The much-discussed phone call between President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which the former told the latter that he was “f**king crazy,” indisputably made headlines. But the problem wasn’t the president’s colorful language or whether the conversation proved, as Israel’s enemies hoped, that the alliance between the two leaders and their countries had broken down. Nor was the repartee entirely confined to Trump’s demands about Israel ramping down its efforts to stop the Hezbollah terrorists from firing on Israel. Still, the fact that his always-shifting stands on whether the war with Iran will end soon or continue until the regime in Tehran falls or surrenders isn’t doing either man’s political standing much good.
Notwithstanding Trump’s profanity or the two leaders’ genuine disagreements on particular issues, the alliance is not collapsing. The real concern is the president’s pursuit of a deal with Iran that sensible observers know won’t succeed. Doing so won’t achieve either nation’s objectives in the war that started on Feb. 28.
Simply put, the Islamist regime is attempting to deceive the United States in the negotiations that have been conducted over the last two months. As JNS columnist Melanie Phillips aptly noted, should a deal be reached along the lines of the terms that have been publicized in recent weeks, it would be a disaster for both the United States and Israel. Any promises the Iranians make about not restarting their nuclear program or interfering with shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, along with other unresolved issues like terrorism and missile production, are almost certainly going to be broken.
Tempering disappointment
Even as the world watches with alarm the president’s apparent willingness to embrace terms that might well be compared to former President Barack Obama’s disastrous 2015 Iran nuclear deal, disappointment with Trump should be tempered by the following thought. As ill-considered and dangerous as such a course of action would be, friends of Israel should nevertheless remember one important fact. No matter how foolish a potential Trump decision to conclude hostilities with Iran might be, Israel is still far better off with him in the Oval Office than it would be with any of his recent predecessors, let alone his opponent in the 2024 presidential election.
To consider the counter-factual scenario in which either President Joe Biden or former Vice President Kamala Harris had defeated Trump in 2024 is to contemplate a very different and far more dangerous world than the one that Israel, the Jewish people and the larger Middle East are currently facing. A scenario in which Washington essentially snatches defeat from the jaws of victory by enabling the Islamist regime to survive and thrive by ending the war, and even relaxing sanctions, would be very bad indeed. Yet this is also a moment to think back on how much the decisions made in the White House and the close cooperation it pursued with Jerusalem have weakened Iran and its allies since January 2025.
Iran is still resisting the U.S.-Israel alliance and has inflicted economic pain on the world by seeking to restrict the free passage of shipping in the Persian Gulf. But its military has been largely stripped of its offensive capabilities. Its leadership has been decimated, and its nuclear facilities are in ruins.
Hezbollah continues to fire on Israel and make the lives of those living in the north miserable. But its forces have been similarly degraded, and it has been pushed back far from the border while there are—for the first time in decades—signs that the Lebanese government may be starting to think that surrendering control of their country to the Shi’ite terrorist group is not their only choice.
In the fighting that took place last year in the 12-day war in June 2025 and in the strikes on Iran since Feb. 28, the essential weakness of both Iran and its Hezbollah terror proxy has been exposed.
And none of that would have happened had a Harris administration continued to appease Iran as Biden did, as well as ramping up even more pressure on Israel to make concessions to Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The folly of Iran diplomacy
To acknowledge this is not to excuse Trump’s seeming willingness to seek a diplomatic solution to the conflict, which would inevitably strengthen the Islamist regime and its terrorist auxiliaries, and weaken the United States and its allies. The folly of such a choice will complicate the president’s legacy and create dilemmas that either he or his successors will be forced to deal with under far less advantageous circumstances than the current situation. That was also the case with Obama’s decision to choose appeasement a decade ago, when better options were still on the table.
Let’s specify that any commentary on the administration’s policies toward Iran or its Hezbollah proxies or what it wants the Israelis to do or not do at any given moment is handicapped by the fact that Trump can and may shift his course at the drop of a hat. And if there is anything that all of us should have learned about the president in the 11 years since he came down that escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015, it is that trying to predict his future conduct by analyzing his past and present statements is to embark on a fool’s errand.
That said, it’s still worth saying now that if he does choose to abandon the conflict by agreeing to almost any sort of a deal with Tehran, then he will have undone a great deal of what he has accomplished last summer and this year.
There is no mystery about why Trump is considering diplomacy with Iran.
The economic and political fallout from the rise in oil prices precipitated by the war itself and the shutdown of shipping in the Gulf have created enormous pressure on Trump to stop the war.
Political dilemmas
The political consequences of the war dragging on, despite the undoubted success of the American and Israeli militaries, have created an obvious political dilemma for a president who promised to avoid “forever” wars in the Middle East, like the failed U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The rise in gas prices has offset any other positive economic developments. And it has added to the likelihood that the Democrats would make the gains in the midterm elections this fall, above and beyond those that the party out of power usually achieves.
It should also be remembered that, contrary to the claims of his political foes, Trump resorted to force against Iran as a last rather than a first resort. Had the Iranians not sought to rebuild their nuclear program after it was smashed by Israeli and then American airstrikes last year, as well as stepping up missile production, the odds are that the president would not have contemplated a return to the use of military action against them. Trump considers himself a master negotiator and dealmaker, and will always be inclined to prefer what he might consider to be that sort of victory to one achieved on the battlefield.
