The United States asked Israel to remain on the sidelines to avoid all-out war and preserve a path back to negotiations with Tehran. On its face this is a containment story — the stronger power moderating the behavior of a close but headstrong ally. Beneath it is a resource-extraction problem. Roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil transited the Strait of Hormuz before the war; the U.S. blockade of Iranian shipping, reimposed after a temporary ceasefire collapsed, has constricted that flow. A broader conflict — one in which Israeli strikes drew Iranian retaliation across the Gulf — would constrict it further. The U.S. interest in excluding Israel is the interest of a global power that cannot afford a recession triggered by the energy supplies of a region that includes its closest partners.

Israel’s stated posture is more complex than the U.S. framing. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet who attended the Iran security consultations — said Tuesday that Israel has “no interest” in joining the current campaign but is “prepared for any scenario.” In the same statement he described the country’s “supreme goal” as “to undermine and weaken the regime’s existence,” adding that “the best way to do this is to crush it economically” and that “the current situation works to our benefit.” The statement does not describe a policy of peace. It describes a policy of instrumental patience — letting the U.S. conduct the physical campaign while economic pressure does the work Israeli officials complained the U.S. stopped too soon to let them do by military means in the spring, when, as the Wall Street Journal reported, Israeli officials expressed frustration that Trump “stopped the war too soon, before they could inflict enough damage on Iran’s rulers and topple the Islamic government.”

Arab Gulf states have a different calculation. Officials are lobbying Washington to ensure Israel’s continued absence, driven by two fears. The first is retaliation: if Israel were to strike Iran, Tehran’s response would very likely target Gulf energy infrastructure, adding vulnerability to economies already exposed to missile fire. Arab officials describe this as a near-certainty, not a possibility. The second is reputational cost. “It is really much better for the Israelis not to be seen as part of any de facto coalition,” said Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute. The domestic political architecture of Gulf states requires distance from Israel as a condition of cooperation — a surfaceability constraint whose violation would collapse willingness to participate in any form.

Iran’s own behavior completes the picture. Tehran has kept its strikes focused on U.S. allies Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan — a missile attack on a Jordanian base killed at least two U.S. servicemembers — while refraining from striking Israel. The targeting pattern is not neutrality. It is a conflict-scoping strategy: by treating the war as a bilateral U.S.-Iran confrontation rather than a regional front, Tehran preserves the boundaries within which regime survival is most plausible and the IRGC’s path back to negotiation remains imaginable. Regional mediators have argued, the Journal reported, that Israeli involvement would make it harder for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to return to peace talks. Andreas Krieg of King’s College London captured the convergence: “This is a fairly limited escalation right now, and all sides know there’s a path back to the negotiation table. If you bring the Israelis into this, it could become a real mess.”

The disagreement buried inside the consensus

Beneath the four-party convergence, the parties are not equally patient or aligned on the endgame. The deepest fracture is structural: the U.S. and Israel are optimizing in differently structured games while sharing a single battlefield.

U.S. and Israeli war aims diverged in the spring. Trump pushed for a diplomatic solution over concerns that energy-supply disruptions could sink the world economy. Israeli officials complained that Trump stopped the war too soon — before they could inflict enough damage on Iran’s rulers and topple the Islamic government. The U.S. wants a regime that survives but is constrained: reopened Hormuz, revised nuclear terms, a return to diplomatic contact with Tehran. Israel wants the regime to collapse. The disagreement is not about timing; it is a structural opposition between a positive-sum game (U.S. containment-plus-diplomacy) and a zero-sum game (Israeli regime change). The gap is dormant while economic pressure builds — both sides can live with it for the moment — but it reactivates the moment the current strategy fails to extract Iranian concessions. Smotrich’s “no interest” phrasing is a tactical statement, not a renunciation of the regime-change goal. His framing of the arrangement as “working to our benefit” implies a time limit. The arrangement works while pressure is building toward something; if it plateaus — if the U.S. opens negotiations that preserve the Iranian government — the dormant opposition reasserts itself.

