Israel Won the War, but the Peace Is Being Signed Without It

In Switzerland on Friday, the vice president of the United States will officially put his name to a 14-point memorandum with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The text is no longer a rumor with a price tag; Al Arabiya and Bloomberg have published it, and we can read it in order.

I have read it. What I cannot find anywhere in its 14 points is the word that started the war: missiles. Nor the network that carried the war across the region: the proxies. Nor the country that did most of the fighting, and most of the bleeding, to bring Tehran to this table at all: Israel, which was not invited to it, and which Washington, by Jerusalem’s own account, declined even to show the document.

Next week, several hundred diplomats, lawyers, soldiers, scholars, clergy and activists will convene for the second JNS International Policy Summit. We will argue across 12 forums—on everything from antisemitism to the strain on Israel’s reservists.

I have the privilege of chairing the forum on challenges in the international arena. But every one of those debates now sits beneath a single hard fact that the Geneva ceremony makes impossible to talk around: Israel won the war and is being written out of the peace. I want to say plainly what that means, what I think my colleagues need to say about it when we gather and where even those of us who are alarmed should be careful not to overstate our case.

Let me grant the administration its strongest argument first since a case that cannot survive the other side’s best points is not worth making. This memorandum ends a war that lasted more than 100 days. It reopens the oil. It pulls the region back from a wider conflagration that, days ago, had Israeli cities bracing for Iranian missiles within hours. De-escalation is not nothing, and anyone who pretends otherwise is making our task easier for us in the worst way.

But weigh the document by the standard any agreement with this regime deserves (relief earned by what Iran delivers, not by what it signs), and the sequence runs backward. Every concession of value flows before a single centrifuge is verified: the United States lifts the blockade, reopens the Strait of Hormuz, ends every sanction, releases roughly $24 billion in frozen assets, underwrites a reconstruction plan reported at $300 billion and locks the whole arrangement into a U.N. Security Council resolution. In return, Iran stops a war it was losing, reopens a strait it closed, clears the mines it laid and repeats a sentence (that it will never build a nuclear weapon) that it has said before and that this text does not verify.
And then there is the silence. Of 14 points, the number that addresses Iran’s ballistic missiles or its proxy network is zero. The capability that necessitated the war is not constrained in the agreement that ends it; it is simply absent from the page. This is not a settlement of the thing Israel fought. It is a financed pause, and what it pauses is precisely what Israel spent blood degrading. As a line making the rounds across Israel’s political spectrum has it, Iran never won a war, but it never lost a negotiation.

The aloneness is not a feeling. It is a fact you can itemize.

Israel is not a signatory. Israel asked to see the text and was refused. As the deal came together, the president of the United States told all sides to “stand down,” and was, by every account, blunter than that in private with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an open rupture between the two governments on display.

Article 1 ends the war “on all fronts, including Lebanon.” Tehran is already reading that clause as a demand that Israel cease striking Hezbollah and withdraw, though Israel never signed and, as recently as June 8, was still bombing the petrochemical node at Karun, which produces the chemical backbone of Iran’s solid-fuel missiles. Article 2 binds the parties to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs—the regime spending its scarce post-war capital not to wall off the U.S. Navy, but to wall off its own people. Around the edges, the Gulf hedges; Saudi normalization has slid from a natural arc to a remote prospect; even the release of Iran’s funds is contested among the very states said to be financing it.

Assemble those pieces, and the picture is not ambiguous. On the central files of its own security (the missiles, the proxies, the question of whether the war it won will be allowed to mean anything), Israel has been left to stand alone.

Here is the turn I will make at the summit, and it is the one the Geneva deal hands us, whether we wanted it or not. Being written off the page is the single strongest argument for the posture my forum’s paper calls Pax Israeliana. If no ally will write Israel’s red lines into a deal, then Israel has no choice but to become the guarantor of its own security, and, by extension, of the regional order that its security requires.

That is what the paper’s five pillars are for, and the deal reframes every one of them as a response to abandonment rather than an abstraction.

The first converts the military reality of the war into a permanent deterrence-first posture, because the memorandum restores nothing it claims to, and the deterrent must now be Israel’s to hold. The second goes on legal offense: universal jurisdiction cases against Iranian and Hezbollah commanders, built with coalitions of co-plaintiffs from states that have themselves been struck. The third is a regional defense shield, in which technological indispensability (integration into a layered missile-defense architecture) becomes a quiet engine of normalization even as the public deal recedes and the Gulf keeps its distance. The fourth is a strategic-communications capability serious enough to compete for legitimacy, not merely to react to its loss. And the fifth borrows the durable, state-level legislative work (the Virginia model) that severs antisemitism from the delegitimization of Israel where it does the most damage.

Beneath the pillars sits the conclusion I have argued in this newsletter since its first issue and that Geneva now proves: No signature can permanently guarantee a non-nuclear Iran. A suspension expires. Centrifuges are rebuilt. A memorandum is reversed the day the cameras leave Switzerland. The permanent answer is not a better text but a different Tehran, and the instrument is already in place and barely used.

