What's next for Trump and Netanyahu in war with Iran

U.S. Chairwoman Donald Trump's attempts to regain a path come out of the state of war with Iran have suddenly become a lot more complicated.

The Israel versus Iran part of the conflict dramatically ramped up in intensity over a matter of hours on Sunday, exactly two months to the day since Trump announced a ceasefire.

The Israeli missile strikes came despite Trump saying publicly that he would urge Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to retaliate.

As badly as Trump wants an agreement that ends the war with Iran, the rapid escalation suggests he'll be hard-pressed to reach the kind of long-term deal he wants with Iran until — and unless — he puts a lid on the related yet distinct conflict between Israel and Tehran/Hezbollah.

Iranian military pauses strikes on Israel

Both Israel and the U.S. Clearly want to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon, but beyond that, the priorities of the two allies start to diverge, in part because of their leaders' differing domestic political concerns.

Trump currently cares far more about getting the Strait of Hormuz reopened to oil tanker traffic than Netanyahu does. A major goal for Netanyahu is to protect Israeli security by crippling Hezbollah's operations in Lebanon, something that Trump shows little interest in pursuing.

Hovering over all this is Iran's position: that any deal it makes with the U.S. To end the war and curtail its nuclear program must include Israel stopping its military action against Hezbollah in south Lebanon.

Washington's attempts to make a Lebanese ceasefire stick have had little success, with Hezbollah rejecting it and Israel refusing to withdraw its troops.

Natan Sachs, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a think-tank in Washington, D.C., says Iran appears to have calculated that Trump's strong motivation to get an agreement to end the war meant it could strike Israel on the weekend without facing retaliation from the U.S.

"That means that [the Iranians] are willing to push the envelope. They do not think they'll return to full-scale war with the United States if they do this," Sachs said.

Sachs says Netanyahu and his government are very concerned about the prospect of Trump striking a deal with Iran that is too soft on Israel's key priorities, including dismantling Iran's support for Hezbollah.

"There is real potential here for a split [between Trump and Netanyahu] because the interests are fundamentally different," he said.

While the Israelis "are very much afraid that Trump will flip on Netanyahu," Sachs said the two countries remain allies, and the differences between the two leaders have not yet developed into a major rift.

That's despite reports of Trump cursing at Netanyahu during a testy phone call last week about Israel's strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon.

What Iran is doing "serves several purposes," according to Michael Young, an author and editor of books on Lebanon and a member of the Carnegie Middle East Centre, a think-tank in Beirut. He says Iran is trying to create strains in the U.S.-Israel relationship.

"Trump wants a deal, while the Israelis are trying to torpedo any breakthrough in negotiations between Washington and Tehran," Young wrote Monday in a social media post.

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There is a gap between what the U.S. And Israel want next from their war with Iran, says Thomas Juneau, a former Middle East analyst with Canada's Department of National Defence and now professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa.

In essence, Trump wants to wrap it up while Netanyahu believes the job isn't done, Juneau says.

But Juneau cautions against reading too much into the apparent differences between the two leaders.

"As real as that divergence is, it's important not to exaggerate it. They do remain very closely aligned, mostly," he said.

Juneau foresees the Middle East conflict continuing the way it's been for weeks, with a fragile ceasefire that keeps getting broken every now and again.

"It's a no-war, no-peace, no-man's land," he said.

Trump reportedly spoke to Netanyahu twice between Sunday afternoon and Monday morning.

"Israel and Iran must immediately stop 'shooting,'" the U.S. President posted on social media shortly after 5:30 a.m. ET Monday, when the missiles were still flying.

By later in the day, Israel and Iran had in fact called off their strikes.

Still, the bigger challenge for Trump remains getting the deal with Iran that has eluded him since April, despite saying on multiple occasions that it was very close.

On Monday, he once again predicted an agreement is coming soon.

"Final negotiations on 'Peace' are proceeding, subject to ignorance or stupidity getting in its way," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "Things should move quickly."

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