By HERB KEINON SEPTEMBER 18, 2026 07:52 Updated: SEPTEMBER 18, 2026 09:30 At the high-level Middle East-America Dialogue (MEAD) conference in Washington last week, which brought together current and former senior officials from Israel, the US, and across the Middle East, one theme repeatedly emerged: In Iran, Gaza, and Lebanon, “the perfect” must not be allowed to become the enemy of progress.
“The perfect,” of course, would be an Iran ruled by a different regime that has abandoned its pursuit of nuclear weapons; a Lebanon where the government, not a terrorist organization, actually controls the country; and a Hamas-free Gaza.
That is the ideal. It will also take a long, long time to achieve.
In the meantime, October 7 and the wars it unleashed have set in motion processes in each of these arenas that, if seen through to completion, could bring those goals within sight.
But the key is seeing them through: Maintaining the blockade and economic pressure on Iran; putting into place US President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza, with demilitarization and deradicalization at its core; and moving forward the historic tripartite process in Lebanon.
World leaders gather during a charter announcement for US President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, in Davos, Switzerland, January 22, 2026 (credit: REUTERS/JONATHAN ERNST) A 28-month window to anchor regional changes Patience is needed. But here is the rub: It must be patience laced with urgency.
Israel now has a 28-month window to root and anchor these processes before Trump leaves office and a new administration, possibly with vastly different priorities and a very different worldview, takes power.
This MEAD conference, like the previous three, was unique in the Middle East policy world: Bipartisan and inclusive of key regional actors. Despite the region’s dark clouds, the mood at the off-the-record panels was surprisingly upbeat.
Participants, including former generals, intelligence chiefs, serving diplomats, and politicians, focused not only on what had not been achieved, but on what had.
Some might call that Pollyannaish; others might see it as a refreshing effort to zoom out and examine what one participant called “the overall trend line.”
And that trend line, emerging from a well-air-conditioned Washington hotel where both kosher and halal food was available for the participants, was – believe it or not – positive.
Nowhere was that positive trend line more evident than in regard to Iran. Not because the Iranian threat has disappeared – it has not – but because the military campaign and subsequent blockade have placed Tehran under pressure of a kind it has never experienced before.
Nuclear damage leaves Iran facing years of recovery Start with the military balance sheet.
Iran’s principal nuclear installations have been destroyed or severely damaged, along with centrifuges, research and development centers, weaponization facilities, and a significant part of the infrastructure needed to rebuild the program. Further, leading nuclear scientists were killed.
Iran’s nuclear knowledge remains, as does enriched material buried at several locations, but recreating what was lost will take time, money, and scientists with the necessary expertise.
The February 28 attack also contained an element of tactical surprise that has received little attention. One participant said the operation was deliberately launched in the morning because the Iranians did not expect Israel and the US to attack during the day.
That decision was part of what participants described as an unprecedented, “dream-like” level of US-Israel military integration and cooperation.
The damage to Iran’s missile-and-drone industry is extensive. One participant said the campaign reduced Iran’s “ability to produce missiles and drones from 100 percent down somewhere to between 10% and 20%.”
That does not mean Iran has only 10% to 20% of its missiles left. It means its ability to manufacture new ones has been dramatically reduced. Iran can rebuild, but only by diverting scarce resources from an economy already reeling.
Blockade seeks to deepen pressure on Tehran’s regime And that is where the blockade comes in.
The military campaign damaged Iran’s capabilities. The blockade is intended to prevent it from rebuilding them and to force the regime to choose between funding its military ambitions and keeping its economy functioning.
Another disclosure heard at the conference concerned Israel’s role in the anti-regime demonstrations that erupted in January.
The unrest began in the Tehran bazaar without an Israeli call for people to take to the streets. But once it spread, Israel actively encouraged Iranians to join the demonstrations.
“We knew that they went out into the streets on January 8 partly because of the influence operations we conducted,” one Israeli participant said.
The regime responded by killing thousands and wounding thousands more. Yet the protesters returned the next day, and that decision to return on January 9 demonstrated not merely that large numbers of Iranians opposed the regime – something Israel had long believed – but that some were now willing to risk their lives to challenge it.
The current pressure being applied, according to these assessments, may create the conditions for change from within.
This requires alternative Iranian leadership, continued influence operations from within and, as one participant put it, “people on the ground.” That referred to Iranians capable of acting inside the country, not to a ground invasion.
But here, too, the clock is ticking.
Iran bets on waiting out Trump’s pressure campaign Iran is betting that American pressure is temporary – that it need only survive Trump’s remaining 28 months and wait for relief. Washington must therefore convince Tehran that this policy will survive Trump and cannot be escaped by waiting for the next president.
None of this means Tehran will go quietly. Indeed, the expectation voiced at the conference was that Iran will eventually lash out rather than allow itself to be slowly strangled economically, and that an attack on Israel will be a sign that the regime is on its last legs.
