Israel Isn’t the Problem, Mr. President

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, June 09, 2026

 

The press, both in America and abroad, would like nothing more than to blame Israel for the Trump administration’s failure to negotiate a durable political settlement to the war with the Islamic Republic of Iran. For some inexplicable reason, the Trump administration is ill-advisedly contributing to their cause.

 

In impromptu remarks to reporters on the tarmac yesterday, Donald Trump admonished Netanyahu concerning Israel’s continued prosecution of its conflict with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. “It has to stop,” the president said. “We want to get it finished.” That was probably a more diplomatic version of the irritation Trump admitted to expressing with his Israeli counterpart over Netanyahu’s commitment to degrading Hezbollah’s capacity to strike Israeli territory.

 

Trump’s remarks dovetail with those of his vice president. “We have a lot of shared interests, but we also have some situations where our interests diverge,” JD Vance said of Israel in a Monday night interview with Fox News host Jesse Watters. He insisted that the United States is still, ever and always, this close to a “long-term settlement” with Iran. “Now, Israel may like that; they may not like that,” Vance added. “But fundamentally, we think this is in the best interest of the United States of America.”

 

Trump and Vance are falling into a familiar trap — one predicated on popular misconceptions that are nevertheless cherished by an audience that is eager for any criticism of Israeli foreign policy.

 

The first problem with Trump’s outlook is his apparent receptivity to the notion that Israeli aggression in Southern Lebanon is all that stands between him and the peace he seeks. It’s not.

 

Trump may have forgotten that Hezbollah joined the war (at Iran’s behest) that the president started in February. The ongoing combat in Lebanon is an extension of both that war and the October 7 massacre (which Hezbollah supported).

 

In years past, Iran maintained a posture of plausible deniability toward its terrorist proxies such as Hezbollah. The West would exhort the Islamic Republic to rein in its terror network, and Tehran would insist it could not control or even deter that terrorist group from executing its attack.

 

Iran abandoned that posture under the extreme duress of Operation Epic Fury. It now positions itself as a vocal champion for its devastated network of Islamist proxies. That is leverage over Iran that Trump could exploit, if he were so inclined. But he’s not.

 

Vance’s outlook is even more discouraging. Not only is the vice president seeking precisely the sort of “daylight” between the U.S. and Israeli positions over which Barack Obama obsessed, but he has demonstrated a thumbless grasp of Obama’s nuclear deal and the criticisms of it.

 

In Vance’s conversation with Watters, the vice president sought to highlight the contrast between Trump’s approach to negotiations with Iran and Obama’s. “The number one thing that went wrong with the Obama deal, Jesse, is there was not a proper inspections regime to ensure that the Iranians could never build a nuclear weapon,” he said. “And that’s one of the big differences between what happened then and what the President of the United States would get to, assuming we’re ultimately able to make a deal.”

 

Vance is right that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’s (JCPOA) lax verification regime — a dispensation that the Iranians routinely exploited when Obama’s deal was a live proposition — was one of the biggest objections to Obama’s nuclear deal. But there were plenty of other problems with the JCPOA.

 

Its critics attacked it for flooding the regime’s coffers with cash — funds that the Islamic Republic used to prop up the Islamist terrorists in Iran’s orbit who are soaked with American blood.

 

The Obama-era deal sidestepped ballistic missiles entirely. Secretary of State Marco Rubio identified Iran’s missile capabilities as this war’s foremost casus bellum. After all, he observed, the “shield” of conventional ballistic missiles that Iran was developing would have raised the cost of military action against Iranian nuclear sites past the point that the West could painlessly absorb.

 

But perhaps the biggest issue with the JCPOA was the fact that it tacitly sanctioned an Iranian nuclear breakout. The Iran deal compelled the Islamic Republic only to mothball the cascading centrifuges it used to enrich uranium, not dismantle them. It asked Iran only to redesignate its nuclear research facilities as civilian rather than military infrastructure. Even if Trump had not withdrawn from the JCPOA, it would have sunset in 2025 — leaving all that infrastructure in place while allowing, under the terms of the deal, the development of advanced uranium enrichment capabilities.

 

Essentially, the Obama deal greenlit an Iranian fissionable device so long as the Iranians debuted it outside the agreement’s ten-year window.

 

At the foundational level, the problem the Trump administration is encountering is the same problem that Obama and Joe Biden encountered: The Islamic Republic wants a nuclear bomb, and the regime is prepared to sacrifice almost everything in that pursuit.

 

The Israelis have every reason to object to a bad deal. Indeed, the Trump administration should be grateful to a nation that Trump once called a “model ally” for attempting to save this White House from its own seemingly capitulatory instincts.

 

These days, precisely no one seems to need any inducement to think and speak the worst of Israel. But the Trump administration should not contribute to the paranoia overtaking the globe. Israel isn’t the president’s problem here. Iran is.