Alright, this one is genuinely difficult to wrap your head around — not because the facts are complicated, but because the contradictions are so glaring that most coverage just... sidesteps them. So here's what Daniel sent us: Could Israel have launched Operation Epic Fury without US support? Do Israeli strategists think the joint operation was a strategic mistake? And then there's this thing that happened in Islamabad — the US and Iran sat down for twenty-one hours of direct talks to end a war that the US and Israel launched together, and Israel wasn't in the room. How does that work? Who's actually been calling the shots in this coalition? And can you even call it a coalition if one side is negotiating peace while the other is bombing Lebanon? That's what we're digging into today.
Herman Poppleberry, by the way, for anyone new. And yeah — the Islamabad optic is the thing that keeps nagging at me. Because the structural incoherence there isn't just a diplomatic awkwardness. It's actually the key to understanding the entire war.
Before we get to Islamabad, let's settle the foundational question, because I think people assume the answer is obvious. Could Israel have done this alone?
Short answer: no. Not at this scale, and not sustainably. And the reasons why tell you a lot about the actual power dynamic here. The most critical issue is underground. Iran's nuclear facilities at Natanz and Isfahan were moved to deeply buried sites — we're talking about depths that require the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, which is a thirty-thousand-pound bunker buster carried exclusively by B-2 stealth bombers. Israel doesn't have B-2s. They don't have anything close to that capability at scale. So the first thing the US brought to this operation was the ability to actually hit the targets that mattered most.
And Israel had already demonstrated the limits of what it could do unilaterally. The twelve-day war in June 2025 — Trump declared Iran's nuclear program "obliterated" afterward, which, it turns out, was somewhat premature.
Very premature. Iran still has an estimated four hundred and forty kilograms of highly enriched uranium. That's enough material for more than ten weapons. So the June campaign degraded some infrastructure but didn't eliminate the program. Operation Epic Fury was supposed to finish the job — and doing that required American hardware. The first thirty-six hours of the campaign consumed over three thousand US-Israeli munitions combined. Israel's own stockpiles could not have sustained a six-week campaign at that tempo. That's not a criticism of the IDF — it's just arithmetic.
And then there's the Hormuz dimension, which is entirely a different category of operation.
Completely different. The US Navy is clearing Iranian sea mines from the Strait of Hormuz. Two guided-missile destroyers transited Hormuz on the actual day of the Islamabad talks — the first US warships to do so since the war began. Israel has no meaningful naval capacity in the Persian Gulf. None. Chuck Freilich, who was Israel's deputy national security advisor, makes this interesting observation: Israel brings greater conventional military capability than almost any US ally — he puts them second only to South Korea globally — but that comparison applies to air power and ground forces. The naval dimension of this war is a purely American operation. Israel is not a player in it.
So the operation required American capabilities that Israel simply doesn't possess. That's the military reality. But the strategic question is different — even if Israel needed US support to execute this, who wanted it more?
This is where it gets genuinely contested, and I think the honest answer is: both sides wanted it, but for different reasons, on different timelines, and with radically different endgames in mind. The "Netanyahu drove this" school has a lot of supporting evidence. Netanyahu admitted on March first that attacking Iran is something he's, quote, "longed to do for forty years." He made six visits to the White House in a single year — that's a record for any foreign leader. Senator Lindsey Graham reportedly coached Netanyahu on how to frame the case for Trump. Yousef Munayyer at Foreign Policy argues Netanyahu saw a convergence of closing windows: his own electoral calendar with Israeli elections in fall 2026, Trump's midterm vulnerability, and a Gallup poll showing for the first time more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis. Netanyahu calculated it was now or never.
The corruption trial is also sitting in the background of all of this. Netanyahu faces prison if he loses power.
