The framework now taking shape between Washington and Tehran is, in its essentials, a refresh of the 2015 nuclear accord that Donald Trump spent the better part of a decade calling the worst deal in American diplomatic history. That is the uncomfortable conclusion drawn this week by Israeli analysts, who argue that the on-the-ground reality of negotiating with the Islamic Republic, after months of war and after the failure of maximum pressure to extract regime concessions, leaves the United States with very little leverage to produce anything qualitatively better than the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Times of Israel founding editor David Horovitz laid out the case in a pointed analysis published May 18, 2026, and the headline framing has rippled quickly through Jerusalem’s policy community. The argument is not partisan and it is not new, but the timing matters. With the Trump administration reportedly closing in on a 14-point framework that would freeze Iranian enrichment, restore international monitoring, and offer Tehran phased sanctions relief, Israel is being asked to live with a deal that the original architects of maximum pressure once told the country would never be necessary.
For Israel, the stakes could not be higher. A weak deal hands Iran a regime guarantee, an economic lifeline, and the time it needs to rebuild the nuclear infrastructure it lost to American and Israeli strikes. A no-deal collapse leaves an unfinished war on Israel’s northern and southern flanks and the prospect of having to act unilaterally to prevent an Iranian breakout. The political conversation in Jerusalem this week is dominated by which of those outcomes is worse, and how to influence Washington at a moment when the White House has signaled it will accept terms that the Israeli security establishment regards as inadequate.
The JCPOA 2 Problem
The original JCPOA, signed under Barack Obama in July 2015 and abandoned by the Trump administration in May 2018, was an arms control agreement built around three core constraints. It capped uranium enrichment at 3.67 percent purity, limited Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium to 300 kilograms, and required Iran to accept enhanced International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring of declared nuclear sites. In exchange, the United States and the European Union lifted nuclear-related sanctions, unfroze tens of billions of dollars in Iranian assets, and allowed Tehran back into the global financial system.
Critics, including the Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu, made three durable objections. The deal’s so-called sunset clauses meant that the central enrichment restrictions would expire over a 10 to 15 year timeline, after which Iran could legally rebuild an industrial-scale enrichment program. The agreement did nothing to constrain Iran’s ballistic missile development. And it allowed Iran to channel the financial windfall from sanctions relief directly into its regional proxies, including Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Iraqi Shi’ite militias.
By the time Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, those criticisms had been validated by the conduct of the Islamic Republic itself. Iran continued to expand its missile program. It continued to fund and arm proxies that would eventually launch the October 7, 2023 attacks. And in the years after Trump’s withdrawal, Iran inched its enrichment upward toward weapons-grade, narrowing the breakout window that the JCPOA had been designed to extend.
The current framework, by the reporting that has leaked, would freeze Iranian enrichment at much lower levels than where it stands today, restore IAEA cameras and inspections, and produce a longer-duration agreement than the original JCPOA. Those are improvements at the margin. But the architecture is structurally similar. The deal does not eliminate Iranian enrichment capacity. It does not roll back Iran’s missile arsenal. It does not address Iran’s proxy network in any meaningful way. And the sunset problem, while pushed out, is not solved.
What Israel Wanted, And What Israel Will Likely Get
Israel’s stated position throughout the negotiations has been a Libya-style dismantlement, in which Iran would surrender its enriched uranium, dismantle its enrichment infrastructure, and accept permanent IAEA verification. This is the standard Netanyahu has held to publicly for more than two decades. It is the standard the Trump administration appeared to share during the early phases of the active fighting, when Israeli and American air forces struck Iranian nuclear sites in coordinated operations and the rhetoric out of Washington was about complete denuclearization.
That maximalist position was always going to be difficult to achieve through diplomacy alone. The Islamic Republic’s leadership treats its enrichment program as a sovereign right and a regime survival asset. Surrendering it under American pressure would be politically existential for Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his successor candidates. The only realistic pathway to forced dismantlement was sustained military pressure backed by an explicit American commitment to keep escalating until Iran capitulated. That commitment never fully materialized. President Trump, after authorizing an extraordinary series of strikes that destroyed key Iranian centrifuge halls and missile assembly facilities, pivoted toward a negotiated off-ramp. Jerusalem’s leverage to demand more shrank as soon as Washington’s willingness to keep fighting shrank.
