Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump’s major summit has concluded, and while there are issues that still appear to be unresolved, there are also some clear initial results from an Israeli national security perspective.
Iran:
This was Netanyahu’s and Israel’s best moment by far at the summit. Trump said almost everything that the Israeli defense establishment would have wanted to hear. He said the United States would help strike Iran again “immediately,” if the Islamic Republic began to rebuild its nuclear weapons program.
That statement is probably the most important takeaway from the entire meeting. Trump is committed to using force and allowing Israel to use force to block an Iranian nuclear weapon, or to block Tehran from even getting close to one.
There have been doubts about whether Trump might oppose such action because he claimed to have obliterated or ended Iran’s nuclear program, and he might not want to admit the need to attack again.
Nevertheless, Trump’s response on this issue was as clear as the often unclear US president can be. And given that Trump ordered the dropping of 12 bombs weighing 30,000 pounds each on Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility in June, no one is going to think he is bluffing.
The second piece of the Iran discussion – Tehran’s ballistic missile threat – was less clear and less satisfying for the Israeli defense establishment, though it still constituted significant progress. Previously, Trump had basically ignored the issue. There had been signals that he would not want to rock the diplomatic boat with Iran “merely” over non-nuclear missiles. His statement that he would be willing to consider the US striking and allowing Israel to strike over rebuilding too many ballistic missiles staked out new ground for the US.
Even before Trump, presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden had ignored the ballistic missiles issue. One of the greatest holes in the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, signed by the Obama administration and maintained as part of the Biden administration’s policy, was to ignore the ballistic missiles problem and focus only on the nuclear issue.
This blind eye policy enabled Iran to massively attack Israel three times with ballistic missiles between April 2024 and June 2025. At the summit and for the first time, Trump signaled that US policy will now be ready to use force if Iran takes its ballistic missiles program “too far.”
The question of what is “too far” is the problem for the defense establishment, among an otherwise very favorable series of statements.
On this issue, Trump either lacked coherence, had not yet come to a decision, or made public statements that were vague enough for it to remain unclear whether Israel and the US are now truly on the same page in defining a “redline” moment regarding ballistic missiles.
Trump certainly cannot believe Iran has no ballistic missiles. It finished the 12-day war in June with over 1,000 – and has already likely rebuilt, developing at least several hundred more.
Israel could live with an Iran that has some ballistic missiles. Until the war, it had around 2,500. That was not the problem. The problem was Iran seeking to develop an arsenal of 5,000 or even 10,000 such missiles. At some point, the volume of missiles could overwhelm Israel’s missile shield. Iran killed 28 Israelis, wounded thousands, and damaged around 13,000 residences in June when 36 of its 550 ballistic missiles got through the missile shield.
Imagine if it fired 5,000 missiles and got 500 through.
So the problem is that Israel may believe that it might need to attack in three or six months’ time or within a year if Iran continues to increase its ballistic missile stock at its current rebuilding rate. Meanwhile, the US may think Jerusalem is not really in danger for another two or three years. What happens if these deadlines do not add up?
One can hope that Trump’s statements indicated that he was listening to Israeli defense officials and Netanyahu on that issue, but this was less than clear.
Syria:
This was Netanyahu and the Israeli defense establishment’s largest clear loss. Trump is enthralled by Syria’s leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa. At a minimum, the US leader will demand that Israel undertake fewer operations against Iranians and jihadists in Syria to avoid creating tension with Sharaa.
Trump has already provided Sharaa with sanctions relief, without demanding that there be a price for a security agreement with Israel.
This leaves open the possibility that, in the coming months or year, Trump will demand that Israel start withdrawing all or part of its forces from the Syrian buffer zone, in exchange for a security deal with Damascus. Such a result might be worth it. The devil is in the details. If Sharaa agrees to certain demilitarized zones, then keeping the IDF in the buffer zone may no longer be necessary.
However, to date, Sharaa has refused to consider the concept of demilitarized zones, and there has been no sign that Trump would apply real pressure on him regarding that issue. If Trump decides Israel needs to withdraw, simply based on promises from Sharaa about security on paper, the issue could come back to haunt Israel.
Gaza:
Israel came out of the summit better than Hamas, though ultimately this issue may be a wash. Trump said everything that Israel wanted to hear about Hamas needing to disarm. He rejected leaks from some in his administration, as well as a prior vague statement of his own that the IDF in Gaza had violated the ceasefire.
But he also pressured Netanyahu openly to accept Turkish peacekeepers in Gaza. The US president did say that Netanyahu gets to have a role in deciding who the peacekeepers are, but he clearly and repeatedly weighed in on Turkey’s side.
If Netanyahu draws a redline on Palestinian Authority involvement – which still seems to be required to get Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, or others to contribute peacekeeping forces – Israel may get stuck with a potentially far worse option in the form of Turkish soldiers.
In more bad news on this issue, Trump said nothing about Italian peacekeepers, though some officials had leaked that Italy might send peacekeepers even without PA involvement. CENTCOM held a major conference a few weeks ago to get final commitments for peacekeepers, and it seems from the summit on Monday that no real progress has been achieved. If Turkey is imposed on Israel or if no one comes in, and the IDF is left to police Gaza, Israel will face an open and indefinite strategic wound: militarily, diplomatically, and economically.
Lebanon-Hezbollah:
Bizarrely, this issue was barely discussed in public. Trump implied that he was unsatisfied with the Lebanese government’s confronting Hezbollah, but no deadline, timeline, or benchmarks for progress were mentioned. One can hope that more progress was achieved behind the scenes.
But with so many other controversial issues to work through, one can also imagine that Netanyahu may have pressed less on this issue, even though, in terms of security threats, Hezbollah remains the greatest current security threat that Israel faces. The threat is far larger than that of Hamas or Syria, and for the moment, even than Iran.