Israel’s tit-for-tat strikes with Iran over the weekend, despite US President Donald Trump’s call for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to hold fire, threatened to thrust the Middle East back into another round of direct confrontation between Tehran and Washington.
Israel bombed sites in Iran for the first time since a ceasefire in April, after Iran fired missiles at Israel, in what Tehran said was retaliation for Israeli strikes on Lebanon’s capital, Beirut.
The current web of fractious alliances and dysfunctional ceasefires shows how dangerously destabilised the region remains, more than three months after the US and Israel launched their war on Iran.
The escalation also highlights three points about the current trajectory of the war:
- Trump can’t or won’t contain his Israeli ally to the extent he publicly proclaims, a point not lost on Tehran, which aims to prise open any differences between the US and Israel
- Tehran is prepared to risk retaliation against its own territory in order to link the fates of the US-Iran war with the one between Israel and Hezbollah
- Trump’s longed-for deal on the nuclear issue is not imminent, as Iran senses his appetite for risk is currently low and is seeking to extract more from Washington at the negotiating table