CNN reported in mid-May that Israel is worried Trump will strike a bad deal with Iran, leaving the war’s strategic objectives unmet. Israeli officials quoted in that reporting described a divergence between the kind of outcome Israel needed, full dismantlement and regional deterrence, and the kind of outcome Washington appears willing to accept, a freeze and a face-saving political settlement. The same divergence drove a quiet phase-down of joint US-Israeli strike planning in early May, even as Iranian threats to American forces in the Persian Gulf continued.
The Strategic Calculation In Jerusalem
Israeli decision-making sits on a knife edge. Accepting a JCPOA 2-style outcome means living, for the foreseeable future, with an Iran that retains enrichment infrastructure and the latent capacity to weaponize on a regime decision. Israel’s military and intelligence establishments are equipped to detect and respond to a sprint to weapons-grade, and the recent operations have demonstrated that Israel and the United States together can degrade Iranian nuclear infrastructure deeply when they choose to. But living with that latent threat indefinitely is a profoundly different posture than living with no Iranian threat at all, which is what the maximum-pressure campaign was designed to achieve.
Rejecting the deal entirely, however, carries its own costs. Open opposition to a signed US-Iran agreement risks fracturing the Israel-United States relationship at exactly the moment Israel needs maximum American backing for its own postwar reconstruction and for the inevitable next round with Hezbollah or with a reconstituted Iranian threat. It also leaves Israel with a problem it cannot solve militarily on its own. Israel’s air force conducted historic strikes against Iranian nuclear targets during the active phase, but a sustained denial campaign against a rebuilding Iranian program would require strategic depth and refueling capacity that only the United States can fully provide.
The Israeli political conversation, accordingly, has shifted toward influence rather than rejection. Netanyahu has reportedly authorized intelligence sharing with skeptical American legislators on both sides of the aisle, briefed European partners on Iran’s post-strike rebuilding activities, and quietly pressed for hardening provisions in the framework, particularly around inspection access, missile constraints, and snap-back enforcement. The goal is to influence the deal as it is being negotiated, not to torch it after it is signed.
The Implications For American Markets
For investors, the JCPOA 2 question matters in three concrete ways. First, a deal lowers the near-term geopolitical risk premium on oil. With Brent currently trading near $109 a barrel, anything that meaningfully reduces the probability of renewed combat in the Strait of Hormuz could compress crude prices significantly. That has macro implications well beyond energy, since the oil shock has been the largest single input into the current inflation spike.
Second, a deal would shift the dynamic of American sanctions enforcement against Iran’s enablers. Phased relief means dollar access for some currently designated entities, a partial reopening of Iranian oil exports, and a complicated handoff between Treasury and State on which designations remain in force. The compliance cost on global banks would change, and the secondary sanctions risk on Chinese commercial counterparties would partially decompress.
Third, defense and security stocks would face a more ambiguous environment. The Middle East spending cycle is currently elevated because of the active war. A negotiated freeze reduces near-term operational urgency but does not change the underlying fact that Iran retains the infrastructure and ambition to rebuild. American and Israeli defense procurement is now structured around persistent vigilance rather than episodic crisis response, and that structural demand should continue regardless of the diplomatic outcome.
Why Pro-Israel Voices Are Worried
The fundamental case made by pro-Israel analysts this week is that the United States is on the verge of trading a tactical military victory for a strategic political settlement that locks in the long-term threat. Israel’s air force, working with American forces, achieved something extraordinary during the active phase of the war. It pushed Iran’s nuclear program back by years. It eliminated key scientists, key military commanders, and key procurement infrastructure. It also revealed, in operational terms, that the supposedly unreachable Iranian sites are reachable when the political will exists.
A diplomatic outcome that fails to consolidate those gains would, in this view, squander them. The argument is not for endless war. It is for a deal that is structurally different from the 2015 agreement, one that eliminates enrichment, dismantles facilities under verification, and constrains the missile program. The fear in Jerusalem is that Washington is settling for less because, having committed to a negotiated path, it now has to accept what Iran is willing to give.
For the IDF’s Iran strategy, the operational implications are clear. The military must be prepared, on standing orders, to act against any Iranian rebuilding activity that crosses agreed thresholds. The intelligence machinery must continue to track every centrifuge, every procurement agent, every missile test. And the political relationship with Washington must be managed carefully enough that, when Israel needs American support for the next round, that support is available.
The story this week is not that a deal is being signed. The story is that the deal that Washington can plausibly get, given the leverage it actually has and the political appetite it has demonstrated, will leave the Iranian threat fundamentally intact. That is the assessment in Jerusalem, in Tel Aviv, and increasingly among American Iran hawks. Whether the assessment changes Washington’s calculus in the final week of negotiations is the open question of the moment.
