Benjamin Netanyahu has flown to Washington this week to discuss Iran with a president whose calculus on Iran no longer runs through Jerusalem. That is the plain reading of the last ten days. Donald Trump halted the bombing campaign not because Israeli threat assessments changed, but because the Pentagon’s target list in the Strait of Hormuz was exhausted and its stock of interceptors was running low. Mediators from Qatar, Pakistan, Egypt, and Oman moved into the resulting space, and by the time Netanyahu boarded his plane from Nevatim rather than Ben Gurion, a Hormuz transit proposal already had Iranian and Omani sign-off and awaited only Trump’s word. Netanyahu’s stated goal for the trip, to secure Israel’s future, described an outcome. It said nothing about who now holds the pen.

This is worth naming directly, because it inverts the assumption built into most commentary on the US-Israel relationship: that the senior partner’s Iran policy tracks the junior partner’s threat perception, with disagreements settled by persuasion in Washington. Neoclassical realism offers a more useful lens here than either the crude power-politics account........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)