GEW Essays & Reports/ GEW Reports & Analyses
Hichem Karoui & GEW Intelligence Unit
Executive Summary
The Netanyahu government’s strategic ambition — variously described as the “Greater Israel” project — rested on a coherent, if audacious, architecture: neutralise Palestinian resistance through overwhelming force, dismantle the Iranian-backed “Axis of Resistance,” expand the Abraham Accords to absorb the Arab world into a pro-Israel normalization framework, and, from that position of total regional dominance, formalise Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, Gaza, southern Lebanon, and occupied Syrian territory. By 2025–2026, each pillar of that architecture had either collapsed or was under existential strain — not principally because of European condemnation, ICJ proceedings, or Arab diplomatic objections, but because Iran refused to be removed from the equation. As former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman observed in interviews with Glenn Diesen, the “Greater Israel Project is collapsing,” and Iran — the one adversary Israel could not neutralise despite two rounds of military conflict — is the structural reason why (Freeman 2026).
This article traces the intellectual foundations of Israel’s “absolute security” doctrine, the territorial logic that flows from it, the instruments deployed by the Netanyahu government with American support to achieve regional hegemony, and the specific ways in which Iran’s resistance — military, economic, and strategic — frustrated that design. It then maps the scenarios emerging from the June 2026 US–Iran Memorandum of Understanding.
I. The Doctrine of Absolute Security: When One State’s Safety Demands Regional Insecurity
Israel’s strategic doctrine has long been built around a concept of “permanent” or “absolute” security. The harder the state pursues absolute security, the more it converts war into the very condition of the state itself — a structural paradox that simultaneously generates the insecurity of every neighbour. The doctrine holds that Israel must maintain overwhelming military superiority over any possible coalition of hostile states, that no hostile military capability can be permitted to mature on its borders, and that pre-emptive action is not only legitimate but obligatory. Over time, this logic expanded geographically: initially focused on Egypt, Syria and Jordan, it eventually extended to Lebanon, Yemen, Qatar, and Iran (Middle East Eye 2025; Strategic Paradox 2025).
The corollary, as Chas Freeman has stated bluntly, is that there is no absolute security for any of Israel’s neighbours. A state claiming absolute security for itself structurally imposes relative insecurity — or outright subjugation — on those surrounding it. This is not a polemical observation but a geostrategic axiom: when one actor in a security system claims maximum inviolability, it must, by definition, degrade the security environment of all adjacent actors. Applied to the Middle East, it explains why Israeli military doctrine has evolved from defensive deterrence toward what critics call a “permanent offence,” in which wars are not exceptions to a normal order but routine instruments of statecraft (Absolute Security 2025; Strategic Paradox 2025; Freeman 2026).
The Gaza war of October 2023 accelerated this shift from doctrine into policy. Following Hamas’s October 7 attack, the Netanyahu government — dominated by far-right ministers openly invoking the vocabulary of Greater Israel — began to act on what had previously been fringe ideology. In July 2025, the Israeli Knesset adopted a motion calling for the annexation of the entire West Bank, declaring it “an inseparable part of the Land of Israel”. Eighty-two percent of the West Bank had been slated for formal annexation procedures. In parallel, Israel occupied substantial portions of southern Lebanon beyond the territory taken in the 2006 war, pushing toward the Litani River, and seized additional Syrian territory as a “buffer zone” following Assad’s fall in December 2024. Between 2023 and early 2026, Israel had occupied more swaths of Gaza, Lebanon and Syria than in any comparable period in decades (Redraw Borders 2025; West Bank Annexation 2025; ICJ Proceedings 2025; UNRWA 2026).
The Israeli government approved a record 52 settlements in 2025. Senior ministers explicitly declared that the Gaza buffer zone was Israel’s “new border” and that the Litani River would become the northern frontier. Zionist parties across the opposition dropped ending the occupation from their political platforms. The Greater Israel project had ceased to be an aspiration discussed in settler think tanks; it had become the operating framework of the Israeli government (Condemn Annexation 2025; Redraw Borders 2025).
