For a few months in 2024 and 2025, it looked like Israel had become a regional superpower, dispatching troops and fighter jets against enemies who were no match for its strength. It started with the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon in November 2024, followed the next month by the bombing of Syrian military assets and the occupation of a handful of strategic sites after the collapse of the Assad regime. In March 2025, Israel broke its cease-fire with Hamas to restart the war in Gaza, and in June, it overwhelmed Iranian air defenses and, with U.S. help, destroyed much of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities. Finally, in September, Israeli fighter jets bombed a compound hosting Hamas leaders in Qatar.
It seemed as if Israel was willing and capable of acting as it chose. The only one who could stop it was U.S. President Donald Trump, and that is what he has done. But rather than simply calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the carpet, Trump has been weaving a web of diplomatic arrangements and military presences to enforce them that leave little room for Israel to maneuver militarily.
For a few months in 2024 and 2025, it looked like Israel had become a regional superpower, dispatching troops and fighter jets against enemies who were no match for its strength. It started with the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon in November 2024, followed the next month by the bombing of Syrian military assets and the occupation of a handful of strategic sites after the collapse of the Assad regime. In March 2025, Israel broke its cease-fire with Hamas to restart the war in Gaza, and in June, it overwhelmed Iranian air defenses and, with U.S. help, destroyed much of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities. Finally, in September, Israeli fighter jets bombed a compound hosting Hamas leaders in Qatar.
It seemed as if Israel was willing and capable of acting as it chose. The only one who could stop it was U.S. President Donald Trump, and that is what he has done. But rather than simply calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the carpet, Trump has been weaving a web of diplomatic arrangements and military presences to enforce them that leave little room for Israel to maneuver militarily.
This process has most obviously occurred in the Gaza Strip. When Trump had strong-armed Netanyahu into a cease-fire last January, only a few weeks passed before the agreement fell apart and Israel renewed its assault. This time around, Trump learned his lesson. His cease-fire and 20-point peace plan not only spell out a framework for the future of the enclave, but also physically embed the U.S. and other countries deep in the process. The Civil-Military Coordination Center set up in the Israeli town of Kiryat Gat near Gaza is monitoring the agreement’s progress from up close, settling disputes and, most importantly, overseeing deliveries of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Thus, while the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) still occupies roughly half of Gaza, its hands are tied. Its ability to respond to Hamas cease-fire violations (and for Netanyahu to potentially provoke Hamas into renewing the fighting) has been severely constrained; Israel can no longer suspend aid as a means of pressuring Hamas.
The web is due to grow tighter. If Trump gets his way, the IDF will, for all intents and purposes, cede all security control over Gaza to a planned international stabilization force (ISF). Even if the ISF does not disarm Hamas, its presence and the risk of confrontation with it will make it very difficult for the IDF to conduct any major military operation there. Trump has internationalized the Gaza problem; Israel can no longer act unilaterally.
A similar situation is taking shape in Syria. Israel continues to hold Syrian territory, intervened in an internecine dispute last July between Syrian Druze and Bedouin groups, and stages periodic raids deeper into the country. Israel doubts Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa has truly abandoned his jihadist roots, and, even if he has, his chances of cementing effective control over Syria are poor. Therefore, it is safer to rely on securing the border than reaching any understandings with Damascus. The Trump White House, however, feels otherwise and has been pushing Israel to reach a security pact with the Sharaa regime. Indeed, the two leaders are speaking in terms of becoming allies, which would all but preclude Israeli strikes against Syrian military assets. The security pact will almost certainly require the IDF to withdraw from Syrian territory and end Israel’s role as protector of the Druze.
And, when the agreement is signed, Trump is apparently not counting on Israeli goodwill to maintain it: Reuters reported this month that the United States plans to have a military presence at an air base near Damascus, close to the southern part of Syria that Israel is most concerned about. Rather than monitoring Islamic State activity as the other U.S. forces in Syria do, these forces would be monitoring Israeli compliance with the pact.
