Sometime this spring, at the height of Washington’s most delicate Middle East negotiations in a generation, American officials did something for which the US-Israel relationship offers scarcely any precedent: they quietly asked other governments to warn Iran of a possible Israeli plot to assassinate Tehran’s two chief negotiators.

That is the substance of a New York Times report published earlier this month; two US officials have confirmed the warnings to CNN, while Israel has dismissed the report as a fabrication. Washington feared Israel was plotting to kill Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the men leading Iran’s side of the talks. Unable to order its ally to stand down, Washington warned its adversary about its friend. Whether or not a plot existed, the decisive fact is the conduct: Washington judged the danger real enough to act on, and acted.

In this phase, Washington’s most difficult task is not simply keeping Iran at the table; it is preventing its closest ally from removing the table altogether. The hardest party to manage is not the one Washington spent two decades treating as an implacable enemy. It is the one it arms.

A pattern, not a hypothetical

According to the Times, Israeli strikes earlier in the war killed Ali Larijani, then secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, and Kamal Kharazi, a former foreign minister and foreign policy adviser to the supreme leader—both pragmatic figures involved in the talks and people Washington had hoped to negotiate with. The channel today runs through Araghchi and Ghalibaf partly because the men who might otherwise have led it are dead.

Ghalibaf himself has reportedly survived two Israeli assassination attempts, one in the 12-day war of June 2025 and one this year, when Israel struck a bunker where senior officials were meeting.

The spoiler playbook fails when the spoiler is a friend

Conflict-resolution scholarship calls actors who see a peace process as a threat and act to destroy it “spoilers”. Political scientist Stephen Stedman’s foundational work observed that spoilers outside a process are the more dangerous kind, bearing no cost when talks collapse and gaining what they want when they do. The literature is also precise about timing: spoilers strike when........

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