Right, and that's not a small factor. His political survival and the war's strategic direction are dangerously intertwined. A leader who needs the war to continue for domestic political reasons is not making purely strategic calculations. But here's the counter-argument, and Freilich makes it forcefully: Trump is not a pushover on Israel. In the weeks before the launch, it was actually Trump who was pushing to go sooner, and Netanyahu who was pressing for a postponement, arguing neither side was fully prepared. Trump had already forced Netanyahu to accept a Gaza ceasefire. Trump had already forced him to end the June 2025 twelve-day war prematurely.
So Trump had leverage and used it. Which complicates the "Israel dragged us in" narrative.
Significantly. Trump had his own strategic fantasy for this operation — what people were calling a "Venezuela moment." Fast decapitation, regime change, declare victory, go home. That was Trump's framing, not Netanyahu's. Steven Simon at Foreign Policy wrote a piece specifically pushing back on the Israel-drove-everything narrative, arguing it echoes a problematic trope about Jewish political influence. The more accurate picture is probably two leaders who both wanted this war, reinforced each other's worst instincts, and then immediately diverged on what they were actually fighting for.
That divergence is where the story gets interesting. Because the evidence of friction between the US and Israel mid-campaign is extraordinary. Like, this is not subtle disagreement.
It's not subtle at all. When Israel struck thirty Iranian fuel depots on March seventh, the White House reaction, according to a White House advisor, was — and I'm quoting directly — "WTF. The president doesn't like the attack. He wants to save the oil." When Israel hit Iran's South Pars gas field on March eighteenth, Trump posted publicly that Israel had "violently lashed out" and the US "knew nothing about this particular attack." Even Lindsey Graham — who by all accounts helped push Trump toward the war — publicly urged Israel to "please be cautious about what targets you select."
Graham is essentially telling his own creation to calm down.
Which tells you everything. And then on March eleventh, Trump said there's "practically nothing left to target" and the war will end "soon." The same day, Israeli Defense Minister Katz said the war will continue "without any time limit, for as long as necessary." Foreign Policy ran a headline the following week: "The U.S. and Israel Aren't Fighting the Same War." That's not a rhetorical flourish. That's an accurate description of the operational reality.
So we have a joint campaign with no unified command, no shared endgame, and apparently no mechanism for one side to bind the other. Which brings us to Islamabad — because that structural problem becomes completely explicit the moment you sit down at a negotiating table.
The Islamabad talks are the most clarifying event of this entire war, and they've received surprisingly little analytical attention. Here's the situation: Pakistan brokers a two-week ceasefire and hosts direct US-Iran negotiations on April eleventh. JD Vance leads the American delegation. Iran's parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf leads Tehran's. The talks last twenty-one hours. And Israel is not there.
Now, you could argue there are practical reasons for that. Iran wouldn't sit in a room with Israel. But that's actually the problem, not the excuse.
That's the whole problem. Because Iran came to the table with a ten-point negotiation plan, and one of the central preconditions was an end to Israeli attacks on Lebanon. Not just attacks on Iran — attacks on Lebanon. And while Vance was in Islamabad, Israel struck over two hundred targets in Lebanon affiliated with Hezbollah in the preceding twenty-four hours. Netanyahu had already stated publicly that the ceasefire "does not include Lebanon." So the US was trying to negotiate a comprehensive settlement while its coalition partner was actively expanding the war in a theater that was explicitly part of Iran's demands.
Vance couldn't deliver on Iran's core condition because he doesn't control the Israeli military. Which means the US was negotiating with one hand tied behind its back — except the hand that was tied belonged to someone else.
A senior Pakistani source told Al Jazeera, and I think this quote is worth sitting with: "There are detractors in Tehran. Detractors in Washington. But the biggest impediment to peace is Israel — which benefits from perpetual conflict." Now, that framing has a political valence, and you can debate whether it's fair. But structurally, the observation is accurate: the US cannot make a commitment to Iran that covers Israeli military operations, because it doesn't have that authority. ABC News Australia ran a segment titled "Israel Derailing US-Iran Peace Talks in Islamabad." During the talks themselves, Netanyahu released a video saying Israel's campaign against Iran "is not over."
