The New York Times reports:

Israel now finds itself counting the ways that Mr. Netanyahu’s grand strategy against Iran has failed.

And Israelis are increasingly convinced that it will make the 2015 Iran nuclear deal look “perfect in comparison,” as the Netanyahu biographer Ben Caspit wrote in the Israeli daily Maariv on Monday.

For more than a decade, Mr. Netanyahu has steadily raised his bets in pursuing his strategy against Iran. His 2015 address to Congress denouncing then-President Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran broke with decades of Israeli bipartisanship and left Mr. Netanyahu frozen out of the talks.

His alliance with President Trump helped turn some Democrats against Israel. The war with Iran, and the perception that Israel had dragged the United States into it, added many Republicans to that column.

With its lofty goal of toppling the Iranian regime, the war was the culmination of Mr. Netanyahu’s long-term strategy. But it ended up showing Iran that the thing it feared most — the might of the U.S. military — was something that it could withstand, said Shira Efron, an analyst at RAND Corporation, a think tank.

“Israel has lost all its leverage, and this has real costs,” she said. “The U.S. can just sort of walk away. But Israel is here in the region with an Iran that is only more threatening.”

Mr. Katz, the analyst and a former editor of The Jerusalem Post, said the upshot of the U.S.-Iran agreement was a return to Israel’s strategic position in the region before the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel that started the war in Gaza.

“If there is intelligence one day in the future that Iran is building a nuclear weapon and enriching the military-grade uranium, Israel will have to go it alone,” he said. “We can’t rely on anyone else now.”

Mr. Katz said that Israel’s three main current adversaries — Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran — could persuasively argue that they had prevailed in their conflicts with Israel. [Continue reading…]