How and when this war will end is uncertain
Did President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu collude to deceive Iran by creating the impression that the US opposed the IDF taking military action while negotiations over a nuclear deal were still underway? Or did Netanyahu act alone, fearing that Trump would strike a deal with Iran that would garner international support, making it impossible for Israel to attack Iran without becoming a pariah state? There is a lot of spin in both directions. The truth may lie somewhere in between, but it’s irrelevant now.
The mixed messaging serves both American and Israeli purposes. Israel has an interest in demonstrating that Trump and Netanyahu are in sync. Trump is playing a more difficult hand. He boasts of Israel’s military prowess, pleasing his pro-Israel constituency, while his insistence that America is not involved in Israeli strikes and his call to Iran to resume negotiations reassure his domestic right-wing base that he is adhering to his policy of keeping the US out of foreign entanglements.
Regardless, Israel has made significant progress in restoring its deterrent posture with a diversified and well-planned preemptive strike against Iran, which doomsayers claimed Israel could never achieve alone, while also absolving Trump of any blame. Assuming that Iran lacks the desire or capability to restart talks, Trump is no longer at risk of damaging his reputation as a dealmaker by either entering into an agreement that Iran would never honor or being forced to admit that the negotiations had failed.
On the subject of negotiations, perhaps the Trump administration and the Western world can learn a lesson from their frustrating experiences in dealmaking with Hamas and the Iranian ayatollahs. Credit for the following concepts is due to Yoram Ettinger, a former congressional affairs liaison to Israel’s embassy in Washington. He has amassed extensive knowledge of Arab culture and negotiating tactics. In the June 9 edition of his weekly Ettinger Report, he contends that US negotiators are taking a “self-destructive step” in basing negotiations with terror regimes on the Western concept of reconciliation, ignoring the concepts that Iranians employ in such talks.
Create a free account to keep reading.