So the US is in a room trying to end a war, and its coalition partner is publicly announcing the war isn't ending. That's not a coalition. That's two separate foreign policies sharing some aircraft.
Foreign Policy's framing is exactly that — "two campaigns sharing the same airspace." And the thing is, both sides can point to the other as the reason the war has gone sideways. The US can say Israel's unilateral strikes on energy infrastructure undermined the economic pressure strategy. Israel can say the US's repeated pursuit of negotiations — the Islamabad talks, the ceasefire itself — undermined the military campaign before it achieved its objectives.
Speaking of objectives — what were they, and have any of them been achieved? Because Amos Harel at Haaretz is pretty brutal about this.
He's scathing. His April eighth piece is titled "Israel Botched the Iran War — and Shattered Its Standing in the U.S." His assessment after forty-four days: the Iranian regime endures. Hundreds of kilograms of enriched uranium remain. The missile program is still active. The Hezbollah front in Lebanon continues. And Israel's public standing in the United States — already eroding — has accelerated its decline. Freilich at the Stimson Center frames it this way: "It is becoming increasingly likely that the war will end without any of its primary objectives having been fully achieved — a military success but strategic failure." Which is a very specific kind of failure. You can destroy a lot of things and still lose.
The missile math problem is part of this. Walk me through that, because I think it reframes the cost calculation in a way that doesn't get enough attention.
David Petraeus coined the term "missile math" for exactly this dynamic. The core equation is: how many US interceptors remain versus how many Iranian launchers survive. An Iranian Shahed drone costs roughly seven thousand dollars to build. A THAAD interceptor costs twelve million dollars. Every time Iran launches a drone swarm and the US shoots it down, the exchange ratio is catastrophically unfavorable for the defense. CNAS analysts have warned that every week of this war deepens a readiness deficit that the US defense industry cannot quickly erase. And this isn't just an abstract accounting problem — it directly degrades Pacific deterrence. Russia and China are watching every interceptor fired. The capability you burn in the Persian Gulf is capability you don't have in the Taiwan Strait.
So there's a real argument that this war, whatever its outcome in the Middle East, is weakening the US position in the theater that actually matters strategically for the next decade.
That's the argument, and it's not coming from doves. It's coming from people who study force readiness. The US has been essential for defending Gulf allies and Israel itself from Iranian ballistic missile counterattacks, and those stockpiles are now significantly depleted. The economic cost on the Israeli side is also staggering — Haaretz estimates fifty to a hundred billion shekels and climbing.
There's a school of thought within Israel's defense establishment that they should have ended the war after two or three weeks, claimed an unequivocal military victory, and gotten out. Is that a serious position or hindsight revisionism?
It's a serious position, and it was apparently argued during the war, not just after. The argument is that the first phase of the campaign achieved genuine, demonstrable results — nuclear facilities struck, missile infrastructure degraded, command structures disrupted. At that point, Israel could have declared a clear military victory, stopped, and left Iran in a weakened but not fully recovered state. Instead, the campaign continued into a phase where the objectives shifted toward regime change — which is a fundamentally different and much harder problem — and where Iran's "mosaic" strategy of distributed resilience started to show its effectiveness.
The mosaic strategy — because Iran's approach here has genuinely surprised people.
It has exceeded expectations significantly. Iran's strategy is essentially: survive, threaten global oil markets, and wait. Iranian strategists believe that merely surviving a war with the United States constitutes a strategic victory. If the regime is still standing with its nuclear HEU stockpile intact — and four hundred and forty kilograms is intact enough for ten-plus weapons — then Iran wins strategically even if it's taken enormous military damage. The Hormuz threat has forced the Trump administration to negotiate repeatedly. Oil is hovering near a hundred dollars a barrel. Every negotiation Iran forces is a demonstration that its deterrence still functions.
The Suez analogy that's floating around is interesting here, because it cuts in a specific direction.
