His warning carries weight because it comes from the heart of the interventionist establishment.
The dilemma is the inability to translate military superiority into a durable political order, however powerful its forces remain.
It recalls the Suez crisis of 1956, when Britain and France discovered that military victory could not stop the collapse of their imperial power. The same limit now confronts the US.
American threats and Trump’s ultimatums failed to produce Iranian submission because they lacked credibility. A threat works only when the adversary believes defiance will cost more than compliance.
For its part, Tehran had no reason to think concessions would buy safety.
It had watched Washington abandon the nuclear agreement in 2018, expand sanctions during talks and carry out assassinations and sabotage alongside the Zionist regime, even as talks continued.
Iran, therefore, chose to expand the battlefield, raise the cost of escalation, threaten global energy flows and deny the US and Israel a clean victory. Its alternative to capitulation was resistance under pain, and that transformed the bargaining structure.
Washington and Tel Aviv wanted a one-sided outcome in which Iran surrenders its nuclear assets, missiles and regional influence for temporary, easily reversible sanctions relief. Tehran knew that reversible relief is not security and refused to give up its deterrence, thereby forcing a deadlock.
Neither side could impose its outcome without paying a price it was unwilling to bear. The US could escalate, but only by threatening the global economy, draining its stockpiles, exposing its bases and widening domestic opposition.
Iran could endure and retaliate, but could not defeat a superpower conventionally. Each constrained the other in an unstable equilibrium.
Within that equilibrium, asymmetry favours the defender. The US needs a visible, triumphant success to justify the war to its public; Iran needs only to avoid defeat, keep its sovereignty and deny the enemy its political aims. For a state facing overwhelming force, survival with its agency intact is itself a victory.
Indeed, Netanyahu understands this threat to his expansionist project – and he fears it. A negotiated ceasefire would confirm a result Israel cannot accept, in which the war would end not in its triumph but in Iran’s endurance.
An imperfect opening
The present negotiations, reportedly mediated by Pakistan and backed by several Arab and Islamic states, have produced a near-final framework.
At its core is the expansion of the current truce into a multi-front suspension of hostilities for at least 60 days, Lebanon included. Driven by economic pressure, energy instability and fear of a wider war disrupting events like the coming World Cup in North America, Washington needs calm. This retreat, therefore, is not a product of victory but of necessity.
Alongside the truce, a package of measures aims to stabilise the region in the interim, including securing navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, easing restrictions on Iranian shipping, granting partial access to frozen Iranian assets, and initiating talks on broader normalisation. Reports on financial compensation vary, with early figures ranging from $12bn to $24bn, though details remain fluid.
The framework signals that the US will concede several Iranian demands for regional stabilisation and the reopening of Hormuz
The nuclear issue has been deferred. Rather than immediate dismantlement, the framework relies on an Iranian commitment not to pursue weapons while talks continue on enrichment levels and verification.
The framework signals that the US will concede several Iranian demands for regional stabilisation and the reopening of Hormuz.
For Netanyahu, this is intolerable, as it gives Iran economic breathing room while leaving its missiles and alliances intact, giving Tehran greater leverage in future talks.
This explains the intensity of his pressure on Trump, and why recent exchanges between the two have been described as tense and uncharacteristically heated. He has opposed the diplomatic drift, pressing instead for renewed escalation across Gaza and Lebanon.
The latest developments around Lebanon reinforce the point.
Trump has personally intervened to restrain Netanyahu from launching a wider invasion of Lebanon, while speaking of an impending ceasefire there – moves that reveal growing tensions beneath the show of strategic unity.
The restraint followed Iran’s suspension of negotiations and warnings that further escalation in Lebanon could ignite northern Israel and widen the confrontation beyond Washington’s control.
Faced with collapsing talks and a prolonged closure of Hormuz, Trump moved to contain Netanyahu and head off a regional war that could drag in the US. The episode offers an early glimpse of the competing calculations now shaping American and Israeli policy.
Israel’s own military record reveals the bind: despite vast destruction, it has failed to secure decisive political outcomes. Gaza lies devastated – more than 76,000 Palestinians killed and over 180,000 wounded – yet the violence has not produced political closure.
In southern Lebanon, Hezbollah has reasserted itself militarily and politically despite heavy blows, contesting Israeli border moves and inflicting casualties over the past two months. No amount of destruction has delivered the absolute victory the Zionist regime craves.
The deeper illusion
Netanyahu is left with limited, dangerous options. If he cannot block diplomacy outright, he will try to sabotage its implementation. Lebanon remains the active arena, where targeted escalation, assassinations or efforts to spark internal instability could derail diplomatic momentum.
Palestine offers another lever.
Netanyahu may calculate that fresh massacres in Gaza, an intensified siege or provocations around holy sites in the occupied West Bank could fracture the ceasefire, placing Trump under renewed pressure to realign with Israeli demands.
Suez was the death knell for the British empire. Hormuz may do the same for the US
Sami Al-Arian
Yet Trump’s continued rhetoric about normalisation under the Abraham Accords reveals a persistent disconnect from reality.
No meaningful path to broad Arab normalisation exists while the Palestinian question remains open.
The Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 conditioned normalisation on Palestinian statehood, and after Gaza, the gap between rhetoric and reality has only widened.
The region stands at a perilous crossroads. One path offers an imperfect diplomatic opening, the product of mutual exhaustion and shifting leverage; the other leads to a wider confrontation neither Washington nor Tel Aviv can control.
To assume Netanyahu will quietly accept a deal that contradicts his core convictions is a dangerous illusion. But the deeper illusion is the belief that brute force can indefinitely preserve a regional order whose political, moral and strategic foundations are crumbling.
Trapped between ideological obsession and strategic failure, Netanyahu may yet make one last fatal gamble and continue widening the war until the whole structure collapses with him.
(Photo credit: Eliza Gkritsi)
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