The 3 possible outcomes of the Trump-Netanyahu confrontation

Two elections, one strait, and a lot of highly calculated explosions. Here is the hidden machinery driving the oil market, and the one signal to watch.

Today moved fast enough that I am going to describe it the way you would describe a car accident to an insurance adjuster: just the sequence, which in this case is already hard to believe.

Last night an American Apache helicopter went into the water over the Strait of Hormuz. A robot boat, an actual uncrewed vessel, pulled both pilots out, which had never happened before in the entire history of people falling out of aircraft into oceans. This morning Trump blamed Iran for shooting it down and said America must respond. By this afternoon, American forces were striking Iranian military sites.

And in that same morning, before any of those strikes had landed, Trump told reporters the deal with Iran could still be signed in two or three days.

I want you to think about this for a second. A president stood in front of cameras and announced both retaliation against a country and a signing date with that same country, in the same session, with the same facial expression. I must confess that my first reaction was labeling this as a contradiction, but I have now watched enough of these to know that Trump is doing this exact thing to drive our attention away from two very critical calendars.

Israel votes at the end of October. America votes the first week of November. The two men running this war face their voters days apart, and they need the same waterway in opposite conditions. Trump needs the strait open and gasoline falling before Americans vote. Netanyahu needs the Iran question either thoroughly squashed or dramatically unresolved before Israelis vote, and since the ‘thoroughly squashed’ scenario was never really discussed by anyone, he’ll have to settle for keeping the conflict unresolved. Let me explain.

Because we’re talking about the same strait, same season, but two alarms set to opposite outcomes. But let’s take a look at their behavior instead.

Start with Trump. On Sunday night he called Netanyahu privately and asked him not to respond to Iran’s missiles. Israel struck anyway. Then Trump took his own private phone call and paraphrased his private call with Bibi. He told an Israeli journalist he had warned Netanyahu, quote, “Bibi, you better be careful, or you will be on your own very soon.” Then he repeated versions of it to reporters. Then again after a basketball game in New York, like a man determined to make sure the message reached everyone except the person it was addressed to.

There’s this thing about venting: a frustrated person does it once, in private, and feels better. Normal stuff. But Trump selected the single harshest sentence from a private call and personally hand-delivered it to three separate audiences across two days. That’s our signal. He is, very publicly, assembling a file labeled “I warned him, I asked him to stop, I gave him every chance,” and a man only assembles that file when he is preparing to do something he will need it for. You can call it an alibi, as well.

Now consider Netanyahu, whose situation is that of a man whose own war is being settled in a meeting he wasn’t even invited to. America negotiates with Iran through Pakistani and Qatari mediators, and Israel sits outside that room. A leader locked out of a negotiation has exactly one remaining way to participate in it, and that way is the battlefield. Every Israeli strike on Lebanon is meant for Hezbollah, yes; but functionally, it’s also a memo addressed to Washington, and every memo says the same thing: nothing gets signed without me.

This week his cabinet stopped pretending otherwise. His finance minister argued, on the record, for what he called the Beirut model: hit Beirut hard and keep the Lebanese front separate from the Iranian one. His national security minister announced the government cannot allow this deal to happen. And when that minister pushed for even more escalation, Netanyahu responded by suggesting the man was campaigning for the election.

So the main topic was not the Iran war, but the October elections.

The polls explain why. When Israelis were asked in April whether the Iran campaign had been a success, one in ten said yes. One in ten is a number normally reserved for questions like “do you trust airline coffee?” Two former prime ministers just merged their parties for the single purpose of removing Netanyahu, and his ultra-orthodox partners are furious over a draft law. So inventory his options. A signed deal hands his rivals the slogan “he let Iran win” right before the vote. An open war keeps him the indispensable man. The strikes are not a man losing the plot, but THE plot itself.

Two elections, days apart, pulling one strait in opposite directions. That is the machine running underneath everything you watched today.

In the following section, I am going to show you why today’s American strikes on Iran will not kill this deal, while one specific Israeli decision could. I will lay out the three ways this branches from here, what each branch does to the price of oil, and the single signal that tells you which branch we are on before the news does.

That signal has nothing to do with missiles. It sounds like this: