I just read an op-ed in the NY Times from Thomas Freidman, and I don't really disagree with any of his points. I do think its fantasy to think that any of the politicians mentioned will do as he suggests though:
The Smart Way for Trump to End the Israel-Iran War
June 16, 2025
Credit...Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Listen to this article · 8:03 min Learn more
Share full article
659
Thomas L. Friedman
By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist
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 Trump has a chance to correct both of them and to create the best opportunity for stabilizing the Middle East in decades — if he is up to it.
Iran’s flawed strategic doctrine, which was also practiced by its proxy, Hezbollah, to equally bad results, 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 American Embassy in Beirut; help Bashar al-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.
They will play by the local rules, and yes, those are not the rules of the Geneva Conventions. They are the rules of the Middle East, which I call Hama Rules — named after the Hama attacks perpetrated by the Syrian government of Hafez al-Assad in 1982, the aftermath of which I covered. Al-Assad wiped out the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama by mercilessly leveling whole swaths of the city, whole blocks of apartments, into a parking lot. Hama rules are no rules at all.
The former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, both thought that they could out-crazy the Israeli Jews, 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 neighborhood.
That said, 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.”
There are only two ways to finish off this problem once and for all. One is for Israel to permanently occupy the West Bank, Gaza and all of Iran, as America did to Germany and Japan after World War II, and try to change the political culture. But Israel has no chance of occupying all of Iran, and it has occupied the West Bank for 58 years and still has not wiped out Hamas’s influence there — let alone secular Palestinian nationalism. That is because Palestinians are every bit as indigenous as the Jews in their homeland. Israel will never “once and for all” them into submission, unless they kill every last one.
The only way to even get close to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “once and for all” is by working toward a two-state solution. Which brings me to what Trump should do now regarding Iran. He says he still hopes “there’s going to be a deal.” If he wants a good deal, he should declare that he is doing two things at once.
One, that he will equip Israel’s Air Force with the B-2 bombers and 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs and U.S. trainers that would give Israel the capacity to destroy all of Iran’s underground nuclear facilities unless Iran immediately agrees to allow teams from the International Atomic Energy Agency to disassemble these facilities and to have access into every nuclear site in Iran to recover all fissile material that Tehran has generated. Only if Iran completely complies with these conditions should it be allowed to have a civilian nuclear program under strict IAEA controls. But Iran will comply only under a credible threat of force.
At the same time, Trump should declare that his administration recognizes the Palestinians as a people who have a right to national self-determination. But to realize that, they must demonstrate that they can fulfill the responsibilities of statehood by generating a new Palestinian Authority leadership that the United States deems credible, free of corruption and committed both to effectively serving Palestinian citizens in the West Bank and Gaza and to coexisting with Israel.
Trump must also make clear, though, that he will not tolerate the rapid settlement expansion and one-state reality that Israel is now creating, which is a prescription for a forever war because Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza won’t disappear or “once and for all” give up their national identity and aspirations. (At the end of May the Netanyahu government approved 22 new Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank — the largest expansion in decades — which is simply insane.)
To that end, Trump could also say that his administration will be committed to sponsoring peace talks for a two-state solution — with the Trump peace plan for a pathway toward two states from his previous presidency as the minimum starting point but not ending point. That, the parties themselves must negotiate directly.
To be ready to out-crazy the crazies has been a necessary condition for Israel to survive in the Middle East, but it is not a sufficient one. As the Gaza war demonstrates, that strategy just begets more of the same. Even if it seems unfair at times, even if it seems naïve at times, a peace-loving nation has to keep exploring alternatives and pairing force with diplomacy. It’s not only the best policy for Israel vis-à-vis the Palestinians; it’s also the best way for Israel and America to isolate Iran.
As such, if Trump really wants to forge peace in the Middle East, which I believe he does, America must not become Netanyahu’s captive or Iran’s patsy. The United States has no interest in making Israel safe for messianic expansion or Iran safe for nuclear messianism. Trump must ignore the dangerous, knee-jerk isolationism of JD Vance. And he must eschew the equally foolish Netanyahu-can-do-no-wrong advice of G.O.P. armchair generals and evangelicals. Neither serves U.S. interests or credibility in the region.
The necessary but not sufficient conditions for peace in the Middle East that will allow America to reduce, but not end, its military presence there are that Iran be forced to draw a clear western border and stop trying to colonize its Arab neighbors and destroy Israel with a nuclear bomb, that Israel be forced to draw a clear eastern border and stop trying to colonize the whole of the West Bank and that Palestinians be forced to draw clear eastern and western borders between Israel and Jordan and stop with the “river to the sea” nonsense.
This war has created the best opportunity in decades for a wise statesman to use what Dennis Ross, a longtime Middle East negotiator, calls in his new book, Statecraft 2.0, “coercive diplomacy.” Is Trump up to that? I really don’t know, but we’re going to find out real soon.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/opinion/trump-israel-iran-war.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20250617&instance_id=156686&nl=opinion-today®i_id=123091539&segment_id=200089&user_id=601346289b01eb09175f5b85b558a7a4
This is how the world
should work with the rational and self-interested populations using diplomacy to navigate to a lasting peace that logically improves everyone's lives.
As such, it is completely naive. Friedman is hanging onto the two-state solution that nobody in the region wants, and which both sides have intentionally sabotaged. What they each want is to defeat the other, in a genocidal way, and to obtain full and exclusive control over the Holy Dirt.
Today, the 2-state solution is only really pursued by Democrats in the U.S, particularly Dems of the 1990s vintage. The fundamental flaw is the same now as it was 30 years ago: The combatants don't want peace. It has no better chance of succeeding now than it did during the 1993 Oslo Accords.
Not to mention that the most issue-engaged people in the U.S. right now are evangelical Christians, whose antisemitic great-grandparents first shut the refugee and immigration doors to Jews trying to flee the European holocaust, and then colluded to send the survivors to the one place in the Middle East where they could assume the Arabs would finish the job the Holocaust started.
Today's Christian fundamentalism has transformed (since the Yom Kippur war) into a pro-Israeli movement, with many fundies flying Israeli flags from their doorsteps. But they don't only want Israel to thrive so that they can take tourist trips to the Holy Dirt. They also hold apocalyptic beliefs in which the Jews will eventually be destroyed in a massive war, leading to a chain of events that ends with the second coming of Jesus and their own rapture into heaven.
So why did Trump scuttle the nuclear agreement that might have prevented Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons? Perhaps that outcome would have conflicted with evangelicals' hopes of living to see Israel leveled by nuclear weapons. Why did Trump move the US embassy to Jerusalem? Perhaps it was a necessary step in the territorial expansion of Israel to control the entire holy land prior to the great war.
The Israelis are fine with this version of antisemitism because it results in an endless stream of US tax dollars and the sort of advanced weapons that allow for strikes deep in Iran. With allies like this, who needs peace? Yet, fissures could develop in such an alliance of convenience. If Iran's nuclear weapons capacity was actually destroyed, evangelicals might be disappointed. Similarly, if Israel was to assassinate the ayatollah, and throw Iran into political paralysis, who else would play that part in the evangelicals' prophecy?
So yea, 3 sides who all want war for different reasons are in control, and 1990's era Democrats are talking about a fantasy world where that's not the case. The rest of us are along for the ride, because the idea of cutting aid to Israel if they refuse to play nice with their neighbors is considered taboo. If the U.S. gets its way, this could very well end with a 2nd Holocaust - this time a nuclear one.