But all that is not an argument for lifting the pressure. It is an argument for preparing for Iran’s response while continuing a strategy that, perhaps for the first time in the Islamic Republic’s 47-year history, has placed the regime’s survival in danger.
One participant said Israel’s original assessment – that the regime could fall within one to three years – still stands.
If Iran requires patience to allow pressure to take effect, Gaza requires patience of a different kind: Giving an untested political framework time to establish itself before declaring it a failure and sending the IDF back in.
That was the clear sentiment from senior American, Israeli, Palestinian, and international officials involved in the implementation of Trump’s 20-point plan.
No one suggested that the plan was perfect, or that its success was assured. The problems are immense: Hamas remains armed; the international stabilization force has yet to emerge; the Palestinian technocratic administration meant to govern Gaza is in Cairo, not in Gaza City; and the scale of physical destruction is staggering.
But the participants repeatedly returned to the same point: What is the better alternative?
One panelist put it bluntly: “Every alternative to the Board of Peace is 1,000 times worse.” Those alternatives include the return of Hamas, indefinite Israeli occupation, the restoration of an unreformed Palestinian Authority, or another major Israeli military campaign.
Another participant said that even if the plan has only a 20% or 30% chance of succeeding, Israel is obligated to exhaust that possibility before sending soldiers back into Gaza’s “hornet’s nest.”
Here, too, the Trump clock matters. The president chairs the Board of Peace, is personally invested in the plan, and is sensitive to Israel’s security concerns. That gives the framework political backing it may not receive from a future administration.
The next 28 months must therefore turn the plan from a collection of promises into something that is up and functioning. Above all, the participants stressed deradicalization.
One person said that the final test of victory will not be how many Hamas terrorists Israel killed, how many tunnels it destroyed, or how much damage it inflicted. It will be whether, years from now, three words can be said: “Hamas lost Gaza.”
For that to happen, removing Hamas from government is not enough. Its ideology must also be removed from the enclave’s schools, mosques, and public institutions. Rebuilding homes while leaving intact the educational and religious infrastructure that glorified October 7 would merely reconstruct the foundations for the next war.
That will not happen quickly. Deracialization is a generational project requiring the involvement of regional partners – including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt – that have experience confronting Islamist extremism.
The Gaza plan is cumbersome, uncertain and full of risks. But the MEAD takeaway was that imperfect plans should not be discarded when the available alternatives are worse. Here, as with Iran, patience is essential – but, again, it must be patience laced with urgency.
The final arena where MEAD participants urged patience – again, without illusions – was Lebanon.
Here, too, the arrangement is far from perfect. Hezbollah remains armed, the Lebanese Armed Forces are not yet capable of taking control of areas vacated by Israel, and the verification machinery needed to ensure that Hezbollah does not simply return has not been established.
But the alternative is a return to the familiar cycle: Hezbollah rebuilds, Israel attacks, southern Lebanon is destroyed, and another war begins.
Lebanon’s historic opportunity to reclaim sovereignty What makes the present moment different, participants argued, is that Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsor have been radically weakened, Lebanon has new political leadership, and the Lebanese state has an opportunity – perhaps a historic one – to reassert its authority. The aspiration can be summed up in six words: “One army, one flag, one anthem.”
Getting there, however, will require moving carefully and learning from the pilot areas where an Israeli withdrawal has been matched by Lebanese Army deployment.
Those pilots are intended to answer the practical questions on which the entire process will stand or fall: Who verifies that Hezbollah has been disarmed?
What precisely does it mean for the Lebanese Army to “clear and hold” an area? How long must it remain free of Hezbollah personnel and weapons before Israel can consider it secure? And what happens if Hezbollah returns after the IDF withdraws?
The process must also confront a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma. Israel says it cannot withdraw until Hezbollah is disarmed and the Lebanese Army is deployed. Lebanon says it cannot demonstrate that the new order delivers results – or build public support for confronting Hezbollah – unless Israel begins withdrawing.
The practical approach being tried and in its infancy is a phased process: Lebanese Army deployment and verified Hezbollah disarmament in specific areas, followed by corresponding Israeli withdrawals.
Israel, meanwhile, must be careful not to turn military success into political defeat. Continued strikes may further weaken Hezbollah’s capabilities, but strengthen it politically by allowing the organization to present itself once again as the defender of Lebanon against Israel. If that were the case, Israel would win militarily but lose the larger political contest.
The key constituency is southern Lebanon’s Shi’ite population. The Lebanese government needs to demonstrate that the state can offer them what Hezbollah has not: Security, reconstruction, economic opportunity and an end to perpetual war.
The tripartite process is slow, fragile and vulnerable to provocation. Hezbollah may launch drones or in other ways try to trigger a fierce Israeli response and derail the process.
But there has rarely been a better opportunity to restore Lebanese sovereignty and remove Hezbollah’s weapons.
As with Iran and Gaza, the arrangement should not be judged against an imaginary perfect solution. It should be measured against the available alternative – another war.
Follow us on Google
Read More