The firmest brake on a renewed war with Iran this autumn was not a diplomat or a sanctions regime. It was two election calendars.
According to CNN, as reported by Israel Hayom, Benjamin Netanyahu was "very eager" for fresh strikes in October and tried to persuade Donald Trump to act before the votes.
Trump withheld the green light. Israel's chief of staff, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, had warned General Dan Caine, the chairperson of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, that a strike could disrupt Israel's October 27 election and even force its postponement. Trump, for his part, had promised on Truth Social not to attack before the American midterms of November 3.
Both votes are now over and neither man won. Netanyahu's bloc finished with 53 seats in the 120-member Knesset, eight short of a majority. Trump has lost both chambers of Congress and called the war the "primary reason".
The conventional reading is that two weakened leaders will now be more cautious. Only half of that reading holds. The calendar that restrained both men has run out and what replaces it is not shared caution but a widening gap between what each of them needs.
Start with Israel, where the arithmetic turned against Netanyahu this week. As President Isaac Herzog opened consultations with the new Knesset factions on Wednesday, Gadi Eisenkot was expected to collect at least 56 recommendations against Netanyahu's 53. Degel HaTorah, the larger faction of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism, declined to recommend anyone. The Islamist Ra'am party backed Eisenkot. Yair Lapid said the American result rules out "any possibility of a unity government led by Netanyahu". If Herzog hands Eisenkot the mandate, he will have up to 42 days to build a coalition and Netanyahu will govern as caretaker for every one of them.
A caretaker in Israel keeps the powers of any other government. Legal experts at the Israel Democracy Institute and the Tachlith Institute told Asharq Al-Awsat that a caretaker prime minister can lawfully take the country to war, that the Supreme Court has historically stayed out of war decisions and that parliamentary oversight is weakest before a new Knesset forms its committees.
For six weeks or more, Netanyahu will hold power with fewer checks than usual and every reason to fear losing it. His political survival has long rested on his role as Israel's defender against Iran and a security emergency is the one development that could produce the wartime unity government his rivals refuse him. Even before the result, Netanyahu was reportedly floating a strike later this week.
Washington is moving the other way — and faster than most expected. Vice President JD Vance wrote on Wednesday that "the reason we lost is the war", citing polling showing that the voters Republicans lost wanted to end the war and to "change our relationship to Israel". Trump called the post "largely true".
On election day, Trump announced that by the end of the year "we won't be paying Israel", a reference to roughly $4 billion a year in military aid. Asked about Netanyahu's suggestion of a strike, Trump told the Financial Times: "We're locked and loaded if we need to go, but there may be no reason for it."
None of this makes Trump a dove. Trump told Fox News that "we have to do something large" and spoke of a "heavy hit", and the outgoing Republican majority will shield him from any binding vote until January 3.
But a president who blames a war for the loss of the Senate, whose vice-president is arguing the point before 2028 and who is dangling the end of Israel's aid, has strong reasons to want a deal. The White House has sent a letter from Vance to Iran's Supreme National Security Council through Qatar.
Here lies the danger of the coming weeks. One lame duck needs the war to resume. The other needs it to end. Israel does not require American permission to strike Iran. Once it does, the American missile-defence batteries in the region and the American bases within Iran's reach make it very hard for Washington to stay out. Trump held Netanyahu back in October because both men shared a calendar. He has less leverage over a caretaker whose calendar is now running out alone.
Tehran is reading the same signals. Iran's parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, welcomed the American result as a rejection of war but warned that if Washington ignored the public will, Iran's "NO comes with a Nightmare". Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei cautioned anyone hoping for a change in American behaviour. Iran's Revolutionary Guards report tankers burning after striking mines near Hormuz. Brent crude fell nearly 8% on Wednesday on hopes of diplomacy, which tells us how much of the next fortnight markets have priced as peace.
There is a deal on the table. Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has proposed reopening the strait within two days of an agreement, with nuclear issues left for a second phase. Two steps would give it a fighting chance before January.
First, European capitals, which carry far more weight in Jerusalem than in Tehran, should tell Herzog and every party leader he consults that a coalition formed on the back of a fresh war with Iran will meet a colder reception in Brussels, Berlin and Paris. Eisenkot, who has pledged to renew a bipartisan alliance with Washington, will understand that message better than his predecessor.
Second, Qatar and its fellow mediators should press Washington to sign the first phase of Araghchi's sequence while Trump wants a win and before Netanyahu finds a reason to spoil it. A reopened strait within 48 hours is a result Trump can sell at home and a fact Netanyahu would find hard to bomb his way around.
The test is easy to set. If January 3 arrives, a new Congress is sworn in and Israel's coalition clock is running without a renewed campaign against Iran, the restraint would have held. If not, the record will show that the war resumed in the one stretch of the calendar when the man who most wanted it had the least to lose.
Dr Imran Khalid is a columnist and geostrategic analyst.