The Swearing Is the Policy
Late Edition — Sunday 21 June 2026
The Swearing Is the Policy
Trump has more leverage over Israel than any American president in a generation. He has spent three months demonstrating, repeatedly and unmistakably, that he will not use it. This is not indecision. It is a choice — and the 60-day negotiating window will be shaped entirely by its consequences.
On the day the US-Iran MOU was announced — the day Trump posted "Let the oil flow" from the South Lawn — Israeli jets were over Beirut. On Trump's birthday, the day the deal was supposed to be signed, Israel struck the Dahiyeh suburb, killing three people. Trump posted that the attack "should not have happened, particularly on a special day." Netanyahu noted the complaint. Then he kept going.
This pattern has now repeated itself so many times across the past three months that it has stopped looking like a diplomatic failure and started looking like a diplomatic arrangement. It is not one. But it functions like one — because both sides have learned exactly what the other will and will not do, and they have calibrated their behaviour accordingly. Netanyahu knows Trump will swear at him. Trump knows Israel will keep striking. Both accept the equilibrium. The people dying in Lebanon are the cost of that equilibrium, and no one in either capital is treating it as a cost that needs to be reduced.
The Leverage Gap
Let us be precise about what Trump actually has available to him, because the gap between his available tools and his willingness to use them is the central analytical fact of the next 60 days.
Trump approved nearly $12 billion in major arms sales to Israel since taking office. He reversed Biden's partial arms embargo on day one, describing it as "wrongly withheld" weapons. He has expedited $4 billion in military assistance using emergency authorities, bypassing Congressional oversight five times. He repealed the National Security Memorandum that required arms recipients to commit not to target civilians. In structural terms, Trump has done everything a president could do to maximise Israeli military capacity in Lebanon — and then spent the same period posting Truth Social complaints about how Israel is using that capacity.
The Responsible Statecraft analysis of the leverage question is the most honest account available: Trump does not have a silver bullet, but he has an extraordinary amount of leverage — if he is willing to use it. Josh Paul, who spent more than a decade overseeing US arms transfers at the State Department, has noted that Israeli F-35s would probably not be able to operate for more than a month or two without US spare parts. Israel's air-to-ground missile stockpiles are heavily US-sourced. Cato Institute analyst Jon Hoffman has argued separately that even a credible threat to withhold support would fundamentally alter Israeli military calculus by removing the assumption of guaranteed American backing. Trump has declined to send that signal. Netanyahu has read the absence of that signal correctly. Lebanon continues.
Why Netanyahu Can Keep Going
There is a domestic Israeli logic to the Lebanon campaign that operates independently of whatever Trump says on Truth Social. Netanyahu is preparing for a domestic election in the context of a war that, regardless of the MOU's Article 1 language, Israel was never a party to. Hezbollah is diminished but not disarmed. The Ali al-Taher hilltop dispute — which triggered the most recent cycle of strikes — is about strategic terrain in southern Lebanon that the IDF has been trying to secure for months. These are operational objectives with their own momentum.
More fundamentally, Netanyahu has correctly identified that Trump's Lebanon anger is not about Lebanon. It is about deal-risk. Trump wants the Iran deal because he wants Hormuz open, because he wants energy prices down, because he wants the Fed to hold or cut rather than hike. The moment the Iran deal is either secured or definitively collapsed, Trump's incentive to pressure Israel on Lebanon disappears. Netanyahu is therefore not facing a principled US objection to Israeli military operations in Lebanon. He is facing a transactional US objection to those operations at this particular moment, in this particular diplomatic context. He has learned to wait Trump out. So far, it has worked every time.
The Managed Retaliation Pattern
What has actually emerged over the past 60-plus days of this conflict is something more stable than either full Israeli restraint or full Israeli escalation. Call it managed retaliation: a pattern in which Israel strikes, Iran or Hezbollah responds at a calibrated level, the US expresses displeasure, both sides pull back just enough to keep the diplomatic process alive, and then the cycle repeats. The Burgenstock cancellation Friday was not a breakdown. It was the pattern operating as designed. Iran used its Hormuz lever to register the complaint. Both delegations flew to Switzerland anyway. Sunday talks are proceeding. The cycle absorbed Friday's strikes and Saturday's closure declaration without producing either a war restart or a genuine ceasefire.
