Dr. Emma Shortis

The Trump administration appears to agree, but recent history suggests that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not agree with that.

He is under significant pressure

In Israel, to maintain the war on Lebanon, particularly from the far right in Israel, where, you know, unnamed official figures have said that they want to do in Lebanon what they've done in Gaza, and that hasn't gone away.

Trump has been doing some performative criticism of Netanyahu, leaking that performative criticism to Axios in particular.

Yes.

But substantively, that relationship between the United States and Israel remains the same.

And the potential for Netanyahu to be a wrecker and for Trump to let him, I think, is still very real.

Look, I think it's worth saying that the United States can control this.

You know, if the United States was really committed to stopping the Israeli government from attacking Lebanon, then it could do that.

But it has so far at least chosen not to.

I think that Lebanon for Trump is a side issue.

He wants it to go away.

He wants to be able to ignore it and move on to other things.

So it's important to say that Trump could exert that control if he wanted to.

And he's clearly getting frustrated with Netanyahu, but not enough to do anything about

material about it.

And as you said, the Israeli armed forces were bombing Lebanon in the lead up to this announcement.

Iran and the United States reportedly scrambled to keep the deal intact despite that.

And look, unfortunately, I think we're more likely than not to see that just keep happening as it is clear that Netanyahu at least has decided that it is in his interests to continue these attacks on Lebanon.

Look, I think that's very difficult to predict, of course, Ruby, because there are so many moving parts and because, you know, as we know, the president himself is so volatile.