Five months after the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran, the war shows no sign of resolving into anything durable. What began as a defined military campaign in late February has degenerated into a cycle of ceasefire, collapse, and renewed strikes, with a 60-day memorandum of understanding now the latest attempt to impose an endpoint on a conflict that keeps finding reasons to continue.
The most recent flashpoint is the Strait of Hormuz. Despite the MOU reached in June, Iran has continued to assert control over shipping lanes, firing on multiple commercial vessels in early July and prompting the US Navy to resume a blockade of Iranian ports. President Trump has oscillated publicly on whether the ceasefire even holds, declaring it over on one day and downplaying the prospect of sustained military action the next. By mid-July he was threatening to escalate further, vowing to target Iranian power plants and bridges unless Tehran returns to negotiations.
The more consequential development this week has nothing to do with Tehran. In a nearly three-hour appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience released July 15, Vice President JD Vance said there are people within the Israeli government who are deliberately working to derail the US-Iran deal — not toward any strategic objective, he said, but simply to keep the war going indefinitely. He tied the claim to a Time magazine report linking Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, to an Israeli-funded influence operation paying conservative commentators to attack the ceasefire.
Vance was careful to frame this as unremarkable by the standards of great-power politics, comparing Israeli lobbying efforts to those of Qatar and Russia and saying it “doesn’t bother” him that allies try to shape American opinion. What he objects to, he said, is when those campaigns succeed in distorting American political judgment. He also said Israel is “losing the battle” for US public opinion.
This is not an isolated remark. In June, Vance told reporters that if he were in the Israeli cabinet, he “might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world” — a comment analysts have described as one of the most consequential statements by a senior US official on the alliance in decades, because it challenged the long-standing assumption that Washington would ultimately defer to Israeli threat assessments rather than the reverse. Netanyahu pushed back directly on Fox News, arguing Israel has meaningful backing from other countries, India among them.
The reaction on Capitol Hill has split along unfamiliar lines. Some Republicans, including Rep. Don Bacon of the Congressional Israel Allies Caucus, called Vance’s tone toward an ally counterproductive. Others read his remarks as an overdue correction to a one-directional relationship. Meanwhile, Senate Democrats blocked debate on the annual defense bill this month, objecting not just to the unauthorized war footing against Iran but to provisions deepening military integration with Israel — with several senators writing that they would not hand Trump the votes to draw the US closer to what they called Netanyahu’s government.
Polling suggests the ground has shifted independent of any single controversy. A Quinnipiac survey in June found 48 percent of registered voters believe the US is too supportive of Israel — the highest share recorded since Quinnipiac began asking the question in 2017, driven by two-thirds of Democrats and a notable one-fifth of Republicans.
None of this points to an imminent rupture. Military, intelligence, and technology cooperation between Washington and Jerusalem remains intact, and Vance himself denied that Israel was driving the decision to strike Iran in the first place, even as he acknowledged being personally less enthusiastic about the strikes than Trump. But the assumption that underwrote the relationship for decades — that Israeli objections would ultimately bend US Middle East policy — is being tested in public, by the sitting vice president, in the middle of an active war.
The war itself remains unresolved. Iran has not abandoned its nuclear program, the US has not softened its position that it must, and the MOU’s 60-day clock is running against a background of continued strikes on shipping and threats against Iranian infrastructure. Whichever term is used for it, the conflict is no closer to a stable outcome in July than it was when the ceasefire was first announced — and it is now producing as much friction inside the US-Israel relationship as it is between Washington and Tehran.
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