II. The Architecture of Expansion: Abraham Accords, Trump, and the Normalization Strategy
The Abraham Accords of 2020, brokered by the Trump administration’s first term, were always, at their core, a strategic realignment against Iran rather than a genuine peace architecture. The UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan normalised with Israel not from a sudden reconciliation with Zionism but from a cold calculation: align with Israeli and American military power to hedge against Iranian regional influence. Each signatory received concrete American compensation: the UAE received F-35 combat aircraft; Morocco gained US recognition of its Western Sahara claim; Sudan was removed from the US terrorism list. These were, as one analysis bluntly noted, “transactions with peace branding” (Abraham Accords Exposed 2025).
The strategic logic for Israel was more ambitious than it appeared. By normalising with Gulf states, Israel sought to:
- Decouple Arab legitimacy from the Palestinian cause, rendering Palestinian statehood diplomatically irrelevant (Abraham Accords Exposed 2025).
- Build a US-backed anti-Iran coalition under Israeli strategic leadership.
- Create the political conditions for annexation by eliminating Arab veto points — if Gulf states normalised without a Palestinian state, the Palestinian issue would lose its leverage.
- Extend Israeli military and intelligence presence through partner states, encircling Iran from multiple directions.
The crown jewel was Saudi Arabia. A Saudi normalisation — the country that controls Mecca, the symbolic capital of Sunni Islam — would have transformed the regional order. Hamas, which launched its October 7 attack precisely to prevent that outcome, understood that Saudi normalization would “permanently” render the Palestinian cause irrelevant in Arab politics. In a perverse logic, the attack succeeded in freezing normalisation, though at devastating cost to Palestinian civilians (Abraham Accords Exposed 2025).
Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025 re-energised the normalization agenda. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly reaffirmed the importance of expanding the Abraham Accords. US military and diplomatic support gave Netanyahu the confidence to pursue the military dimensions of the project — the Twelve-Day War against Iran in June 2025 and, subsequently, the broader 2026 Iran war — with the expectation that American air power, intelligence, and missile defence would ensure Israeli dominance. The calculation was that a militarily humiliated Iran would collapse or capitulate, stripping the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance of their external sponsor and opening the path to a comprehensive normalisation settlement (Accords Developments 2025; ACLED 2025; Iran Update 2025).
III. Iran’s Structural Role: The Last Obstacle
The Axis of Resistance — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Syrian state, Iraqi militias, the Houthis — had been Iran’s forward defence architecture: a layered system of non-state and quasi-state actors positioned on Israel’s borders that converted any Israeli offensive into a multi-front war. By deploying this network, Iran gained “leverage and deterrence without direct confrontation” (Twelve Days 2025). The genius of the strategy, from Tehran’s perspective, was that it allowed Iran to impose costs on Israel across the region while maintaining plausible deniability and avoiding direct conflict with the United States.
After October 7, Israel began methodically dismantling this architecture. By mid-2025, the results were striking. Hamas’s military leadership had been decapitated and its arsenal severely degraded after over 55,000 Palestinian deaths and the physical destruction of Gaza. Hezbollah, forced to accept disarmament in southern Lebanon under the November 2024 ceasefire, had lost its near-total political dominance of Lebanese politics and seen its secretary-general killed. The Assad regime, long a critical land bridge for Iranian weapons transfers to Hezbollah, fell in December 2024. The Syrian collapse ended Iran’s most important logistical corridor to the Mediterranean. Iranian-backed militias in Iraq had retreated into political activity, calculating that the benefits of state access and enrichment outweighed the risks of escalation. Only the Houthis, drawing on Iranian support and Yemeni territorial control, remained operationally active — and even they were two thousand kilometres from Tel Aviv, their missiles largely intercepted (Axis Collapse 2025; Reshaping ME 2025).
Iran entered its confrontation with Israel in June 2025 in a position of serious strategic isolation — its allies diminished, its regional network degraded, its supply lines severed. Thomas Juneau, Iran specialist at Chatham House, noted that this “changed the equation for Iran and limited its options,” adding that Israel’s demonstrated capacity for disproportionate force had made deterrence through proxy warfare effectively obsolete: “Bluffing no longer works against Israel’s escalation tactics” (Juneau 2025; Axis Collapse 2025).
But Iran itself had not been defeated. And this, ultimately, is what prevented the completion of the Israeli strategic design.
