“Heavy.” This is how the American press described the telephone exchange between the American president and the Israeli Prime Minister on Tuesday evening. At the heart of this quarrel: a dispute over the strategy to adopt in Iran, according to several sources close to the matter cited by the media Axios. Benyamin Netanyahu would have strongly criticized the diplomatic route, which Donald Trump currently favors. “Bibi was furious,” said one of them.
These differences are nothing new, but the tension seems to have increased a notch between the two men. Israel has long expressed skepticism that Iran would honor any agreement to dismantle its nuclear program and refrain from attacking countries in the region. But Benjamin Netanyahu would have vigorously hammered out these arguments during Tuesday’s call as well as during a previous interview on Sunday, says the Wall Street Journal.
Divergences on war objectives for Washington and Tel Aviv
For his part, Donald Trump seeks to end a war that is economically costly and unpopular in the United States. And his position on Tuesday was not exactly the same as that of Sunday. If Trump would have first indicated that he was considering launching new targeted attacks against Iran, an operation called “Sledgehammer”, the latter would have backed down at the request of his Gulf allies, reveals CNN. Despite the various testimonies to this effect, Trump denied any difference with his Israeli counterpart, going so far as to assure, the day after the call, that the call had gone well and affirming, regarding Benyamin Netanyahu: “He will do everything I want him to do.”
But Tel Aviv seems rather determined to do everything to block the adoption of an agreement that does not resolve the nuclear issue. “If the Americans get a deal in which all the enriched uranium is exported and the enrichment facilities dismantled, then from the Israeli point of view it’s a good deal,” analyzes Yaakov Amidror, a researcher at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, at the Wall Street Journal. “If it’s a bad deal, Israel will do everything it can to prevent its implementation.”
Iranian uranium and the Strait of Hormuz remain blocking points
This week was marked by intense diplomatic activity on the Iranian issue, notably involving Pakistan and Qatar. Mediators reported little progress in negotiations at the start of the week, with the United States and Iran each taking firm positions with no real sign of compromise regarding the nuclear issue, the Strait of Hormuz or sanctions relief.
Reuters, citing two senior Iranian sources, reported that Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei had ordered that the country’s stockpiles of enriched uranium not be exported. Information immediately denied by an American official, who declared that no directive of this type had been communicated to the White House on Thursday morning in the United States. Asked Thursday about the possibility for Iran to keep its highly enriched uranium, Donald Trump was inflexible: “No, no, we will recover it. And added: “We don’t need it; we don’t want it. We will probably destroy it after we get it back.”
Some analysts still believe that a memorandum of understanding deferring the most difficult issues could be possible thanks to a few basic compromises. “There are encouraging signs, but I don’t want to be too optimistic,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in Florida on Thursday, before his departure for Sweden and India. For his part, Donald Trump continues to pose the threat of a resumption of military actions, even if he seems determined to avoid it behind the scenes. “If we don’t get the right answers, things can deteriorate very quickly. We are all ready to go back to war,” he assured Wednesday.
