The Jewish state is too powerful for the world’s liking.
The U.S.-Iran deal reveals an uncomfortable truth: The world is far more comfortable with a vulnerable Israel than a victorious one.
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The headlines following this week’s U.S.-Iran agreement have been remarkably predictable.
Some accuse Israel of “dragging America into another Middle Eastern war.” Others insist that U.S. President Donald Trump abandoned Israel at the moment of victory. Still others portray the agreement as proof that Washington ultimately restrains Jerusalem whenever Israeli military success becomes inconvenient.
All three interpretations miss the larger story.
The agreement signed by Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, which seeks to end the conflict that began with the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28th and opens a 60-day negotiation period on broader issues, reveals something far more significant: Israel may simply have become too powerful for the world’s liking.
For years, governments throughout the Middle East have viewed the Islamic Republic of Iran as the region’s principal destabilizing force. Iran finances, arms, and directs a network of proxy militias and terrorist organizations stretching from Lebanon to Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Gaza. From the Gulf monarchies to the eastern Mediterranean, few governments mourn the weakening of Iranian power.
But there is a profound difference between wanting Iran weakened and wanting the Iranian regime to collapse. A weakened Iran creates opportunities. A collapsing Iran creates uncertainty.
Who takes power? Does the country fragment along ethnic and sectarian lines? Does a new regime emerge that is more moderate, or more radical? Would regime change produce stability, or merely unleash another regional vacuum similar to those seen in Iraq, Libya, or Syria?
These questions matter enormously to countries such as Saudi Arabia.
For decades, Saudi Arabia regarded revolutionary Iran as one of its principal strategic rivals. Yet today’s Saudi leadership is simultaneously pursuing perhaps the most ambitious economic transformation in the kingdom’s history. Massive infrastructure projects, foreign investment, tourism initiatives, and long-term development plans all depend upon one indispensable condition: regional stability.
A weakened Iran may serve Saudi interests. An imploding Iran may not.
The same logic applies elsewhere.
Qatar, despite its tiny population and geographic size, has accumulated extraordinary influence by making itself strategically indispensable. It hosts major American military assets. It maintains relationships across ideological divides. It has spent years cultivating influence throughout Western institutions, universities, media organizations, and diplomatic circles.
Qatar’s power rests not upon military supremacy, but upon relevance. In a Middle East defined by competing centers of power, Qatar often serves as a bridge among them. But bridges become less valuable when one actor towers over everyone else.
And this leads to a reality that many policymakers prefer not to discuss openly: Many countries in the region do not want Israel to become significantly stronger than it already is.
This concern is not unique to the Arab world. Turkey also had reasons to oppose a decisive transformation of the regional balance.
Reports surrounding the war suggested that Israeli planners envisioned exploiting internal Iranian vulnerabilities by encouraging pressure from Kurdish, Baluchi, and Ahwazi groups, thereby stretching the regime on multiple fronts. Some reports further suggested that Kurdish elements operating from Iraqi Kurdistan could play a significant role in such a strategy.
From Ankara’s perspective, this possibility was deeply alarming.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has spent years suppressing Kurdish separatism and preventing the emergence of political developments that might energize Kurdish nationalism across Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. A successful Kurdish campaign against Tehran, particularly one associated with an Israeli victory, could have reverberated far beyond Iran’s borders.
It would not merely have weakened Tehran. It might also have reshaped regional politics in ways fundamentally contrary to Turkish interests.
Turkey, like many regional powers, may welcome limits on Iranian influence, but it has little interest in seeing Israel emerge as the uncontested victor in the Middle East.
Russia and China also have reasons to view an increasingly dominant Israel with caution. Russia has spent decades positioning itself as a power broker in the Middle East. From Syria to Libya to Iran, Moscow has sought influence by balancing among competing regional actors and presenting itself as an indispensable diplomatic and military partner. A Middle East in which Israel emerges as the overwhelmingly dominant military power — particularly one closely aligned with Washington — would inevitably reduce Russia’s leverage and diminish its role as a regional arbiter.
China’s concerns are different but no less significant. Beijing’s primary interest in the Middle East is stability. China depends heavily on energy imports from the region and has invested enormous resources into expanding its economic and political footprint throughout the Gulf. Beijing prefers a regional balance in which no single power can dictate terms and in which China can maintain productive relationships with all sides simultaneously.
An Israel capable of unilaterally reshaping the regional order complicates that strategy — and that is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of the current moment. Many countries wanted Iran weakened. Far fewer wanted the region transformed.
For decades, Israel’s critics portrayed the Jewish state as uniquely weak, uniquely vulnerable, and utterly dependent upon American protection.
