Wars are fought to achieve objectives. Peace agreements are where those objectives are supposed to be secured. Which raises a question Americans and Israelis have every right to ask: What, exactly, was this war for?
For more than three months, President Donald Trump promised nothing less than transformation. Iran’s nuclear ambitions would be dismantled. Its missile capabilities would be broken. Its terror proxies would be crippled. Trump spoke repeatedly of devastation, unconditional surrender and consequences unlike anything Iran had ever seen. Americans were told the sacrifices would be worth it.
The sacrifices were real. Thirteen Americans are dead. Thousands of Iranians have perished. Tens of billions of dollars have been spent. Israel absorbed missile attacks. America committed its prestige and power to the proposition that this time would be different.
And now?
The regime remains. The Revolutionary Guards remain. Hezbollah remains. Iran’s missile program remains. The fate of enriched uranium remains unresolved. Yet sanctions relief, oil revenues and access to frozen assets are on the table while the very issues that supposedly justified war are deferred to future negotiations.
This is not peace through strength. It is the extraordinary spectacle of a victorious coalition negotiating as though it had lost.
Iran cannot honestly claim victory. The damage it suffered was immense. But Tehran does not have to win. It merely has to survive. And in the Middle East, survival itself can be proclaimed as triumph.
For Israel, however, the deepest wound is not disappointment. It is betrayal.
Israel was not a bystander. Israeli intelligence identified targets. Israeli pilots flew missions. Israeli civilians were the target of recurring missile attacks. Yet when the time came to shape the peace, Israel found itself excluded from key discussions and denied access to draft agreements. Worse still, President Trump publicly criticized Israel for defending itself against Hezbollah attacks because they interfered with his rush to secure a deal and move on.
The message was unmistakable. Israel was indispensable in war but expendable in peace.
That betrayal of Israel is also a betrayal of America. The battlefield produced enormous leverage. The problem was not military weakness but a lack of strategic discipline. Trump wanted a way out of the mounting pressure of continued war more than he wanted victory. His boasts about unconditional surrender and promises of transformation turned out to be easier to utter than to achieve.
Ironically, the emerging framework threatens to make Barack Obama’s much-maligned 2015 nuclear deal look disciplined by comparison. Whatever its flaws, the JCPOA sought to translate pressure into enforceable commitments. Trump’s framework appears to do the opposite, offering relief today while promising that the hardest questions will somehow be answered tomorrow. That is not strategy. It is a promise to negotiate later — a substitute for strategy rather than the product of one.
History may conclude that America and Israel won on the battlefield and squandered the victory at the negotiating table — not because Iran proved stronger, but because the stronger side became more eager for an exit than for a victory worthy of the sacrifices already made.
And history will remember who traded victory for an exit.