IV. The Twelve-Day War (June 2025): A Victory That Sowed the Seeds of Failure
On June 13, 2025, Israel launched a massive strike on Iran’s military and nuclear infrastructure. Over 200 Israeli fighter jets targeted more than 100 nuclear and military sites. The United States joined the campaign on June 22, conducting bunker-buster strikes on Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. By June 24, a US-brokered ceasefire was reached after Iran targeted the largest US air base in the Middle East, located in Qatar. According to ACLED, Israel and the US conducted at least 145 confirmed air strikes, with estimates as high as 508 strikes by Israeli forces alone. Iran launched approximately 120 retaliatory strikes using ballistic missiles and drones (ACLED 2025).
The military balance appeared lopsided. Israel and the US “effectively destroyed” Iran’s enrichment capacity and killed prominent nuclear scientists and military leaders. Iran suffered 610 fatalities and 4,746 injuries, with extensive damage to public infrastructure including hospitals, health units, and emergency bases. Israel, shielded by its missile defence systems and US assistance, recorded 28 fatalities and 3,238 hospitalisations — a profoundly asymmetric casualty ratio (Iran Update 2025; ACLED 2025).
Yet the campaign failed on every one of its declared strategic objectives:
Regime change was not achieved.
Contrary to Trump’s expectations, air strikes could not topple a political system. As Chas Freeman observed, citing historical precedent from Nazi Germany to Vietnam, extensive bombardment of a population does not dissolve the regime — it tends to consolidate it. Iranian director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was later forced to acknowledge, in her Senate testimony, that Iran had made no effort to rebuild its enrichment capacity after the June 2025 strikes — meaning there was, by the US government’s own intelligence assessment, no ongoing nuclear weapons programme to justify the war in the first place. Iran’s regime, described by Gabbard as “intact but largely degraded,” survived (Gabbard 2025; Freeman 2026).
The nuclear threat was not eliminated; it was accelerated.
Chas Freeman made the crucial paradoxical observation: Khamenei, who was killed in the conflict, was the Supreme Leader who had issued the fatwa forbidding nuclear weapons as haram under Islamic law. His successors and potential replacements were all, by contrast, advocates of developing a nuclear bomb. By assassinating Khamenei, the United States and Israel had removed the most powerful theological and political obstacle to Iranian nuclearisation. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a Republican, characterised the entire Iran offensive as “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades” (US-Iran Framework 2026; Freeman 2026).
The Axis of Resistance, while weakened, was not extinguished.
The Houthis continued operations; Iran’s influence over Iraq’s political elite remained; Hezbollah, though diminished, retained political presence in Lebanon. Most crucially, Iran’s strategic deterrent — its control of the Strait of Hormuz — was intact and, in subsequent months, would prove to be the decisive lever.
V. The 2026 Iran War: Horizontal Escalation and the Reversal of the Strategic Logic
The more consequential confrontation began on February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel launched a new campaign targeting Iran. This time, Iran deployed a qualitatively different strategy. Rather than proportionate or calibrated retaliation — the model it had used in April and October 2024 — Iran chose what CSIS analysts termed “horizontal escalation”: dramatically expanding the geographic scope of the conflict to impose the maximum possible cost on the United States, the Gulf states, and the global economy (CSIS 2026).
In the first six days of the conflict, Iran targeted 14 countries. The UAE — Iran’s most proximate Gulf adversary and the anchor of the Abraham Accords — absorbed at least 2,100 drone and missile strikes. Iranian forces struck civilian targets including hotels and apartment buildings in Gulf states, critical infrastructure including airports, ports, data centres, and energy installations, and desalination plants. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, the passage through which approximately 20 million barrels of oil flow daily — roughly a quarter of global seaborne oil trade — and through which 20 percent of the world’s LNG is transported. International Energy Agency chief Fatih Birol warned that the disruption was already “worse than any previous energy market shock,” surpassing even the 1973 oil embargo and the 2022 Russia–Ukraine energy crisis (Strait of Hormuz 2025; Global Trade 2026; CSIS 2026).
The economic consequences cascaded globally. Brent crude surged past $120 per barrel. Oil prices had risen close to 70 percent since the start of the conflict. Natural gas prices in Europe and Asia rose sharply. Agricultural commodity prices, particularly fertilisers, spiked — threatening food security in developing nations already constrained by debt and limited fiscal capacity. The UNCTAD noted that “the situation highlights the importance of continued monitoring, particularly implications for vulnerable economies”. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy quantified the welfare losses as severe, with energy-dependent developing countries bearing disproportionate burdens (8 Charts 2026; Global Trade 2026; Energy Bottlenecks 2026; Economic Impact 2026; Strait of Hormuz 2025).
