Why the War Against Iran Suddenly Stopped

Everyone wanted Iran weakened. Nobody wanted what came next.

IDF and U.S. Army officials meet in Israel. (photo: IDF/X)

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

One of the strangest questions to emerge from the U.S.-Israel war against the Iranian regime is not why it started. It’s why it stopped.

Even after Sunday’s events in the Middle East — Iran’s ballistic missile attacks on Israel in response to Israeli airstrikes in Beirut, with the IDF saying it targeted a Hezbollah headquarters in the group’s stronghold of Dahiyeh, a large suburb just south of the Lebanese capital — the war against the Iranian regime will likely remain halted.

Acknowledging that Israel is being prevented from responding to tonight’s Iranian missile attacks, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, during an assessment with the military’s top brass, says: “the IDF will strike the enemy with force the moment the green light is given.”

The IDF is preparing for a response against Iran over its missile attack on Israel this evening, but is awaiting approval from the political level. U.S. President Donald Trump said earlier that he was urging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to respond.

Contrast that with the events that started on February 28th when, for weeks, the world watched as the U.S. and Israel achieved what many believed was impossible. Iran’s military infrastructure was battered. The supreme leader and senior officials were eliminated. Strategic assets were destroyed. The regime’s vulnerabilities were exposed in ways that would have been unimaginable in recent memory.

And then, suddenly, the war came to a screeching halt.

The explanation most people have heard is rising oil prices and economic disruptions with regard to the Strait of Hormuz. With midterm elections approaching this November, Washington had little appetite for a prolonged conflict that could hurt American consumers and create political headaches for the Republican Party.

There is certainly truth to that explanation, but it is not the whole explanation. After all, governments have tools to manage energy shocks. Strategic petroleum reserves exist for precisely these kinds of situations. Previous U.S. presidential administrations, such as Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden, have used them to ease pressure on markets and reduce political fallout from rising fuel costs.

If gasoline prices were the only concern, there are ways to address that problem.

So, what if something else was happening? What if the deeper reason the war stopped was that Israel’s vision of victory had become larger than what other actors in the Middle East were willing to support?

A revealing clue came this weekend during an interview on Israeli television with a former senior Mossad official who retired last year. According to him, the campaign that Israel launched against the Iranian regime was not exhausted. Additional stages remained.

“We didn’t try all the way; we were stopped along the way,” he said. “This is a multi-stage plan that has been prepared over time and has been paused for the time being.”

Whether one agrees with his assessment or not, his comments point to an important possibility: Israel rightfully viewed the campaign not simply as an operation to weaken Iran, but as part of a broader effort to fundamentally change the strategic landscape of the Middle East.

That is where interests may have begun to diverge. Many countries in the region wanted Iran weakened. Far fewer wanted the region transformed.

For years, governments throughout the Middle East have viewed the Iranian regime as a destabilizing force. Iran’s support for proxy militias, terrorist organizations, and armed groups across the region has threatened governments from the Gulf to the Mediterranean.

Yet there is a significant difference between wanting Iran weakened and wanting the Iranian regime to collapse. The latter raises a host of uncertainties. What comes next? Who takes power? Would the result be a more peaceful Iran, or a fragmented Iran? Would regime change produce stability, or another regional power vacuum?

These questions become especially important for countries like Saudi Arabia. For decades, the Saudis viewed revolutionary Iran as one of its principal strategic rivals. Yet today’s Saudi leadership is also pursuing an ambitious economic transformation. Massive investments, foreign partnerships, tourism initiatives, and long-term development plans all depend upon regional stability.

A weakened Iran may serve Saudi interests. An imploding Iran may not.

The same logic applies to other regional actors, such as Qatar. Few countries have managed to accumulate as much influence while maintaining such a small population and geographic footprint. Qatar has positioned itself as an indispensable diplomatic intermediary. It hosts major American military assets. It maintains relationships across ideological and political divides. It has spent years cultivating influence throughout Western institutions, media organizations, universities, and policy circles.

Qatar’s power comes not from military dominance but from strategic relevance. In a Middle East defined by competing powers, Qatar often serves as a bridge between them.