This pattern is stable in a narrow sense — it has not yet produced a full collapse of the MOU framework — but it is deeply unstable in its underlying dynamics. Every cycle of managed retaliation degrades something: Lebanese civilian infrastructure, Hezbollah's capacity to be a viable political interlocutor, IDF soldiers' lives, Iranian domestic political tolerance for a deal that their own IRGC general staff publicly called a US defeat. The MOU's 60-day window will almost certainly be extended — the structural pressures on both sides to keep the process alive outweigh the pressures to collapse it — but the window will be extended in a Lebanon environment that gets more precarious, not more stable, with each passing week.
What Would Actually Change Trump's Calculation
There are scenarios in which Trump would impose real consequences on Israel. None of them are likely in the next 60 days, but they are worth naming precisely, because they define the outer boundaries of the current arrangement.
The first is if Israel strikes Iran directly. Trump cancelled planned US strikes on Iran once during these negotiations — the action he reminded Netanyahu of when warning him about Lebanon. A unilateral Israeli strike on Iranian territory would threaten to restart a war that Trump has staked enormous political capital on ending. This is the one red line that has some evidence of being real. It is also the one Netanyahu has, so far, respected.
The second is if the 60-day window produces nothing and the Iran deal collapses publicly and catastrophically. In that scenario, the domestic US political cost of the relationship with Netanyahu — who would be seen as having sabotaged Trump's signature foreign policy achievement — might be sufficient to produce a genuine rupture. But this requires the deal to collapse in a way that is unambiguously Israel's fault, which Iran would need to cooperate in making clear, which it has so far declined to do. Iran wants the deal more than it wants to assign blame.
The third, and most structurally interesting, is Congress. Forty senators voted to block weapons transfers to Israel in April 2026 — a record. Sixty-six House members have sponsored a bill to prevent Trump from sending weapons to Israel entirely. This is driven by Democrats, and Trump controls enough Republicans to prevent veto-proof majorities. But the trajectory is real. If Lebanon continues to produce mass civilian casualties — 3,756 killed as of the latest Lebanese health ministry count, more than 1.1 million displaced (OCHA, May 2026) — the Congressional arithmetic will keep tightening. At some point, a Republican senator from a swing state may conclude that the political cost of continued Israeli arms transfers exceeds the political cost of breaking with Trump on Israel. That moment is not imminent. The trend line suggests it is not as distant as it would have seemed six months ago.
What Iran Understands That Coverage Misses
Iran's negotiating posture — the Hormuz lever deployed Saturday while the delegation flew to Switzerland Sunday — makes complete sense in this context. Iran has correctly read that Trump will not impose real consequences on Israel during the 60-day window. It has therefore concluded that the Hormuz lever is the only enforcement mechanism available for Article 1. The declaratory closure costs Iran almost nothing as long as ships keep moving and CENTCOM keeps denying it. It keeps Lebanon on the Burgenstock agenda. It gives Ghalibaf something to show his domestic audience. And it forces the US to publicly acknowledge that it cannot enforce Article 1 — which reinforces Iran's negotiating position that the US and Israel are effectively one party to the dispute.
Iran is not trying to collapse the 60-day window. It is trying to shape what gets negotiated inside it. The Lebanon question — which the US insists is separate from the nuclear track and Iran insists is foundational to it — will not be resolved. But Iran's leverage on this question is real, durable, and entirely independent of whether Trump ever uses a single expletive with Netanyahu again. Hormuz is the enforcement mechanism that Article 1 lacks. Iran knows this. The US knows this. Netanyahu knows this too, which is why the strikes continue at a level calibrated to keep both the Hormuz lever and the diplomatic window simultaneously active.
The 60-day negotiating window will likely survive. The Lebanon ceasefire will likely not. And the gap between those two facts is where the entire future of the deal will be decided — not in Burgenstock, and not on Truth Social, but in the daily military decisions of a government that has correctly concluded that the most powerful country on earth has decided, for now, that the swearing is enough.
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