Iran deal does not solve all Israel's problems, war was never meant to - analysis

Israelis need a reality check on the impending Iran deal and understanding the winners and losers.

It all depends on the question you ask.

If you ask why Israel is not only not dominating the direction of negotiations, but being pushed to the side, then Israel lost big time.

But if you speak to top IDF and Mossad officials, immediate regime change was never in play.

Top IDF and Mossad officials across-the-board will tell you that the most the current war could achieve was to help improve conditions for regime change.

The real goals of the last two wars with Iran in June 2025 and early 2026 were to push back the two existential threats by a couple of years: nuclear weapons and massive ballistic missile volumes, which could overwhelm Israel's air defense shield.

If you ask: Were those two primary goals achieved, the answer is unequivocally yes.

The first proof is that we are now a full year since the June 2025 war, and predictions by pessimists that the Islamic regime would have a nuclear weapon within a few months were not only proved wrong, but Iran is basically still around two years from nuclear weapons, and the impending deal will probably push it off even more.

If Iran never gets nuclear weapons, then looking backward in 25 years, historians will probably credit Netanyahu with pushing off the nuclear threat during this time period.

But, looking back, a win will not help him much in the present and upcoming election when much of the country is sour about the failure to secure immediate regime change.

There is a twist here that if Trump loses his attention completely, the Iranians could end up keeping some 60% enriched uranium, but all signs are that that uranium will be removed or diluted.

In terms of leverage, once Iran opens up the Strait of Hormuz and the US keeps even some of its forces in the region, Trump will have more leverage, not less, to get the Iranians to give up the uranium.

The same is true with enforcing the 15-20 years uranium enrichment freeze. And Iran is a long-term planner. Many forget that while Iran broke aspects of the 2015 nuclear deal, for the first four years, it stayed within the uranium enrichment limits.

But with a reality check, this was always the deal Trump was going for: remove the nuclear threat in exchange for money.

The thought of regime change, even with Trump, was brief and passing, and he did not even allow the Mossad's plan with the Kurdish Iranians and Iraqis staging a ground advance against the regime in parts of Iran to go forward.

Yet once again, anyone who thought he would let that go forward was not thinking about who Trump is and his aversion to messy and long wars, especially with ground troops.

These officials needed a reality check on the mentality of Americans and the US president right after 9/11, compared to those persons in 2026 under the banner of "America First" and with no attacks on the US mainland.

Is this funding bad news for Israel on all fronts between Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas? Yes.

But are the apocalyptic warnings of how bad it will be over the top? Also, yes.

Israel has failed to completely defeat any of those enemies - that is a loss.

But by the same token, Israel has thoroughly bludgeoned and weakened all of those enemies in ways that cannot be restored in a year or two, and may not be fully restorable.

If they do not, they still are utterly isolated from receiving weapons from outsiders, have zero rockets, essentially zero ability to threaten Israeli civilians (they can threaten forward IDF troops in Gaza), and have been reduced from a powerful and sophisticated national military to the guerrilla warfare organization they were in the 1990s.

Hezbollah has dropped from 150,000 rockets to maybe as few as 10,000 rockets. They can threaten Israel's North, but not the rest of the country. Even the North cannot threaten at nearly the same level. Israel may be able to use a withdrawal from most of southern Lebanon to normalize relations with the Lebanese government, completing a historic process which could isolate Hezbollah much more than at any time since its founding.

For over 18 months, Hezbollah has been largely cut off from Iran, smuggling weapons by land, because the Syrian regime is now Sunni and as anti-Iran as Israel.

None of this means that Hamas and Hezbollah will fade away, and they are still threats, especially Hezbollah.

But getting more money from Iran is not going to help them restore their former powers and threats, especially since Israel will not stand by and allow them to rearm with long-range weapons, even after a ceasefire and even after a potential partial withdrawal.

Iran likewise will not restore its power overnight.

In the upcoming stages of the expected deal, it is expected to get unfrozen funds (its own money held overseas) of between $6 billion and $24 billion, some of which will be conditioned on nuclear progress.

It lost hundreds of billions of dollars in its defense sector and some other sectors during the recent wars.

The biggest problem then is actually the ballistic missile program.

This threat of overwhelming volume has been pushed off by a couple of years.

But nothing in the deal prohibits Iran from trying to restore its 500-1,000 missiles to its pre-war 3,000 number, or worse, to jump to the 5,000-6,000 range, the prospect of which made Israel decide to go to war again in 2026.

Had Israel played its diplomatic cards better, including incorporating Europeans into some major decisions and strategy, maybe an upper limit and range of missile range could have been reached since Europeans would be threatened by Iranian ballistic missiles much sooner than the US, as they are only somewhat out of Iran's current range, whereas for Iran to strike the US, it would need years more to master intercontinental ballistic missiles.

This is the largest and most under-covered loss for Israel in the deal.

The only, but relatively simple solution for Israel is to send a direct message to the Iranians that Israel will respect the ceasefire until Iran crosses whatever missile volume point the IDF deems as too many to handle. If Iran crosses that point, Israel must be clear that it will attack again.

All of this misses one of the largest threats to Israel today: the massive loss of support from its allies in the US, in Europe, and among some Arab countries in the Middle East. One positive of an end to the years of war, or even a pause for some years, is a chance to fix those issues.

This more complex analysis of wins and losses is not where the average Israeli is right now, having been sold the new "conceptcia" idea that after October 7, a two-plus-year war and with Iran, air power alone, could end all threats to the Jewish state.

But at some point, it will be wiser if Israelis focus on the enhanced security they have achieved, while awakening to the largest dangers confronting Israel in the future: a return of Iran's ballistic missile threat and Israel's cratering diplomatic status, which, over time, will have severe military implications as well if the trajectory is not reversed.