This was not, as some analysts initially assumed, Iranian desperation. It was a coherent execution of the strategy Chas Freeman had identified: the “rope-a-dope,” modelled on Muhammad Ali’s famous boxing strategy — absorb the punches, exhaust the opponent, then strike when defences are depleted. Freeman had predicted precisely this sequence: that Iran would absorb initial strikes, wait for Gulf states’ interception systems to be depleted, and then escalate beyond their capacity to defend. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar found themselves on the receiving end of Iranian strikes despite having attempted neutrality — confirming Freeman’s broader argument that hosting US military bases had not protected them but had instead made them targets (Regional Security 2026; Freeman 2026).
The Gulf states, caught between Iranian strikes and US–Israeli pressure to join the fight, refused to be drawn into the conflict. Even during the Twelve-Day War of 2025, Saudi Arabia had “maintained a studied neutrality, refusing to publicly support the operations”. In the 2026 war, as Gulf infrastructure burned, the prospect of those states normalising with Israel under the Abraham Accords framework became not merely politically difficult but strategically absurd. States that had just been struck by thousands of Iranian missiles were being asked, simultaneously, to formally align with the state whose military adventurism had provoked those strikes (Saudi Target 2026; Regional Security 2026).
Trump himself was eventually forced to acknowledge the war had been launched to avert “an economic catastrophe” — the exact opposite of the triumphalist regime-change narrative that had justified it (US-Iran Framework 2026).
VI. The Failure of Mandatory Normalization
Trump’s attempt to bundle the Iran ceasefire with mandatory expansion of the Abraham Accords — demanding that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, and Egypt formally normalise with Israel as a condition of ending the war — represented the logical endpoint of the Greater Israel strategy: use American military leverage over Iran to coerce Arab states into geopolitical alignment with Israel. But it failed comprehensively (Israel Policy Forum 2026; Abraham Accords Push 2026).
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who had previously showed openness to normalization, refused even during an Oval Office meeting with Trump in November 2025. As the war deepened, Saudi officials continued to insist that Israel must commit to a “definitive and time-bound plan” for a Palestinian state — a condition the Netanyahu government rejected categorically. Qatar, having absorbed Iranian strikes on its territory because it hosted the Al Udeid US air base, was emphatically unwilling to publicly align with Israel. Pakistan declined outright. Turkey, whose leadership viewed Israel as a worse destabiliser than Iran, showed no interest (Abraham Accords Push 2026; Israel Policy Forum 2026; Abraham Accords Exposed 2025).
The Israel Policy Forum, in a detailed May 2026 analysis, identified the fundamental flaw in Trump’s gambit: Arab and Muslim states “view both Iran and Israel as rogue states that are destabilising the region,” and in some cases — certainly Turkey — “view Israel as the worse actor”. Forcing normalization at the point of a Truth Social post would not produce genuine diplomatic relationships but “hollow façades,” making Israel’s isolation more visible rather than less. The forum warned that linking the Iran war to the Abraham Accords was doing “Israel incalculable political damage in the U.S.” while driving up its unfavourability ratings globally (Israel Policy Forum 2026).
At the same time, within the United States, the Iran war had become the foreign policy catastrophe that the Iraq war had been for the Bush administration. Trump called Netanyahu “a very difficult guy” and “f***ing crazy”. JD Vance noted that “Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time” — a back-handed acknowledgement of Israel’s total international isolation. The erosion of Israeli support on both the American right (which increasingly viewed Israel as manipulating US foreign policy) and the left (which saw the Iran war as a strategic catastrophe enabled by Israel) was, as the Israel Policy Forum noted, “consuming” (Trump Allies 2026; Israel Policy Forum 2026).
The European dimension reinforced this trend. In February 2026, nearly 20 countries condemned Israel’s West Bank annexation. France, the UK, Italy, and Germany issued a joint statement in May 2026 declaring Israeli settlement construction in the E1 area “a serious breach of international law” and warning businesses against participating. The EU-Israel relationship had deteriorated sharply, with Israel facing arms embargoes and potential sanctions. The ICJ continued its genocide proceedings, with South Africa’s case against Israel advancing with a scheduled timeline extending to 2029. Israel had become, in the language of the Israel Policy Forum, “diplomatically constrained, economically strained by boycotts and regional hostility” (Joint Statement 2026; ICJ Order 2026; EU-Israel Relations 2026; Iran Conflict 2026; Condemn Annexation 2025).