The third place where Israel has been put on a short leash is Qatar. The U.S. has maintained a large military presence at Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base since the early 2000s to serve as a staging ground for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as to deter Iran. But after Israel’s failed attack on Hamas leaders in Qatar, an angry Trump pledged via an executive order issued on Sept. 29 to “regard any armed attack on the territory, sovereignty, or critical infrastructure of the State of Qatar as a threat to the peace and security of the United States”—language that mimics NATO’s mutual defense clause. While the order applies to all enemies, including Iran, which attacked Al Udeid at the end of the war last June, it applies no less to Israel. In other words, Hamas leaders in Doha are now shielded from Israel by Trump.
After the shock of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack, Israel was determined never to be caught by surprise again and began taking a far more proactive stance against the threats it faced. But the new aggressiveness went beyond that, reflecting Netanyahu’s worldview, which sees Israel in a perpetual conflict immune to diplomatic solutions. This attitude surfaced in his “super-Sparta” speech in September, in which he discounted Israel’s recent military successes: “The threats haven’t disappeared—they have changed. … People and societies are in perpetual struggle, constant competition. … It never ends—it even grows stronger.”
If American presidents never held such a dark view of humanity, neither did they see much potential in the Middle East for peace and stability. It was a region where crises were to be managed by supporting allies and containing enemies. Israel has always had to look over its shoulder at Washington when it entered into its wars over the years because at some point, the United States would demand it halt its advance and withdraw out of fear of creating instability. But the United States never sought to create a network of obstacles to preemptively deter Israel from acting.
It is not clear that the Trump administration has consciously done that either. Rather, it seems to be a piecemeal response to Israeli overreach, the attack on Qatar being the final, fatal case. “Every time they’re making progress, it seems like he bombs someone,” an unnamed person close to Trump’s national security team told Politico shortly afterward. “That’s why the president and his aides are so frustrated with Netanyahu.”
Trump sees the Middle East as ripe for a strategic realignment, economic development, and even “eternal peace,” and a condition for achieving that is putting an end to its perpetual conflicts. Trump’s to-do list includes a nuclear accord with Iran, bringing Syria into the coalition of pro-Western nations, and ending Israel’s forever war with Hamas, even at the cost of establishing a Palestinian state. Israeli aggressiveness is getting in the way of achieving all these goals. The president is evidently not opposed in principle to military action, as he demonstrated by allowing the war in Gaza to stretch on for much of 2025 after the January cease-fire and by using American power against the Houthis and Iran. But, in contrast to Netanyahu, he sees wars as a means to advancing a diplomatic solution, not a remedy in themselves.
Trump may be overly optimistic about what he can accomplish. Perhaps he is being influenced by his business interests in the Gulf, whose leaders are pushing this new Middle East vision. Perhaps it’s his naked interest in winning a Nobel Peace Prize. But it doesn’t really matter, because Netanyahu has no choice but to deal with Trump and is too frightened to defy him as he did his predecessors, Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
What’s next? Of the three places where the United States and Israel may find themselves at loggerheads over diplomacy versus war, the White House seems the least invested in Lebanon. There are growing signs that Israel is weighing a military operation to nip in the bud Hezbollah’s rearmament efforts, but in public at least, Washington has not issued any warnings. Israel may be testing the Trump administration’s willingness to stand by when it targeted Ali Tabtabai, Hezbollah’s No. 2 leader, in an airstrike this week without notifying the United States first. In the West Bank, the United States has also laid low, even as the area is being wracked by settler violence against Palestinians. Trump last month vetoed any possibility of Israel annexing all or part of the territory, which by itself is unlikely to deter settler ambitions. At a Nov. 12 news conference, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed little concern about the possibility that settler violence would undermine progress in Gaza. “We don’t expect it to. We’ll do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t happen,” he said. However, a surge of Palestinian counterviolence or a particularly lethal settler attack might just cause the United States to step in.
Iran presents the real challenge. Tehran appears to be trying to revive its nuclear program, but more importantly, from Israel’s perspective, it is working overtime to rebuild its ballistic missile arsenal. As Netanyahu has said many times, the missile threat is one Israel cannot ignore. Any resumption of U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations that were broken off by the June war would make it difficult for Israel to launch a strike. But while Trump says he wants to resume the talks, Iran is taking a hard line. The risk is that Trump may open a hole in his web and let Israel attack in the hope that it will bring Tehran back to the negotiating table.