But if one side suddenly emerges significantly stronger than all the others, the balance changes. And that leads to a reality many people are reluctant to discuss openly: Many countries in the region do not want to see Israel become more powerful.

If the Iranian regime were to fall and Israel emerged as the uncontested strategic winner, the regional balance of power would shift substantially. Countries that currently exercise influence by navigating between competing forces could find themselves operating in a very different environment.

That possibility may make some governments uncomfortable, and the same dynamic exists in Washington.

From an Israeli perspective, the ideal outcome may have been the removal of a regime that has spent decades funding terrorism, pursuing regional hegemony, threatening Israel’s destruction, and destabilizing the Middle East.

From an American perspective, however, the objectives may have been narrower: Destroy critical military capabilities, degrade nuclear infrastructure, restore deterrence, protect allies, and avoid a prolonged regional war. Then leave.

Those are not identical goals. They overlap, but only up to a point. The closer the conflict moved toward reshaping the political future of Iran itself, the greater the possibility that Washington’s interests and those with tremendous influence on Washington (Saudi Arabia and Qatar) would diverge from those in Jerusalem.

Indeed, a recent report surfaced about Israel finding itself increasingly isolated in the aftermath of the U.S.-Israel-Iran war. It claimed that Netanyahu is being “sidelined” by Trump regarding Iran, and that Israel is “almost entirely out of the loop” in talks between the United States and Iran. According to the report, Israel has been forced to use other roundabout avenues to seek information on the peace talks, including other diplomatic connections and intelligence sources within Iran.¹

This prompted an additional report this weekend about the Pentagon raising its estimates of Israeli espionage activity against the U.S. to the highest level in history² — with the main reason being tensions between Israeli and American officials over how to proceed in the war with Iran and its proxy terror groups.

History offers many examples of allies who agreed on the enemy but disagreed on the desired end state. That may be what happened here. The uncomfortable possibility is that the war stopped not because the U.S. and Israel had exhausted its options, but because Israel’s definition of victory had become larger than what others were prepared to support.

Everyone wanted Iran weakened, but not everyone wanted the Iranian regime replaced. Everyone wanted Iranian aggression reduced, but not everyone wanted a new regional order to emerge from its collapse.

As the British author and journalist Douglas Murray poignantly wrote:

“… Israel seems to be the only country in the world never allowed to win a conflict. It is allowed to fight a conflict to a draw, but rarely to a win. Which is one reason why the wars keep occurring.”³

For Israelis, that realization carries an important lesson. The Jewish state cannot assume that because others recognize a threat, they share the same urgency in eliminating it. Nor can it assume that because others support military action, they support every possible outcome of military success.

Alliances are real. Shared interests are real. But they are rarely identical. The lesson for Israel is not that alliances are unreliable. The lesson is that no alliance can substitute for national self-reliance.

Almost every country in the Middle East wants something different from Iran, and something different from Israel. Every country has its own interests, priorities, elections, economic concerns, and geopolitical calculations.

Israel’s interests are unique because Israel’s circumstances are unique. No American city currently sits within missile range of Iran’s proxies. No European government faces regular calls for its destruction from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. No Gulf monarchy faces the same existential stakes that Israel does.

That means there will always be moments when Israel’s assessment of a threat diverges from the assessments of its allies, and the Iranian regime understands this. It has spent decades operating on the assumption that the coalition against it would eventually fracture over questions of timing, risk, and objectives.

Perhaps the most important question now is not why the war stopped. It is whether Israel has learned that even its closest allies may support defeating Iran’s capabilities without supporting the complete defeat of the regime itself.

If that is true, then the strategic challenge facing Israel is larger than Iran. It is learning how to pursue long-term national objectives in a world where no other countries share them completely.

The war may have exposed the weakness of the Iranian regime, but it may also have exposed the limits of international support for the kind of Middle East that would be safe for every inhabitant, most notably Israel.

---

1. “Once Trump’s Co-Pilot Against Iran, Netanyahu Is Now a Mere Passenger.” The New York Times.

2. “Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level, sources say.” NBC News.

3. “The Easy Politics of Criticizing Israel.” Sapir.