Israel asked Trump to wait on his Iran strike, but in doing so gave away the one thing it can’t afford to lose: the claim that it controls escalation. Right, so news has now emerged that Benjamin Netanyahu had asked Donald Trump to delay that expected strike on Iran. Not cancel it. Delay it. But he was so keen last June wasn’t he? What’s changed then? Well the reason being briefed is that Israel is now worried it can’t absorb what comes back if the US goes ahead. Not so cocky this time it seems! That single move removes a lot of assumed certainty. Because the country that has spent years presenting itself as escalation-proof, having learned the hard way last June that it isn’t, has gone even further in its reasoning. It is now warning about stretched defences, retaliation risk, and timing. Which means the confidence you were hearing about how this would play out has all now effectively been quietly withdrawn. At the same time, Israel’s intelligence chief is in the US trying to manage the fallout, a US senator is flying to Israel to push escalation anyway, and Iran is openly floating talks instead of war. So the old story, where confrontation was inevitable and controlled, doesn’t hold anymore, and its not just Trump holding back because he’s perhaps waiting on the Navy, but because Israel has panicked as well now. The machinery is still running, but the brakes are being argued over in public and who is actually driving at this point is anybody’s guess. Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu has it seems asked Donald Trump to hold off on that strike on Iran, another facet to this story now coming out; not because he’s suddenly found a conscience, but because Israel’s own missile-defence stocks are being described as depleted and its home front is being treated as the obvious target for retaliation if the US pulls the trigger.

The United States entered a strike readiness posture against Iran and then stopped - so is it all off or is there more to it? Right, so the US has moved to strike Iran, entered a readiness posture, and then suddenly it stopped. Was it because the forces in place weren’t enough to do it safely? Not all the pieces were on the board perhaps? Well maybe so. The regional bases were exposed, civilian airspace started closing, markets reacted, and only after that did Washington order an aircraft carrier strike group to cross half the planet to catch up with the threat it itself was responsible for making, because there was very much a distinct lack of naval backup. Once you realise the strike couldn’t be launched from where the US already was, suddenly this pause, whilst a strike group makes its way to the Middle East makes more sense. Those statements stop behaving like decisions and start behaving like stalling, and the people calling this restraint need to explain why hardware only starts moving after the threat has apparently now fizzled out. So has Trump had his bluff called by Israel, or has he simply realised he was going to attack Iran from the worst position possible? Right, so Trump has been threatening “strong action” against Iran, and then the most useful thing for any threat merchant to discover has happened: the physical conditions for a clean opening move weren’t there waiting for him. A US aircraft carrier strike group, that of the USS Abraham Lincoln has been ordered away from the South China Sea and is heading towards West Asia, with reporting that puts its arrival in the region at least a week away, and with all the accompanying destroyers named in that reporting, a full strike group, the type of thing that moves when you mean business, not just to flex. This is a deployment being briefed into the public record. The story is not a single decision, or a single phone call, or one of those “at this time” moments, it is a real repositioning of heavy kit because the existing situation for the US in the Middle East was not been enough to make the threat as credible as perhaps some might have wished and that’s before you even get onto the part where civilian airspace has been closing and rerouting in the background, as airlines hedge their bets that this isn’t a safe place to fly.

Israel has taken its Lebanon campaign north using F-35s, an escalation that hasn’t just breached the ceasefire again, but done so on steroids. Right, so Israel has been breaching the so-called Lebanon ceasefire from the moment it was signed, with regular strikes, incursions, and violations that everyone politely pretended were “incidents.” That fiction has now been stretched past breaking point, because Israel hasn’t just kept breaching it, it has expanded those breaches northward and done it openly with F-35s no less. The restraint people were relying on was never that Israel would stop, it was that the breaches would stay limited, stay south. That limit has now gone as well. The ceasefire isn’t failing, it’s always been irrelevant in practice and is now being treated even more so, and in full view of the supposed guarantors who were meant to make it mean something. Once that happens, a lot of confident commentary about enforcement and monitoring stops sounding reassuring and starts sounding evasive. Because what’s being tested here isn’t Israel’s firepower, it’s how much longer the rules people keep invoking we’re going to pretend mean anything. Right, so Israel has gone back to using F-35s over Lebanon and it has hit targets well outside the narrow mental box that people were being trained to keep this in, the “south only” box, the “border enforcement” box, the “it’s all still technically contained” box, and you can dress it up in whatever official vocabulary you like but it is still the same practical act, an air force with political cover striking another country at will. The Israeli government can give you a menu of justifications for that, and it will usually pick the one that makes it sound like a reluctant response rather than a chosen policy, but the part that matters for the public record is the act itself, the aircraft, the locations, the timing, and the lack of any visible restraint imposed from outside. When a strike campaign expands and there is no outward consequence, that expansion becomes part of the operating environment and everybody else has to think inside it.