The Iranian people filled the streets in 2022; they are filling them again now, against their own negotiators. The regime that just absorbed the death of its supreme leader did not spend its capital on the U.S. Navy. It spent it on its own population because it fears them more than it fears us. That fear is the asset.

Which is why the next phase cannot be American and cannot be kinetic. Airstrikes did what airstrikes do: They set the program back and bought time. The work that finishes the job is political, patient and Israel’s to lead with its regional allies, in addition to every group that shares the single goal of a free Iran. Washington keeps the interest; Jerusalem takes the lead. Geneva is the demonstration of why: The United States has just shown that it will trade away the military gains the moment a signature is within reach.

So let me address my colleagues directly, because how we say this matters more than how loudly.

Say what we mean with precision, and resist the triumphalism the moment invites. We will be tempted to declare Iranian deterrence dead. It is more honest to say it is broken for now: programs are reconstituted, regimes that look brittle endure, and the whole danger of this deal is that it refinances exactly the recovery the regime’s own newspapers are openly planning. The audience that matters is the skeptic, and the skeptic stops listening the instant we claim more than we can prove.

Do not mistake “alone” for “abandoned and helpless,” but do not pretend the alliance is unbroken, either. The honest word for a partner that signs over your head and tells you to stand down is “unreliable,” and a serious doctrine plans around it. This is the lesson of self-reliance: A Qualitative Military Edge that depends on Washington’s mood is a borrowed blade. We should be candid that the United States remains indispensable in many things and has just proven undependable in the one that counts most, and build accordingly, rather than wishing the contradiction away.

Widen the tent; do not narrow it with litmus tests. There is a real pull in our own materials toward making support for Israel the test of whether someone is serious about fighting antisemitism. I share much of the conviction beneath it. But our own Narrative Warfare forum documented antisemitism rising among voices nominally friendly to Israel, which means “pro-Israel” cannot be a reliable test of who is an enemy of the Jews. A litmus test that shrinks the coalition at the exact moment we have been left alone is a strategic error dressed up as a principle.

Be honest about the price. The reservists’ forum laid bare a home front stretched past breaking: families, businesses, an economy quietly bleeding work hours. A doctrine of permanent self-reliance owes those people an answer, not a slogan about deterrence.

And keep the methods consistent with the values we claim to defend. When our paper called for a “coordinated attack” on the United Nations, Hollywood, the universities and the press, it reached for a word that a movement defending open societies cannot afford to use. The target is foreign-funded influence and bad-faith delegitimization, so say that, precisely. Speak of exposure, transparency and the law. Do not speak of attacking a free press because the moment we do, we have conceded the ground we are trying to hold, and our adversaries will quote us with delight.

There is one critique of all this I want to raise before anyone raises it for me because it is the one with teeth.

Dominance is not the same thing as peace. We named the framework Pax Israeliana—consciously, after Pax Romana—but Rome’s peace is a warning as much as a model. It endured because it rested on far more than legions: on law, on roads, on citizenship extended to the defeated, on an order that the conquered could rationally choose to live inside. My own Carthage Doctrine holds that a threat must be answered rather than indefinitely managed, and I stand by it: Rome did not negotiate the end of the Punic Wars; it closed them. But the lesson of Carthage is not that a nation can stand alone against a region forever. It is that a true victory opens a window, and the window is wasted if nothing durable is built in the space it clears.

That is why “left alone” cuts both ways, and why I want my own side to hold both edges at once. Israel did not sign, which means Israel is not bound, and it is acting on precisely that freedom, still striking Karun and Beirut while the ink dries. For a state with Israel’s capabilities, solitude is also a license, and that is part of the doctrine, not merely a grievance. But a doctrine of pure self-reliance, romanticized, becomes its own kind of overextension. Israel is formidable; it is also small.

Being written out of Geneva should drive us toward a coalition of the willing (the partners who build shared capacity rather than rent a guarantee, the logic that made the Abraham Accords work where it has been allowed to), not toward the comfortable fiction that we need no one. The answer to one unreliable ally is more allies, chosen better, not none.

Israel did not choose to be left off the page in Switzerland. But it can choose what to make of it.

The task of the summit (the reason it is worth gathering at all in a week like this one) is to convert an abandonment into a doctrine. Victory first, unapologetically, because the war was won by force when force was the only language Tehran understood. And then the harder, less glamorous work of building an order Israel can sustain—alongside the Iranian people the regime fears more than it fears us, alongside the regional partners who share our interests and with a clear-eyed understanding that Washington has just shown it will not always be one of them.

Pax Israeliana will not be judged by what it breaks or by how alone we are willing to stand. It will be judged by what it builds, and by whether, the next time a deal is signed over our heads, Israel has made itself indispensable enough that it cannot be left off the page.

Published originally on June 17, 2026.