Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Washington this week for his eighth Oval Office meeting since the return of Donald Trump to power and by any fair count, this is the most difficult so far. The two men have not met in five months an unusually long separation in a relationship that has traditionally involved them meeting in the same room each ten weeks and the meeting had to be carefully arranged around the time of the funeral of Senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of both leaders, who was reportedly so close to Netanyahu that he could not have been invited to the meeting based on the agenda.

The story is what has changed in those five months. In a meeting two weeks before their joint military campaign to dismantle Iran's nuclear program, its missile arsenal and its regional proxy network, Trump and Netanyahu spoke at the start of February when regime change was spoken of in Israeli circles. Trump in April ordered a halt. The possibility of Iran closing off the Strait of Hormuz had stunned energy markets, and neither side had been able to knock the other out.The prospect of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz had shaken the energy markets hard enough that Washington's political price couldn't be ignored and neither side had been able to knock the other out. Brent crude's own tracking from the EIA reveals that in March, the price hit more than $140 a barrel, the most volatile period of the war, and then fell back to pre-war levels, around $68 a barrel, by early July following a memorandum of understanding signed on June 18 between the US and Iran to reopen the strait. It is that memorandum that is the source of unease for Jerusalem: Israel's top officials are concerned about the moment it gives Tehran an opportunity to grow economically and militarily, and also to bind Israel's hands against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Netanyahu is coming with updated intelligence this week of the continuing Iranian nuclear and missile efforts by the new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, officials say. The main thrust of the pitch is that the work Israel began in February was never completed and that Washington's diplomatic effort is only giving Tehran time and not peace. Fox News reports Netanyahu will brief Trump on the facility called Pickaxe Mountain, located in Natanz, that Trump has openly discussed doing more to attack, but has complained about Netanyahu not communicating intelligence through the press.

The problem for Netanyahu is that his hand is clearly weaker. Trump has issued a series of phone calls in recent months that contradicted Israel's wishes: He opened the door to selling F-35 fighter jets to Turkey, one of Israel's most vocal critics; and confirmed a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia, which initially did not mention normalization with Israel, only to walk back and tie the deal to Riyadh joining the Abraham Accords. The news outlets Reuters and Bloomberg view Tuesday's meeting as more of a successful covering-up of a real crisis than a raucous triumph, citing a farcical atmosphere at Bloomberg's Middle East desk. CNN reported on the day of the meeting that Trump has been pushing back any pressure from Netanyahu to resume airstrikes, while his own top military and political advisers have advised him against further escalation, due to depleted defense stockpiles, the possibility of losing the support of other Gulf countries, and the threat of another oil price collapse before an election year.

The electoral timetable dictates all that's going on in that room. In late October, Israel's general elections will take place, followed by American midterm elections days later. Netanyahu is seeking a major security success to deliver to an Israeli population that has been under attack by Iranian missiles for weeks but saw the war come and go without a decisive victory. Trump hopes to keep gas prices low and off the political agenda before his party's next election. In that light, Netanyahu's pragmatic proposal may not be a license to launch a new offensive but an understanding: accepted red lines; a shared Israeli-American definition of what constitutes an Iranian infraction; and implicit American acceptance that Israel might have to take action on its own if diplomacy fails. Indeed, both veteran Israeli security officials Yaakov Amidror and Amos Yadlin have separately called for a twin track approach: mutual understandings which would allow Israel to back the American-brokered plans in both the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, but make sure it retains the option of striking back if either Hamas or Hezbollah breaches the agreements.

In the wreckage of the campaign there is a real opportunity that passes through the Gulf. Bahrain and Kuwait have been conducting unprecedented counterstrikes against targets connected to Iran in recent days; Riyadh has moved closer to Jerusalem's threat assessment on Iran, Hezbollah and the Houthis; and the civilian nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia may be repackaged as it was briefly during the Biden administration into a package that finally brings Saudi-Israeli normalization the cornerstone of the Abraham Accords and one of the bases for the India-Middle East-Europe trade corridor. Netanyahu, for his part, is politically better positioned to claim he can maintain Israel's alliance with Washington if he can make it to an election without another string of inconclusive attacks on Iran, since such a move would represent a tangible advance towards that goal. The only thing this meeting will be tested on is whether Trump is prepared to let him win in front of his own supporters, while oil prices spike and his own counselors take heed to the Gulf.