VII. The US–Iran Memorandum of Understanding (June 2026): Iran’s Strategic Victory
On June 18, 2026, at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, France, President Trump signed a 14-point Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian — a framework agreement ending hostilities and establishing a 60-day negotiating period for a final deal. The agreement’s terms represented a near-total reversal of the war’s stated objectives (US-Iran Agreement 2026):
- Iran committed only to refrain from developing nuclear weapons — a pledge it had made consistently since 2015 and whose verification remained technically contested (US-Iran Agreement 2026).
- The US would lift its naval blockade and begin dismantling sanctions immediately (US-Iran Agreement 2026).
- A $300 billion reconstruction fund — to which the US would not directly contribute but which Gulf states would fund — was committed for Iran’s development (US-Iran Agreement 2026).
- Frozen Iranian assets, potentially worth tens of billions, would begin to be released (US-Iran Agreement 2026).
- The US committed to respecting Iran’s sovereignty and withdrawing military forces from Iran’s vicinity within 30 days (US-Iran Agreement 2026).
- Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles would be addressed through a “mutually agreed mechanism,” but crucially, the precise disposition of the material remained unresolved (US-Iran Agreement 2026).
Critics, including former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, noted that the concessions Trump was prepared to make exceeded those of the Obama-era JCPOA — the very agreement Trump had abandoned in 2018 as the “worst deal ever”. The only tangible outcome of the ceasefire was the potential reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, “which had been accessible before the conflict began” — meaning Trump had, in effect, signed a deal to compensate Iran for access to a waterway that Iran had closed in retaliation for a war the US had started (US-Iran Framework 2026).
Iran’s strategic achievement was remarkable. Having survived two military campaigns by the world’s most powerful air forces, having kept its regime intact despite the killing of Khamenei, having closed the Strait of Hormuz for months and extracted $300 billion in reconstruction commitments, and having frustrated the entire normalization architecture that Israel and the US had spent years constructing — Tehran emerged from the conflict not as a defeated state but as a negotiating party whose leverage had been demonstrated to the world in the most concrete terms possible (Iran Conflict 2026; US-Iran Framework 2026).
Israel, by contrast, was in a profoundly weakened diplomatic position. Netanyahu remained defiant, declaring that the Trump MoU “does not bind us” through his national security minister, and insisting on continuing military operations in Lebanon. The Trump-Netanyahu relationship had fractured visibly. Trump had publicly called Netanyahu “f***ing crazy,” while Netanyahu dismissed Trump’s authority over Israeli military decisions. The bedrock of Israel’s strategic approach — the US alliance — was described by informed observers as “under strain” (Netanyahu Dismissal 2026; Trump Allies 2026; US-Iran Framework 2026).
VIII. The Anatomy of Iran’s Strategic Resistance: Why It Worked
Iran’s ability to resist the Israeli strategic design rested on several structural advantages that no amount of conventional military superiority could fully neutralise:
* Geographic and economic leverage.
Control of the Strait of Hormuz gave Iran a lever of global reach. Approximately 20 million barrels of oil daily — from Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE — transit the strait, alongside one-fifth of the world’s LNG. Iran’s ability to close this chokepoint imposed immediate, severe costs on the global economy that the United States, as the world’s largest economy, could not absorb indefinitely. China, which purchases approximately 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports and processes it for global markets, had every incentive to pressure the US toward a settlement. The economic arithmetic ultimately made a negotiated outcome inevitable (Strait of Hormuz 2025).
* Regime resilience under pressure.
The Iranian state, far from collapsing under bombardment, consolidated. Historical analogies — Germany under Allied bombing in WWII, Vietnam under US carpet bombing — confirmed what political scientists have long observed: external military pressure tends to strengthen national cohesion against a perceived existential threat. The death of Khamenei, which the US and Israel expected to trigger succession chaos and regime implosion, instead hardened resolve and, by removing the main theological opponent of nuclear weapons, arguably moved Iran closer to a nuclear capability (Freeman 2026).
* The paradox of asymmetric retaliation.
Iran’s horizontal escalation strategy — targeting 14 countries, closing the Strait, striking Gulf critical infrastructure — imposed costs far disproportionate to its military power relative to its adversaries. By making the conflict not just an Israeli-Iranian bilateral confrontation but a global economic crisis, Iran aligned its interests with those of every oil-importing economy in the world, including the United States itself. The war Trump began to achieve dominance became the war Trump had to end to avoid “an economic catastrophe” (CSIS 2026; US-Iran Framework 2026).
