Here's the smart way for Trump to end the Israel-Iran war

Sydney Morning Herald

5 hours ago

Behind the strikes and counterstrikes in the current Israel-Iran war stands the clash of two strategic doctrines, one animating Iran and the other animating Israel, that are both deeply flawed. President Donald Trump has a chance to correct both of them and to create the best opportunity for stabilising the Middle East in decades — if he is up to it.
Iran's flawed strategic doctrine, which was also practised by its proxy, Hezbollah, to equally bad result, is a doctrine I call trying to out-crazy an adversary. Iran and Hezbollah are always ready to go all the way, thinking that whatever their opponents might do in response, Hezbollah or Iran will always outdo them with a more extreme measure.
You name it – assassinate the prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri; blow up the US embassy in Beirut; help Bashar Assad murder thousands of his own people to stay in power – the imprints of Iran and its Hezbollah proxy are behind them all, together or separately. They are telling the world in effect: 'No one will out-crazy us, so beware if you get in a fight with us, you will lose. Because we go all the way — and you moderates just go away.'
That Iranian doctrine did help Hezbollah drive Israel out of southern Lebanon. But where it fell short was Iran and Hezbollah thinking they could drive Israelis out of their biblical homeland. Iran and Hezbollah are delusional in this regard – Hamas too. They keep referring to the Jewish state as a foreign colonial enterprise, with no indigenous connection to the land, and therefore they assume the Jews will eventually meet the same fate as the Belgians in the Belgian Congo. That is, under enough pressure they will eventually go back to their own version of Belgium.
But the Israeli Jews have no Belgium. They are as indigenous to their biblical homeland as the Palestinians, no matter what 'anticolonial' nonsense they teach at elite universities. Therefore, you will never out-crazy the Israeli Jews. If push comes to shove, they will out-crazy you.
Former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, both thought that Israel would never try to kill them personally, that Israel was, as Nasrallah liked to say, a 'spider web' that would just unravel one day under pressure. He paid with his life with that miscalculation last year, and the supreme leader probably would have as well if Trump had not intervened, reportedly, last week to stop Israel from killing him. These Israeli Jews will not be out-crazied. That is how they still have a state in a very tough neighbourhood.
That said, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his band of extremists running the Israeli government today are in the grip of their own strategic fallacy, which I call the doctrine of 'once and for all'.
I wish I had a dollar for every time, after some murderous attack on Israeli Jews by Palestinians or Iranian proxies, the Israeli government declared that it was going to solve the problem with force 'once and for all'.