Sorry, Israel – Trump needs a win!

Tariffs are on, tariffs are off; some are back on and some postponed and others supersized to the point of embargo. Iran will be forced to dismantle its nuclear facilities or maybe just cease enrichment; maybe destroy its centrifuges “nicely” or have them blown up “viciously,” or maybe just promise not to use them to make weapons. Anyone trying to follow US President Donald Trump’s sudden and frequent policy lurches will be tempted to reach for the Dramamine. Politicians often change their minds – then-Senator John Kerry was famously for the war in Iraq before he was against it – but it’s safe to say no president has ever executed so many head-spinning, diametric reversals in so short a time. Four months have not yet passed since his inauguration.

This chaotic behavior, in my view, has two sources. The first is Trump’s desperate need to see himself as a winner (even if not actually winning). The second is competition for his attention among close advisors with very different views. Most relevant for Israel is the cleavage within his foreign-policy team. Vice President JD Vance, Susie Wiles, and Donald Trump Jr. lead a neo-isolationist cadre that gauges foreign relations in terms of transactional benefits to America. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz advocate a more assertive – and more traditionally Republican – US role in global affairs. Trump also pays attention to media gadflies such as Tucker Carlson and Laura Loomer, who serve as windows to the soul of his political base.

Trump listens to these discordant voices and decides whose advice is likely, at a given juncture, to make him look like a winner. And he goes with that until it no longer feels like winning. Then he goes with someone else. The underlying merits and the repercussions are secondary or irrelevant. What counts is public perception, or at least how he reads it.

Upon assuming office for the second time, Trump’s priority was to banish as much global conflict as possible so as to burnish his war-ending persona and draw a favorable contrast from his predecessor. That didn’t work so well with Russia and Ukraine, but like virtually all previous US presidents, he knew he could pressure Israel into supporting American priorities – in this case, a ceasefire with Hamas. It took Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by surprise but didn’t work out too badly for him, since a substantial segment of the Israeli public supported the agreement’s first phase and Netanyahu declined, without backlash, to pursue the far more controversial subsequent phases.

President Donald Trump speaks while meeting with Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (unseen) in the Oval Office of the White House, April 17, 2025, in Washington, as Vice President JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listen. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Since then, Trump has threatened Hamas with “hell to pay” if all hostages – or American hostages, or, right, actually all hostages – were not released; unleashed substantial firepower against Yemen’s Houthi rebels and threatened them with “complete annihilation”; and reimposed “maximum pressure” sanctions against Iran while threatening to destroy their nuclear facilities. These all bear the fingerprints of the muscular foreign-policy cadre.

Hamas neither released any hostages nor faced hell, Iran remained defiant, and the Houthis still managed to mount attacks against ships in the Red Sea, including American naval vessels. Plainly, none of this felt very much like winning. Soon, Trump was engaging in dialogue with Iran, which obliged him by muzzling the Houthis to “build momentum” in the talks – i.e., to hand Trump a win he could boast of and a debt to be collected later. The neo-isolationists now had the upper hand. Unsourced statements suggested Trump might even be considering a return to the terms of Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal with Iran, which would please the neo-isolationists since they don’t perceive Iran as a threat to US shores. But it ignited a firestorm among right-wing commentators, who reminded Trump how mightily he inveighed against that deal before dramatically exiting it in 2018. Manhood check! Trump quickly pivoted to “nicely” or “viciously” and postponed further talks.

Read: Trump: Iran’s centrifuges will either ‘blow up nicely’ in a deal or ‘viciously’ without one

What happens next? Talks with Iran are back on. The neo-isolationists perceive the vigor of Trump’s manly threats as cover for a renewed effort to accommodate the mullahs. If they can get some concession from Iran that arguably – even if not credibly – extends beyond the Obama deal, they think they can sell it to Trump as a momentous win. They have learned by now that no line he draws in the sand is fixed if its erasure can be spun favorably.

In the meantime, Trump’s team has been feeling out the possibility of bringing Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords – a signature Trump win in his first administration. Getting Saudi on board would not only gild that win but achieve what his hated predecessor, Joe Biden, sought strenuously but failed to obtain. The obstacles were, and remain, Saudi insistence on an end to the Gaza war and a pathway to Palestinian statehood as prerequisites.

Joe Biden and his State Department seemed genuinely puzzled over Israel’s refusal on both counts. But they overestimated the value of Saudi normalization to Israel. The two countries have cooperated fruitfully and quietly since Obama signed his nuclear deal with Iran. The tangible benefits of normalization to Israel would be few, and the risks to the Saudi government significant. Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, is engaged in a long-term project of reforming and modernizing his country in the face of fierce opposition from religious fundamentalists and members of his own royal family. Attempts to placate the Palestinians would make recognition of the “Zionist entity” by the cradle of Islam no less of an abomination to religious zealots. And the Palestinians have always refused to be placated.

One can almost imagine bin Salman colluding with Netanyahu to keep the bar to normalization unachievably high, precisely to avoid upending the productive status quo. But Trump needs a win, and facts are beside the point. The Palestinians have had a Jew-free state in all of Gaza since 2005. We know how that experiment turned out. And ending the Gaza war on Hamas’s terms, which have not meaningfully changed since they perpetrated the horrors of October 7, would simply start the countdown to the next pogrom. We have experimental evidence for that proposition as well: Israel is fighting its fifth war with Hamas, having allowed it to survive and thrive after each of the previous four.

These are merely facts, however, and Trump needs a win. We’ll see how far he’s willing to go to get it, how eager MBS is to cooperate, and how much fortitude Netanyahu is prepared to show in defending Israel’s core interests. Rumor has Trump preparing to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state. The perfidy and self-defeating destructiveness of such a move can’t be overstated. But in a Machiavellian world of princes and winners, nothing is unthinkable.