* The Palestinian question as a structural limit on normalization.
Israel’s normalization strategy required Arab states to publicly abandon the Palestinian cause. No Arab or Muslim government could do this in the context of ongoing live-streamed devastation in Gaza, West Bank settlement expansion, and Lebanese bombardment. Saudi Arabia’s insistence on a “definitive and time-bound” plan for Palestinian statehood was not merely ideological posturing — it reflected the political impossibility of a Saudi government signing normalization papers while Palestinian civilian casualties mounted. Iran’s strategic support for Palestinian resistance — however attenuated after October 7 — kept the Palestinian issue alive as a structural constraint on the normalization architecture Israel needed (Obstacle to Greater Israel 2026; Abraham Accords Push 2026).
* US strategic incoherence.
Israel’s plan rested on the assumption of sustained, unlimited US military and political support. That assumption proved unfounded. Trump signed the Iran MoU not because it served Israeli interests but because it served American economic interests — reopening the Strait of Hormuz, reducing oil prices, and arresting the domestic political damage of a deeply unpopular war. The moment US and Israeli interests diverged — as they inevitably did — the coherence of the joint strategy collapsed. As prominent Israeli Knesset member Ohad Tal acknowledged, Israel now needed to “prepare for the day when there is a less supportive US president” and become “much more independent” (Trump Allies 2026; US-Iran Framework 2026).
IX. Future Scenarios: The Post-War Regional Order
The June 2026 MoU is a ceasefire, not a settlement. It inaugurates a 60-day negotiating window — extendable by mutual agreement — for a final deal whose core issues remain entirely unresolved: the disposition of enriched uranium, the timeline for sanctions relief, Iran’s nuclear programme, the status of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israeli military presence in Syrian and Lebanese territory, and the Palestinian question. The scenarios that emerge from this juncture divide broadly into four trajectories:
Scenario 1: Managed Détente and Partial Reset
In this scenario, the US–Iran final deal is concluded within the 60-day window (or a modest extension), locking in the MoU’s framework. Iran’s nuclear programme is frozen below weapons threshold under enhanced IAEA monitoring. Sanctions are progressively lifted. The Strait of Hormuz reopens fully. Gulf states receive implicit security guarantees from the US in exchange for funding Iran’s reconstruction. Israel, excluded from the negotiations, accepts the ceasefire under US pressure, withdraws from southern Lebanon short of the Litani River, and retains its West Bank settlement and annexation policies but without formal declaration.
In this scenario, the Greater Israel project is not abandoned — it is frozen. Settlement expansion continues de facto. West Bank annexation remains on the political agenda for Israeli elections. But the macro-strategic architecture that was supposed to enable it — regional Arab normalization, Iranian neutralisation, US unconditional support — has been disrupted. Israel becomes a more isolated but still militarily formidable actor, pursuing its territorial agenda incrementally rather than comprehensively.
Scenario 2: Iranian Nuclear Breakout
In this scenario, the assassination of Khamenei and the destruction of Iran’s enrichment infrastructure in June 2025 produce the opposite effect from what was intended. Iran’s new leadership, freed from the theological constraint of the fatwa, and galvanised by the demonstration that conventional deterrence was insufficient against combined US-Israeli attack, covertly accelerates nuclear weapons development. US intelligence director Gabbard had already acknowledged that Iran had not rebuilt overt enrichment capacity after June 2025 — but covert programmes at hardened facilities, beyond the reach of IAEA monitoring, represent a different calculation (Gabbard 2025; Freeman 2026).
A nuclear Iran would constitute the definitive terminus of the Greater Israel project. No Israeli military campaign could proceed against Lebanon, Syria, or the West Bank under the shadow of Iranian nuclear deterrence. The entire Israeli absolute security doctrine would need to be reformulated. Saudi Arabia — the target of Iranian horizontal escalation and now deeply wary of an emboldened Tehran — might accelerate its own nuclear programme through a US-Saudi civilian nuclear deal. The region would enter a period of nuclear proliferation that renders all previous strategic calculations obsolete.