The Gulf states, too, are not of one mind with Washington. Their opposition to Israeli involvement is both a security calculation and a domestic political necessity. The same officials who lobby against Israeli strikes privately understand that the threat of an Israeli attack held in reserve gives the U.S. bargaining power. Erez Winner, chairman of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, a think tank with close ties to the current government, characterized it directly: the threat of an Israeli attack “held in reserve” gives the U.S. leverage as it tries to revive a Hormuz agreement and advance nuclear talks.

Iran faces a tension within its own set of interests that pulls in opposite directions. Ending the Hormuz blockade is an urgent economic necessity; the blockade cuts into the oil revenue the regime needs to survive. Yet the IRGC’s institutional need to avoid the appearance of capitulating to combined forces can outweigh that economic pressure. The current arrangement — fighting the U.S. alone, avoiding Israel — allows Tehran to keep the diplomatic channel open while preserving institutional dignity. The economic pain will eventually force the choice between capitulation and escalation. The direction is not in doubt — capitulation is intolerable to an institution whose reason for existing is regime defense. What is unknown is the threshold and the timing.

The game-theory logic — and its fragility

The strategic-interaction model explains why the sideline posture has persisted despite these fractures. Working backward from the terminal outcome each party is trying to avoid — all-out regional war, which would destroy the global oil supply, trigger Iranian retaliation against Gulf infrastructure, pull in Israel directly, and threaten regime survival in Tehran — each party’s optimal move at its decision point is to sustain the status quo. The U.S. keeps Israel out. Israel stays out while economic pressure builds. Iran refrains from striking Israel. Gulf states lobby for distance. No player can improve its payoff by unilateral deviation. The non-participation posture is a subgame-perfect equilibrium: it holds at every decision point, not just the final outcome.

Several credibility assessments sharpen the logic. Smotrich’s “no interest in pushing ourselves in” is credible because it aligns with Israel’s strategic calculus of letting economic pressure build while the U.S. does the military work. Iran’s restraint is credible but fragile — grounded in avoiding the terminal node, but if Tehran perceives a forward-deployment order or joint U.S.-Israeli operational planning, preemption becomes rational. The U.S. promise to keep Israel on the sideline is structurally weak: Trump has told advisers no one can handle Netanyahu, who he says wants to “bomb everyone.” That weakness is converted into leverage. The fact that the U.S. cannot fully guarantee Israeli restraint becomes a Schelling-style threat-that-leaves-something-to-chance, giving Washington bargaining power precisely because its control is imperfect.

The standoff also functions as a focal point — the pattern each player recognizes as the clearest way to avoid catastrophe without formal coordination. That property helps explain why the arrangement has held without a written agreement, but it carries a structural risk: each party may interpret the same arrangement differently. Washington may read Israeli restraint as a concession it can claim credit for. Jerusalem may read it as preserving its option to strike. Tehran may read it as a signal that the U.S. is restraining its ally. Divergent interpretations destabilize the arrangement when conditions shift.

The equilibrium depends on the shadow of the future: every player must perceive the game as repeated, with future interactions worth preserving. If any party — Iran facing existential pressure, Israel facing a domestic political constraint, the U.S. facing an election timeline — begins to treat the conflict as a one-shot game, the equilibrium collapses toward all-out war. That is the fragility the current tacit arrangement cannot resolve.

The loops that hold the pause — and the asymmetry that will break it

A systems-dynamics map of the standoff reveals how the same forces that keep Israel out also carry the seeds of the equilibrium’s destruction. Three feedback loops operate at different speeds.

The first is a balancing loop (B1) between U.S. bombing and diplomacy. Each round of strikes increases pressure on Iran, which raises the incentive to negotiate, which leads Washington to de-escalate. The Journal documents this as Trump’s recurring pattern of pulling back “toward negotiations after taking threats up to the brink.” The loop’s dominant timescale is weeks. It is brittle: a ceasefire already collapsed once under it, and the delay between bombing cessation and a return to the negotiating table — weeks to months — creates a window in which retaliation can outpace diplomacy.

A second, reinforcing loop (R1) drives escalation. U.S. strikes intensify Iranian retaliation against Gulf allies, which prompts Washington to broaden its target list — the U.S. has moved from military targets to bridges and port infrastructure, and Trump has been briefed on options for escalating. This loop operates on a timescale of days and accelerates faster than the diplomatic loop can brake it. Smotrich’s observation that “the current situation works to our benefit” suggests Israel reads this escalation as serving its economic-crushing objective, but the same dynamic erodes the diplomatic path the system needs to survive.

