A weekend of significant developments in the Iran conflict, including new American strikes on radar and drone sites following the downing of a US drone and attacks on American soldiers at a base in Kuwait that wounded five, was followed by reports of a profanity-laced call from President Trump to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a second Lebanon ceasefire brokered after Trump pressured Israel to halt planned strikes on Beirut. Into this volatile picture stepped CNN reporting that Trump told Netanyahu he was effing crazy, that he would be in prison if not for Trump, and that everybody hates Israel because of the war.
Menahem Merhavy, senior fellow at the Harry Truman Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess the diplomatic and strategic landscape.
On the reported Trump-Netanyahu call, Merhavy said he understood the frustration. He said Trump is under real economic pressure because of gas prices and the broader costs of the conflict, and that there was likely an elevation of expectations before the campaign began about how quickly Iran would bend. He said aerial bombardment and economic pressure have degraded Iran significantly, but the expectation that the regime would collapse or capitulate on a timeline Americans found acceptable was probably always unrealistic, and that gap between expectation and reality is where the frustration originates. He also acknowledged a genuine divergence of national security interests, with Israel viewing Hezbollah as an imminent threat to its territory and citizens in a way that simply does not map onto American strategic calculations the same way.
Merhavy wrote a piece for the Jerusalem Post explaining why Iran’s regime did not collapse, and he developed the argument on air. He said the appropriate historical comparison is the Soviet Union in the mid to late 1970s, when the system was clearly broken, clearly losing the ideological and economic competition, and clearly unsustainable in the long run, but nonetheless remained in power for another fifteen years. Iran is in a structurally similar position. The Islamic Republic does not have a promising future. But between broken and gone is a very large gap, and it could persist far longer than outside observers anticipate. He said the IRGC and the circles around it are fighting for their own lives and their own privileges, that they have extensive experience suppressing internal dissent, that they still have resources to maintain the loyalty of the people who matter to the regime’s survival, and that expecting collapse on a timeline set by external actors was always unrealistic.
On the broader pattern of American military engagement in the Middle East, Proft cited historian Niall Ferguson’s observation that Trump has done the most conventional thing of his life by going to war in the Middle East, following the classic American pattern of finding it easy to get in and harder to get out, relying on air power and sanctions to avoid ground forces, and treating talking and fighting as alternatives rather than complements. Merhavy said Trump has actually partially disrupted this pattern because the United States is doing both simultaneously, continuing to strike Iranian targets while also maintaining diplomatic tracks. But he said the fundamental problem remains the same as it has been throughout: the United States has not been willing to use the force required to physically open the Strait of Hormuz, and as long as that remains the case, Iran retains the one card that gives it leverage over the entire world and makes negotiations a recurring frustration rather than a path to resolution.
He said Iran has been sitting on the strait card for a long time and did not dare use it until now, which itself demonstrates how desperate the regime has become. But having played it, they are extracting real concessions from a world that needs the strait open. He also flagged a card Iran has not yet fully played, which is more deeply striking its neighbors, the UAE, Bahrain, and others, targeting desalination infrastructure and other critical systems in ways that would make life extremely difficult across the Gulf region. He said that escalatory option remains available to Iran as long as the strait card is still in play.
His bottom line was clear and direct: the only path to a genuine victory in this conflict, even one that leaves the Islamic Republic in place, is reopening the strait. That requires force. No paper agreement can substitute for it because no paper agreement with the current Iranian regime is reliably enforceable, and the history of every previous arrangement with Tehran supports that conclusion. He said the United States is going to have to decide whether it is willing to pay the price of force to take that card out of Iranian hands, or continue on the hamster wheel of negotiations that produce frameworks the other side has no intention of honoring.