Iran split screen: When US, Israeli interests reach a fork in the road

With the exception of a few years, for most of recent decades, US and Israeli interests regarding Iran’s nuclear program, as interpreted by their respective governments, have strongly converged. Both countries want to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon. Israel because it could be an immediate existential danger. The US because an Iranian nuclear weapon could make the ayatollahs (or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which may have replaced them) the new hegemon of the region and eventually become a direct threat to the US mainland, like North Korea, which started with short-range atomic bombs and gained longer-range ones within only a few years. One of the few exceptions was this summer, when US President Donald Trump’s administration cut a deal with Iran that was defined by both Israeli government and opposition officials as a “bad deal.” Iran made a fateful error They said it was bad because it reduced US military pressure on Iran, placed resolving the dispute over the Strait of Hormuz at the front of the sequencing of the deal, and pushed off resolving the nuclear issues to the end of the deal, conditionally on months of amorphous negotiations. The Iranian ballistic-missile threat, which has devastated US military bases and harmed around a dozen countries throughout the region, was not even mentioned in the deal. Had the deal gone forward as agreed upon, Israeli and American interests would have widely diverged on Iran. But the Iranians made a potentially fateful error: They decided to rub Trump’s face in the deal and go for an even more humiliating deal, presuming that his readiness to make the concessions he had already made meant that they could push him further. Trump has caved in stunning and rapid ways on a number of issues during his presidency, but he almost always does so quietly to avoid humiliation. The Iranians’ insistence on humiliating Trump led him to walk away both from the new deal they wanted and from the concessions he had made under the old deal. A new reality set in. Iran had bet that he would continue to cave to try to save the Republican Party from major losses in the November 3 midterm elections. They were right to a point, as this concern led him to cut the original “bad deal” (from Israel’s perspective). Trump's bet to outlast the Iranians To avoid humiliation, however, Trump shifted gears, choosing a third path. He would neither push to topple Iran’s regime with military force, nor cut a deal that would humiliate him; rather, he would try to beat it in a staring contest in which US military power would be used to harm Iran’s economy at a much worse rate than whatever harm the Islamic regime could inflict on America and its allies. It took months for this strategy to play out, as the US had not really prepared in advance for such a scenario. But sometime in August, Washington’s military power achieved a shift in which the harm to the West’s economy started to go down, while the harm to Iran’s economy escalated tremendously. This time, Trump made a bet that Iran would be worn down before the US midterm elections, so he could claim victory leading into those elections and gain back some of the nuclear concessions he had negotiated away earlier. In the constant miscalculations between the sides, however, Trump continued to project Western rationalism into how he expected Iran to act. They had lost $200 billion to $300 billion. During the war in early 2026. Now they were losing more day by day. They would for sure finally crack under the ongoing pressure, he thought. But the IRGC officers running Iran are a mix of religious fanatics who believe their regime is aided by messianic divine currents and are paranoid that the US will just try to topple them at some later date if they do not bring America to its knees. They could care less when their people suffered in June 2025 and in early 2026, so they still do not care in late 2026 – not if it means giving up on their sense of victory and opens them to the possibility of another US-Israeli massive attack. With five weeks to Election Day, there are no signs that Iran will change its tune anytime soon. Meanwhile, Trump and his administration have alternated between saying they will immediately cut a deal with Iran after the midterms and saying they will immediately re-escalate into a full war with Iran after the midterms. This means that the next fork in the road is set for five weeks from now. Will Trump stick to his guns, thinking of protecting Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the region from Iranian hegemony and everyone, including the US, from an eventual Iranian nuclear weapon? In that case, will there be a later point after the midterms when internal pressure on the IRGC forces it to return to nuclear concessions? Or will Republican pressure from losing the midterms (almost accepted now as self-evident) compel Trump back into a bad deal with Iran to shore up short-term American interests, which will go against Israeli interests and long-term US security interests? This monumental fork in the road is just over the horizon.