Daniel Levy at Al Jazeera invokes it, and it's worth taking seriously. In 1956, the UK and France joined Israel in a military campaign against Egypt — the Suez Crisis — and it became a defining end-of-empire moment for both European powers. The US forced them to withdraw. The argument is that Israel drawing the US into this Iran campaign may be remembered in analogous terms — a smaller power leveraging a larger one into a war that primarily serves the smaller power's interests, with the larger power eventually forced to negotiate its way out while the smaller power keeps fighting. The parallel isn't perfect — the US is far more capable than Britain in 1956, and the strategic interests overlap more genuinely — but the structural dynamic of a larger power finding it can't control the conflict it entered has real resonance.
Although the reverse reading is also available — that the US used Israel as the ground force for a war it wanted to fight but didn't want to own politically.
That's the other reading, and it's equally defensible. Trump gets to pursue regime change in Iran using Israeli political cover, Israeli air power, and Israeli ground intelligence — while maintaining some rhetorical distance when specific strikes go too far. The "we knew nothing about this particular attack" posts on social media are doing a lot of work there. Whether that was a deliberate strategy or just the inevitable result of a poorly structured coalition is hard to know from the outside.
Let's talk about Pakistan for a minute, because its role in this is genuinely unusual. The ceasefire brokerage, the Islamabad talks — Pakistan's positioning here is not what you'd expect from a country that, days before hosting these talks, had its defense minister publicly condemning Israel.
Pakistan's position is fascinatingly contradictory on the surface and actually quite coherent when you look at the incentives. Pakistan has close ties with Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, Qatar. It shares a border with Iran. Its ports sit near Hormuz. It has a relationship with China. And crucially — it doesn't host US military bases, which gives it a kind of credibility with Iran that most US partners lack. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir played central roles. Munir was in intensive contact with Vance, with special envoy Steve Witkoff, and with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi throughout. Munir has now been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, which is either a genuine recognition or an optimistic gesture depending on how the next ten days go.
The ceasefire expires April twenty-second. Which is nine days from now. And the talks collapsed.
The talks collapsed after twenty-one hours with no agreement. The core sticking point from the US side was a demand that Iran make an affirmative commitment — not just a temporary suspension, but a long-term commitment — that it will not seek a nuclear weapon. Iran refused. Iran also demanded the release of six billion dollars in frozen assets, an end to Israeli attacks on Lebanon, and the right to charge ships transiting Hormuz. The US couldn't deliver the Lebanon demand, as we discussed. After the talks failed, Trump ordered a naval blockade of Iranian ports and vowed to, in his words, "kill" Iranian warships that approach the blockade. Vance's final statement was: "We leave here with a very simple proposal — a method of understanding that is our final and best offer." Iran's ambassador framed it as "not an event, but a process." Those two framings are not compatible.
The Houthi precedent is interesting here, because Trump has already demonstrated he can walk away from a fight and call it a win.
Omar Shakir at Foreign Policy makes this point explicitly. The Houthi ceasefire in 2025 was messy and imperfect, but it held. Trump negotiated bilaterally with the Houthis without including Israel or other regional actors. The US stopped fighting. Israel kept going. Trump called it a win. The same template is structurally available for Iran — a US-only ceasefire that leaves Israel to continue its Lebanon campaign. The question is whether Trump will use it, and whether the naval blockade announcement is leverage for a deal or the beginning of a new escalation.
By the way — today's script is powered by Claude Sonnet four point six. Just in case you were wondering who's been doing the heavy lifting here.
Working overtime on this one, I'd say. Because the honest summary of where we are is: a joint operation that wasn't really joint, a coalition that doesn't share an endgame, a negotiation that couldn't cover the whole war, and a ceasefire expiring in nine days with no successor agreement. The structural incoherence that Islamabad exposed isn't a diplomatic failure — it's a reflection of the fact that these two campaigns were always going to diverge, because the two parties never actually agreed on what success looked like.
Netanyahu's answer to "what does success look like" is regime change and permanent elimination of Iran's nuclear program. Trump's answer, when he's being honest, is a fast win he can declare and move on from. Those aren't the same war.