A third balancing loop (B2), the one currently keeping Israel out, is powered by Gulf fear. The more the Gulf states worry about Iranian retaliation, the harder they lobby Washington to keep Israel sidelined, which keeps Israel out and reduces the threat of retaliation, calming the fear. Iran’s own restraint toward Israel is an active attempt to keep this loop functional — by striking only U.S. allies in the Gulf, Tehran preserves the buffer that prevents Israel from re-entering the war. The Arab officials who told the Journal it is “only a matter of time before Israel re-enters the war” are expressing a judgment that the buffer is depletable.

The timescale crossover between these loops is the arrangement’s most consequential structural feature. In the short term (weeks), the balancing diplomacy loop dominates, with Trump oscillating between escalation and de-escalation. In the medium term (months), the reinforcing escalation loop dominates as economic pressure accumulates. When diplomatic windows open, the accumulated damage may already be too high for Iran to bargain effectively. The system is designed to fail at precisely this crossover — a structural feature of the conflict’s architecture, not an analytical artifact.

The critical asymmetry is structural: escalation moves faster than de-escalation. Iranian retaliation against Gulf targets operates on a timescale of days. Diplomatic return — the gap between bombing cessation and meaningful negotiation — operates on a timescale of weeks to months. The bombed bridges and ports will not be rebuilt before the negotiating table is set, and the IRGC will not have rebuilt its institutional confidence in any U.S. commitment before the next round of strikes. The system can escalate through the diplomatic channel’s recovery window faster than diplomacy can catch it.

The “loose cannon” as leverage — and the cost of using it

The reported inability of the U.S. to guarantee Israeli restraint is, in certain respects, a source of power rather than solely a liability. Trump’s private complaints that Netanyahu wants to “bomb everyone” and that no one can handle him, and analyst Elizabeth Tsurkov’s observation that “the perception in the Trump administration is that Israel is a loose cannon” — “when you put in a player that is a loose cannon in the mix, you lose control of the situation” — creates an ambiguity Iran must reckon with. The threat of Israeli intervention, while unscheduled, is not deniable. Any escalation by Tehran carries the risk that the loose cannon enters the fight, expanding the conflict in ways Iran’s scoping strategy is designed to prevent.

The leverage is real but uncontrolled. The U.S. benefits from the ambiguity but cannot calibrate it with precision. If the threat materializes, the benefit evaporates and the system enters the terminal state every party is working to avoid. The arrangement works only so long as it stays unrealized; it is a bomb whose value lies entirely in its fuse never being lit.

What breaks the arrangement

The arrangement is, at bottom, a tacit integrative deal whose stability rests on two hypotheses that have not been tested. The first is that economic pressure alone will produce enough Iranian concessions to make a diplomatic deal viable. If the U.S. blockade and bombing do not deliver results on a timeline Israel can accept, the regime-change camp in Netanyahu’s cabinet will push to re-enter the fight. Smotrich’s language — “not necessarily jointly with the U.S.” — signals that Israel reserves the right to act unilaterally. The second hypothesis is that Iran will continue to see Israeli non-participation as a red line worth accommodating. If the economic squeeze becomes suffocating, the IRGC’s institutional imperative to avoid capitulation will override its substantive interest in ending the blockade, and striking Israel becomes a rational way to change the frame before the economic situation forces a humiliating deal.

External variables amplify the fragility. Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis threaten to blockade the Red Sea — a capability the group has demonstrated in part but cannot sustain as a true naval blockade, since sustained surface operations are beyond the assets the Houthis control. An intensified anti-ship missile campaign alone will deepen the disruption enough to force the U.S. and Gulf states toward escalation options that require Israeli operational support — at which point the Gulf states’ structural requirement that Israel remain politically invisible collides with American military necessity. Trump’s documented pullback pattern means no player can credibly read his escalation ceiling — the same behavior that gives the U.S. leverage as a commitment device also makes the diplomatic off-ramp unreliable. Netanyahu’s coalition dependency on Smotrich makes the restraint posture domestically fragile; every day that economic pressure fails to produce visible Iranian concessions strengthens the case for unilateral action.

