A broken clock has to be right at least once, right? According to Iran, their talks with the U.S. in Muscat on Friday concerned “only” the nuclear issue—despite the initial position that ballistic missiles, regional proxies and Iranian protesters would all be on the table.
Now, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to visit Washington on Wednesday to discuss the talks. After so many false readings, has the daylight between Israel and the United States finally materialized?
Well, let’s slow down.
So far, nothing combative has come out of Jerusalem. Then again, to date, Netanyahu has never publicly confronted President Donald Trump. The worst he has done was issue a midnight statement against Trump’s Board of Peace for allowing a Palestinian flag in the technocratic council logo, and sent Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar to “talk to the Americans.” The latter sounds innocuous, but it’s a snub—where the U.S. is concerned, Netanyahu is the foreign minister.
But past experience teaches us to be cautious. Every time there’s talk of a serious rift, it later turns out to be the opposite of what it appeared. The most prominent examples being Operation Rising Lion, the end of the war in Gaza, and several other episodes that were initially interpreted as confrontations and later revealed to be coordination.
I would suggest two alternative possibilities for the current perceived tension.
The first is that the Americans—like anyone with basic common sense—understand that asking Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to swallow four cups of poison may be too much, even for him. His predecessor, Ruhollah Khomeini, claimed to have drunk the “poison” of ending the Iran-Iraq War without total victory—and survived. But the chances that Khamenei can stomach the loss of the nuclear program, ballistic missiles, the dismantling of Hezbollah and Hamas, and ending the killing of demonstrators are low.
If that’s the case, an attack remains more likely than not. And when it happens, Netanyahu will say: Look, I helped bring this about by insisting on pushing the demands.
The second possibility is simpler.
Netanyahu was meant to attend a meeting of Trump’s Board of Peace in Washington next week. A photo of him sitting next to Qatar and Turkey in any context—especially when discussing their American-ordained future role in Gaza—is not one he wants circulating in an election year. Fake tension with the U.S. that precipitates an earlier visit may simply be Bibi’s way of taking a rain check.
The answer will have to wait for Wednesday, Netanyahu’s seventh Trump visit since the latter’s second inauguration.
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