Reality tells a different story. It is historically remarkable that a state established in the wake of the Holocaust has, within less than eight decades, become one of the world’s most formidable military, technological, intelligence, and economic powers.
There is scarcely a historical precedent for such a transformation.
As historian Walter Russell Mead once observed: “Israel did not grow strong because it had an American alliance. It acquired an American alliance because it had grown strong.”1
That observation is increasingly relevant.
The United States did not create Israeli power. Rather, successive American administrations aligned themselves with a country that had already demonstrated extraordinary military capability, social resilience, and strategic effectiveness. Ironically, some now argue that Israel has become so successful that it must be restrained.
This pattern is hardly new. Again and again, Israel is permitted to fight — but rarely permitted to decisively win. International calls for ceasefires almost invariably intensify at precisely the moment Israeli battlefield success appears within reach. Israel may be allowed to restore deterrence temporarily. It may be allowed to fight to a stalemate, but outright victory often provokes international discomfort.
No other country is so routinely urged to stop short of victory, and the reason is obvious: A decisive Israeli victory does more than defeat an adversary, it alters regional hierarchies, it redistributes influence, and it creates new realities that neighboring states, global powers, and international institutions may not welcome.
The issue, therefore, is not that America abandoned Israel, nor is it that Israel dragged America into war. Rather, Israel encountered the same phenomenon that many rising powers eventually encounter: Success itself generates resistance.
When Israel’s adversaries like Hamas and Hezbollah and their useful-idiot supporters around the world talk about “resistance,” this is precisely what they are talking about: resistance to Israel’s success. The stronger Israel becomes, the more others seek to limit the extent of its victories.
If Israel were weak, poor, isolated, militarily incompetent, or perpetually dependent on others for survival, there would be far less need for “resistance.” A failed Zionist project would garner little attention. What many of Israel’s enemies find intolerable is not simply that Israel exists, but that it exists successfully.
Israel was supposed to be a temporary experiment. Instead, it became a thriving democracy, a technological powerhouse, a military force, and an increasingly influential regional actor. It absorbed millions of Jewish immigrants from around the world, revived an ancient language, built world-class universities, developed a globally significant innovation economy, and repeatedly defeated larger adversaries on the battlefield.
For movements whose identity has been built around opposing Zionism, every Israeli success represents a political and ideological failure. Every normalization agreement, every economic achievement, every successful military operation, and every diplomatic breakthrough undermines the narrative that Israel is unnatural, illegitimate, and destined to disappear.
This helps explain why “resistance” often continues irrespective of Israeli concessions, territorial withdrawals, or peace initiatives. Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000. It withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Yet the conflict persisted. The issue, for many rejectionist movements, was never solely where Israel’s borders lay. The issue was that a sovereign, powerful, and successful Jewish state existed at all.
The same dynamic increasingly extends to segments of the Western activist world. For some activists, Israel represents a deeply uncomfortable anomaly: a people once viewed primarily through the lens of persecution and powerlessness has become powerful, sovereign, and capable of defending itself. In contemporary ideological frameworks that divide the world into oppressors and oppressed, Israel’s success complicates easy moral categories.
Resistance, then, is not merely resistance to Israeli actions. In many cases, it is resistance to the fact that the Jewish People succeeded in reclaiming sovereignty, exercising power, and rebuilding in our ancestral homeland.
Which brings us back to the present moment.
The agreement between Washington and Tehran should not be understood primarily as a story of American betrayal or Israeli defeat. It is, in many ways, a recognition of a new regional reality. Many countries wanted Iran weakened. Very few wanted to see Israel emerge from the conflict even more dominant than it already was.
For decades, Israel’s enemies insisted that the Jewish state was fragile, artificial, and unsustainable. Yet today, it is precisely Israel’s growing strength that is causing anxiety throughout the region and beyond. Regional powers, global powers, and transnational institutions are all adjusting to a Middle East in which Israel is no longer merely surviving, but shaping consequential events.
The stronger Israel becomes, the more resistance it encounters — not simply from its enemies, but from allies, competitors, and observers who fear what an overwhelmingly powerful Israel might mean for the future of the Middle East.
This is the paradox of modern Israel. For centuries, Jews were persecuted because they were powerless. Today, the Jewish state is increasingly constrained because it is powerful.
The world is content with a constrained Israel, but a Jewish state approaching the mountaintop is a whole other story.
Mead, Walter Russell. “The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People.” Knopf. July 5, 2022.
The old adage holds true. The world loves Jews when we’re victims. They despise Jews with guns in their hands.
They hate us when we’re weak. They hate us when we’re strong. I’d rather be strong and hated.