Scenario 3: Prolonged War and Israeli Strategic Exhaustion
The MoU breaks down — Israeli operations in Lebanon violate the ceasefire’s terms, Iran resumes hostilities, and the 2026 war continues through 2027. In this scenario, Iran’s rope-a-dope strategy reaches its intended conclusion. Gulf states’ interception systems are depleted; their populations, traumatised by Iranian strikes, demand neutrality or accommodation; the political costs of hosting US bases become intolerable. The US is drawn into a prolonged conflict with no viable exit, repeating the pattern of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Israel, lacking credible partners and facing a US public growing increasingly hostile to permanent entanglement in Middle Eastern wars, finds its “absolute security” doctrine hollowed out by the very mechanism it relied upon to function. Military exhaustion, economic damage from regional disruption, and escalating domestic polarisation — Netanyahu’s approval ratings had already fallen to approximately 40 percent — combine to destabilise Israeli politics. The Greater Israel project’s political base fractures. Israeli elections, scheduled for late 2026, potentially produce a government seeking withdrawal from the Lebanon and Syria commitments, if not the West Bank, as conditions for regional stabilisation (Iran Conflict 2026).
Scenario 4: Regional Reordering and the Post-Hegemony Middle East
The most structurally significant — and perhaps most plausible — long-term scenario is a gradual reordering in which no single actor achieves regional hegemony. Iran, having demonstrated the costs of confrontation but having also suffered severe damage to its nuclear infrastructure and civilian economy, pivots toward the diplomatic model Chas Freeman identified: “prioritising political influence over military actions” (Axis Collapse 2025). The Axis of Resistance does not disappear but transforms, from a military network into a political influence architecture.
Israel, deprived of the normalization breakthrough that was supposed to legitimate its territorial expansion, faces growing international legal pressure through the ICJ genocide proceedings, European sanctions, and domestic political crisis. The far-right coalition that enabled the Greater Israel agenda fractures under the combined pressure of war costs, diplomatic isolation, and US strain. A future Israeli government — possibly under Naftali Bennett, whose “Shrink the Conflict” strategy is already an established alternative framework — seeks economic normalisation with Gulf states on terms that do not require formal annexation, accepting that the maximalist territorial project cannot be achieved without destroying the state’s international legitimacy (Elections Impact 2026; ICJ Order 2026).
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council, having absorbed the consequences of the Iran war and having resisted both Iranian aggression and Israeli-American pressure for mandatory normalization, emerge as the pivotal regional actors — capable of engaging both Tehran and Jerusalem on their own terms, and extracting maximum strategic benefit from both. The Palestinian question remains unresolved, the subject of ongoing legal proceedings and periodic escalations, but no longer existentially threatening to the broader regional framework.
X. Conclusion: The Limits of Absolute Security
The Greater Israel project rested on a theory of strategic sequencing: first, demolish Palestinian military resistance; second, dismantle the Axis of Resistance; third, neutralise Iran; fourth, achieve Arab normalisation under American auspices; and finally, formalise Israel’s territorial expansion from a position of uncontested hegemony. Each step depended on the completion of the previous one — and Iran’s survival broke the chain at its critical link.
This is the substance of Chas Freeman’s argument. Israel’s doctrine of absolute security contains its own structural contradiction: the pursuit of total security for one state generates the insecurity that makes total security unachievable. Iran’s resistance was not simply military; it was an assertion that no regional power — not even one backed by the world’s most powerful military — can impose hegemony on a system of sovereign states without generating a counterforce proportionate to the threat it embodies. In closing the Strait of Hormuz, absorbing two rounds of devastating air campaigns, and surviving the assassination of its Supreme Leader, Iran demonstrated that the price of regional domination was higher than any conceivable return (Strategic Paradox 2025; Freeman 2026).
Ambassador Freeman’s assessment — that the Greater Israel project is collapsing — is not a prediction of Israeli defeat. Israel retains formidable military capabilities, technological advantages, and strategic depth. But the specific project of transforming Israeli military dominance into formal territorial sovereignty from the Jordan River to the Lebanon interior, underpinned by a normalization architecture that dissolved Arab solidarity with Palestine, has been disrupted, perhaps irreversibly. The June 2026 ceasefire, concluded on terms that represented an Iranian diplomatic success and an American strategic reversal, marks the end of the most ambitious phase of that project — and the beginning of a more contested, multipolar Middle Eastern order in which absolute security, for any actor, remains permanently out of reach.
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