And then there is the fact that the two figures in charge of the negotiations with Iran—special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, and presidential adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner—seem to be true believers in diplomacy for its own sake, much in the manner of those who represented the Obama administration in their ill-advised talks with Iran in the previous decade. Leaving aside the fact that both might be compromised because of their personal financial dealings with the Gulf states, including Qatar, they seem to have lost sight of the fact that America’s goal in this conflict ought to be to defeat the Iranian regime, not to reach a compromise with it.
Nor should the difficulty of toppling the despotic Islamist regime be dismissed by those who rightly speak about that being the only way to ensure that Tehran is not a threat to the region and to the West. That is something that can only be accomplished by the Iranians themselves, though both the United States and Israel can certainly aid those who risk their lives to do that.
Yet those who argue that the war is as unwinnable as Afghanistan and Iraq are clearly mistaken. The ayatollahs are not invincible. Nor is Hezbollah, as Israeli actions have proved. Those who have claimed this or, even more improbably, that Iran is actually winning the war, despite having its leadership and military infrastructure largely destroyed, in the United States and elsewhere, are largely doing so because they oppose Trump, Israel or both. Regarding Iran, the president has been pursuing a goal sought by his predecessors in the last quarter-century. The only difference is that he has acted while they either punted on the issue or were deluded into believing that appeasement was the way to deal with the problem.
It’s equally true that having invested so much political capital in this issue already, there’s no going back. Ending the war won’t undo the damage done to his party or his personal standing because of the war’s unpopularity. The only way to recoup some of his political losses is to persevere in the conflict.
An economic strategy based on the inevitability of Iranian economic collapse caused by the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports is still a sound one. Yet it remains to be seen whether Americans have the patience to pursue that course of action and if they will give Trump the time he needs to make it work.
In the event of Trump choosing to end the war now, comparisons with what might have been achieved had he not stopped the air strikes or waited for his economic strategy to work will be both fair and inevitable. If that happens, we should also compare where the United States and Israel would be now with where they might have been had Harris been president. It’s not just that the Iranian nuclear facilities destroyed last year would still be standing. All the losses inflicted on the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism would not have occurred. Iran would be immeasurably stronger, and so would Hezbollah.
The consequences of a President Harris
More than that, Iran might well be close to or would have achieved its nuclear ambitions by now if Harris had, as she almost certainly would have done, gone back not just to Biden’s weak policies but to an Obama-style active pursuit of a rapprochement with the Iranian terrorist regime.
A President Harris almost certainly also would have tried to force Israel to make far more concessions to the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza to free the remaining hostages when she took office. She would likely have pushed for a possible return to the status quo pre-Oct. 7, 2023, in which the Islamists ruled Gaza as an independent Palestinian state in all but name, with the ever-present threat of more Oct. 7 atrocities that would entail.
We should also think about what it would have meant not just for Israel but for American Jewry had there been a president in the White House during the last 17 months who sympathized, as Harris did, with those falsely accusing Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza.
Not only would the United States have used all of its leverage to stop Israel from dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat, but it would have also forced it to accept the status quo with Hezbollah in which northern Israel would have essentially been rendered uninhabitable.
More than that, the situation on American college campuses for Jewish students would be incomparably worse.
At the very least, Trump’s efforts to force elite universities and other schools to stop tolerating and encouraging pro-Hamas mobs, as well as to abandon the woke ideologies and DEI policies that granted a permission slip for Jew-hatred, made it harder for the antisemites to persist in these hateful practices. If there had been a president who largely approved of the cause embraced by those mobs, antisemitism in academia and elsewhere would have become an even greater crisis than it is now.
Asking “what if” about a Kamala Harris presidency and what that would have meant for Israel and American Jews doesn’t rationalize everything Trump has done or the mistakes he might be on the verge of making. But it does provide a reminder that, as bad an idea as a new Iran deal would be, the scenario in which the United States would have already been enriching and empowering Iran is far scarier.
No one, including perhaps Trump himself, knows what will follow next. There is still the chance that—due to Iranian intransigence, Trump’s knowledge that a bad deal is far worse than no deal at all, or because he never really intended to let the Islamists off the hook—the war will not end with a whimper of appeasement but will be pursued until victory. Or perhaps he will make a terrible deal and essentially reward Iran as Obama did, something that will worsen his political predicament rather than solving it.
The alliance with the United States is problematic at times, but it bears remembering that fighting for its survival without an ally would be exponentially more dangerous for the Jewish state. A U.S. administration run by a president and a party that is increasingly hostile to Zionism and Jews, as well as enamored of radical ideologies that invariably place it on the side of antisemites (something that may eventually happen under different scenarios), would be a nightmare.
No matter what happens next, the situation will not be as dire for Israel, American Jews or America itself as one in which Harris had won in 2024. That will be cold comfort for those throughout the Middle East and elsewhere, who will pay a price in blood for a diplomatic blunder with Iran. But it does place the current choices facing the administration and the world in context.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