Three mechanisms that could stabilize the arrangement

If the current equilibrium is as structurally fragile as the analysis indicates, the path to stabilization runs through three mechanisms that convert the tacit arrangement into a more durable framework.

A staged escalation ladder with codified Israeli re-entry triggers. The U.S. and Israel could agree on a formal framework: the U.S. continues its economic-pressure campaign under agreed thresholds — no strikes on leadership targets, no ground incursions — while Israel’s re-entry is defined by specific Iranian triggers, such as resumed nuclear enrichment above a defined level or a Houthi Red Sea blockade cutting off an agreed percentage of Gulf oil supply. The mechanism converts sequential compatibility into explicit terms, eliminating the misinterpretation risk that plagues the current tacit arrangement. It depends on one hypothesis: that U.S. and Israeli interests are genuinely sequentially compatible rather than terminally opposed. It fails if Israel’s reservation point is that no level of U.S.-imposed economic pain can achieve its goal without direct military strikes on Iran’s leadership.

A Gulf-state “cover” arrangement for Israeli reserve status. The U.S. could broker a private understanding in which Gulf states publicly oppose Israeli involvement — satisfying their domestic political necessity of distance from Israel — while privately agreeing not to veto intelligence-sharing or staging access that shortens Israeli response time if re-entry is triggered. The mechanism converts the surfaceability constraint from a liability into an operational asset. It depends on the hypothesis that Gulf states’ domestic politics truly preclude public cooperation but permit private accommodation. It fails if Gulf domestic constraints block any cooperation, even private.

Formalizing the “loose cannon” as a calibrated commitment device. The U.S. could convert its imperfect control over Israel from a recognized vulnerability into an explicit bargaining tool. By publicly conditioning Israeli participation on specific Iranian actions — Hormuz closure beyond a defined threshold, direct strikes on Israel — the U.S. transforms an uncontrolled risk into a calibrated escalation signal. The key insight is that the threat of Israeli participation, not the participation itself, provides the leverage. The U.S. should not seek to turn the loose cannon into a reliable partner in this phase; the unreliability is the source of the bargaining power.

These mechanisms do not resolve the underlying U.S.-Israel structural disagreement on whether the Iranian regime should be preserved or toppled. Nothing can resolve that divergence except a choice by one side or a decisive shift in the balance of power. The mechanisms would reduce the probability that the current equilibrium breaks through misinterpretation, misperception, or the accident of divergent discount rates — making it possible for the system to survive long enough for that deeper question to be answered by events rather than miscalculation.

The questions that carry forward

The consensus keeping Israel out is real but not permanent. Three questions define the near-term trajectory.

Does the current economic pressure campaign — U.S. bombing of bridges and ports and the Strait of Hormuz blockade — produce Iranian concessions before Israel’s patience for the “reserve” role expires? Smotrich’s framing of the arrangement as “working to our benefit” is instrumentalism, not disposition. The clock starts the day the U.S. begins negotiating with a regime that is still standing.

What are the Trump administration’s briefed escalation options for broadening the campaign, and does any scenario require Israeli operational support? A scenario requiring Israeli support forces a direct test of the consensus that has held since the spring divergence — and collides with the Gulf states’ structural requirement that Israel remain politically invisible.

Does Iran’s restraint toward Israel hold as U.S. strikes broaden? Iran’s strategic choice to direct fire away from Israel is the single most important constraint holding the current arrangement together. If the economic or military pressure reaches a threshold where the IRGC concludes that regime survival is threatened regardless, that choice reverses — and the system enters the terminal state it exists to avoid.

The system will collapse at precisely the moment its participants discover they no longer fear the collapse enough to sustain it.

Analytical techniques used in this piece

This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.

Interest Mapping
Separates parties’ stated positions from their underlying interests (Fisher & Ury).
Strategic Interaction (Game Theory)
Models a situation as a game — players, moves, payoffs, and likely equilibria.
Systems Dynamics (Structural)
Maps a system’s structure — stocks, flows, and the architecture that shapes its behavior.