And Iran's strategy exploits exactly that gap. If Iran can make the war expensive enough, long enough, and diplomatically complicated enough that the US decides it wants out on terms that don't include regime change — then Iran wins strategically while losing militarily. The mosaic survives. The HEU stockpile survives. The regime survives. And Iran can spend the next decade rebuilding while pointing to the fact that it withstood a joint US-Israeli attack.
Which, if you're an Iranian strategist, is a genuinely compelling outcome.
It's a rational one. The question for Israel is whether a strategically surviving Iran — damaged but intact, with its nuclear material still in hand — is actually better or worse than the pre-war status quo. Harel at Haaretz seems to think the answer is worse, and a growing number of voices in Israel's defense establishment agree. The war has cost Israel enormously in treasure, in manpower — the IDF chief warned the military could "collapse in on itself" due to shortages, which is a stunning thing for a chief of staff to say publicly — and in its standing with the American public. That Gallup finding — more Americans sympathizing with Palestinians than Israelis for the first time — is the kind of structural shift that doesn't reverse quickly.
The Haredi draft exemption issue is almost surreal in this context. You're in a shooting war, your military chief is warning about manpower collapse, and the government is formalizing exemptions for the largest growing demographic in the country.
The domestic political entanglement here is severe. Netanyahu's coalition depends on Haredi parties. Haredi draft exemptions are a condition of that coalition's survival. His coalition's survival is a condition of his own political and legal survival. So you have a situation where the war's strategic requirements — more soldiers — are in direct conflict with the political requirements of the government prosecuting the war. That's not a stable configuration.
So where does this leave us as a practical matter going into the next two weeks?
A few things seem clear. First, the US retains the ability to exit this war on its own terms, using the Houthi template — a bilateral arrangement with Iran that doesn't bind Israel. Whether Trump does this depends on whether the naval blockade produces Iranian flexibility or Iranian escalation. Second, Israel's ability to continue independently degrades over time — the munitions math, the manpower math, and the diplomatic isolation math all work against it. Third, Iran's strategy of surviving and waiting has proven more effective than expected, which means the longer this runs, the more Iran's strategic position improves relative to its military position. And fourth, Islamabad wasn't a failure of diplomacy — it was a revelation of structure. You cannot negotiate a comprehensive settlement when one party to the coalition can't bind the other, and when the other is actively expanding the war during the talks.
The Islamabad image is going to stick. JD Vance negotiating in a conference room while Netanyahu is releasing videos saying the campaign isn't over — that's the picture of this coalition.
And the headline that ran after the talks collapsed says it all: "Trump Targets Hormuz After Iran Talks Fail, as Netanyahu Waits on the Sidelines." The US is now escalating its naval posture. Israel is watching from the sidelines of that decision, the same way the US was watching from the sidelines of the Lebanon strikes. Two separate foreign policies, two separate escalation ladders, one shared conflict they can neither win together nor exit independently.
That's a genuinely uncomfortable place to be with nine days left on a ceasefire clock.
It is. And the honest assessment — not from critics of the war, but from people like Freilich who spent careers inside Israel's national security establishment — is that the operation may end up being a military success and a strategic failure simultaneously. A lot of things got destroyed. Whether the things that mattered most — the nuclear program, the regime, the missile threat to Israel — have been durably addressed is a different question, and the answer right now is probably no.
Alright. That's the picture as it stands. A war that needed both parties to launch, that neither party can end alone, being negotiated by only one of them, while the other keeps fighting. Whatever you call that, it's not a coalition in any traditional sense.
It's a partnership of convenience that became a strategic trap — and figuring out who set the trap for whom may be the most contested historical question of the next decade.
Thanks as always to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping this thing running. And a genuine thank you to Modal for the GPU credits that make this show possible — we'd be nowhere without them. This has been My Weird Prompts. If you want to follow along as this situation develops, search for us on Telegram — My Weird Prompts — and you'll get notified when new episodes drop. We'll see you next time.
Take care.
