Israel Is Remaking the Middle East — but Will Trump Help?

By Noah Rothman

Monday, June 16, 2025

 

It was only about one month ago that Donald Trump wondered at the Arab world’s glittering skylines and declared that this modern marvel could not be achieved through the application of Western military power — conveniently ignoring the Western military power that helped to create the conditions in which the Arab world could flourish. Today, the Trump administration spectates as Israel is busily remaking the region in ways that certainly advance American interests and may beget a better world altogether.

 

Israel’s military successes since the outset of hostilities with Iran last Thursday are staggering. In the early hours of the campaign, Iran’s air defenses — many of which were not repaired after the Israeli Air Force decimated them following an October 2024 missile barrage targeting Israel — were systematically dismantled both from the air and by special forces on the ground. Iran’s military and intelligence establishment was decapitated. Its cadre of prominent nuclear scientists was neutralized. Its nuclear facilities were struck and struck again, some of which were disabled in the process.

 

In the days since this initial burst of activity, Israel has continued to advance its objectives. The IAF now claims air superiority over the whole of western Iran, from the Iraqi border to the capital, Tehran. Israeli fighters and bombers operate with impunity over Iranian skies. Many more Iranian nuclear facilities have been disabled.

 

Israel has widened the aperture, too. It has begun tentatively striking the regime’s pillars of stability — its energy-production facilities and the symbols of the regime’s terror apparatus, including the ministry of justice, the intelligence ministry (killing Iran’s chief of intelligence) and the hated Basij paramilitary police. Iran’s ballistic missile reserves are being steadily depleted, as are its missile launchers. The barrages Israel has endured, lethal though they may be, have grown steadily smaller in scope as Israeli forces take out Iranian rockets in real time.

 

The Israelis have not yet targeted Iran’s political and religious leadership — perhaps, as some reports indicate, at America’s behest. But the symbols of the regime are collapsing one by one. Tehran residents didn’t need Benjamin Netanyahu to tell them to get out of Dodge, but he has confirmed the wisdom of those who fled. “To the citizens of Tehran, we say: ‘Evacuate,’” Netanyahu warned Monday. “We are taking action.” The Israel Defense Forces evacuation order covers districts that are home to several government compounds frequented by top regime officials, including political leaders.

 

The role that the United States will play in this campaign in the coming days remains the biggest question mark of the endeavor. For all of Israel’s initial successes, the consensus belief that Israeli forces “don’t have enough 5,000-pounders” to disable the uranium enrichment facility at Fordow persists. If it remains intact, Iran will emerge from this war with the capacity to produce enough fissile material to make several nuclear devices per year. Israel’s war will have been a strategic failure if Iran retains that capability.

 

That frustrating reality renders the flotilla of U.S. Air Force refueling tankers that took off from American bases last night rather conspicuous. As TWZ’s Tyler Rogoway observed, “These are precisely the assets that would be needed if the United States were going to change its support of Israel’s Operation Rising Lion, or if there were urgent concerns that the conflict is about to widen significantly.” In addition, the USS Nimitz sped from the South China Sea en route to the Middle East, where it will join the USS Vinson and be supported by the dozens of U.S. air assets at Diego Garcia.

 

The bloody nose Iran has already endured combined with the promise of an even more brutal pummeling to come have apparently convinced the mullahs to sue for peace. “Iran has been urgently signaling that it seeks an end to hostilities and resumption of talks over its nuclear programs, sending messages to Israel and the U.S. via Arab intermediaries,” the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. Iran’s allies, like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, don’t seem inclined to rescue Iran from its peril — even though he reportedly acknowledged that the Iranian regime’s very survival is in the balance. But Donald Trump may be amenable to a negotiated (and temporary) conclusion to this conflict. “I think it’s time for a deal,” he told reporters on Sunday. Then again, the president added nonchalantly, “We’ll see what happens. Sometimes they have to fight it out.”

 

In the absence of U.S. active support for Israel’s objectives, Iran will likely reserve the right to reengage in the effort to build a nuclear weapon. Even if Iran was willing to offer new concessions in nuclear negotiations (which are not yet on offer), the Islamic Republic has demonstrated that it does not negotiate in good faith. It will race toward a bomb. Even if the U.S. were to join the campaign and crush the remainder of Iran’s nuclear research and enrichment installations, the threat from Iran would persist. The regime was the world’s foremost exporter of terrorism before this war, and it will still thirst for American and Israeli blood after it.

 

The American side of this equation may lose its taste for Israel’s campaign if the regime begins to teeter. But Washington’s reliable fear of the unknown should not blind it to the prospect of better outcomes. The strategic objective of this campaign is to defang Iran — eliminating the threat posed by it and its terrorist proxies. Neither Israel nor its Western partners have any appetite for a major ground operation inside Iran to topple the regime. Only the Iranian people can be the authors of their liberation. But neither should the United States succumb to apprehension over the wondrous prospect of a Middle East without the theocracy in Tehran.

 

A fear of the unknown should not blind the Trump administration to a region defined not by conflict but commerce and cooperation — a region in which Israel has won for itself the right to exist in concert with its neighbors, all of which would have a stake in preserving the status quo Israel hammered out over its long campaign against Iran’s Shiite militias.

 

That day may be years in the future, but it’s no longer so difficult to envision. Nothing would facilitate the Trump administration’s desire to shift its focus from the Middle East to other hot spots around the world more than the dramatic alteration of the regional threat environment. Today, Israel is remaking the regional landscape on its own terms. But it has struggled in the past to transform its spectacular military successes into lasting political victories. It will need America’s support and engagement to realize a vision in which the Iranian menace is a thing of the past.

 

The Trump administration should think big. The Israelis certainly are.