President Donald Trump sounded confident on Sunday when he told a reporter that a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas could be reached by the end of the week.

Israel has reportedly proposed a 60-day ceasefire and the return of 10 living and 18 deceased hostages, out of approximately 50 remaining Israeli hostages, of whom 20 are believed to be alive. Hamas continues to push for a permanent end to the conflict.

Negotiations between the two sides are being conducted indirectly, with Qatar and Egypt leading the talks. The calculus on the part of the US and Israel appears to be that, with Iran and its proxy forces in the region significantly weakened, Hamas will be ready to make more concessions.

These talks are taking place against the backdrop of a worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza, with daily reports of Israeli troops displacing Palestinians and firing on hungry, desperate people trying to get food as Palestinian children struggle with starvation, malnutrition, and disease. Israeli soldiers have also been killed in recent fighting.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is making the rounds in Washington, DC, this week. It’s his third visit since Trump returned to office, more than any other foreign leader.

At a dinner at the White House on Monday evening, Netanyahu presented Trump with a copy of a letter nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump has repeatedly expressed his interest in getting the peace prize — an accolade that President Barack Obama received early in his presidency — and has cited his “peacekeeping” efforts in the Middle East, including attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, as justification.

Ending the war in Gaza, Trump believes, would cement his legacy. But he has to convince Netanyahu to agree to that. To get the latest on where things stand between Trump and Netanyahu, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke to Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at Israel Policy Forum.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have run hot and cold on each other since Trump took office in January. Where do things stand between them right now?

Right now, it seems that their relationship is at a high point. But even in the past six months, we’ve seen significant ups and significant downs.

On the one hand, this is now Prime Minister Netanyahu’s third visit to the White House in President Trump’s second term, and that would indicate that these two men have a closer relationship than any other two leaders on the face of the planet. But these visits have not always been so harmonious, and they’ve not always been so great for Prime Minister Netanyahu, particularly the second visit.

On that second visit, Prime Minister Netanyahu seemed to be blindsided in the Oval Office in front of cameras by a number of things that President Trump said. He was blindsided on tariffs when he had come to Washington ostensibly to try to remove any tariffs that President Trump was going to put on Israel. And not only was he not successful in doing so, President Trump sat in front of the cameras and talked about how the United States gives Israel $4 billion a year, and that’s a lot of money and it should get something in return.

He was also blindsided in that meeting on the issue of Iran. President Trump announced in that meeting that the United States was going to enter into direct talks with Iran, something that Prime Minister Netanyahu was certainly opposed to. Now we know how that turned out two months later, but at the time, it was seen as a pretty significant signal that President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu were not on the same page.

In addition to the awkwardness of that second visit — during President Trump’s last visit to the Middle East, he went to Saudi Arabia, he went to Qatar, he went to the UAE. He made a huge production out of those visits, talking about how much he loved the region, but he didn’t go to Israel and many people interpreted that as a snub. Was it?

I don’t think it was a snub. I think that he went to the region because he wanted to come home with high-profile, visible demonstrations of US strength and demonstrate that he could bring deals back home. Ultimately, he thinks of himself as a dealmaker, and there were all sorts of trade deals and promises for investment to be found in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. Those were not going to be found in Israel.

He took that trip to the Middle East back in May. What’s changed since then?

The biggest thing that has changed is the campaign against Iran, where you had 12 days of Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear and military facilities and personnel, and then you had the very high-profile US strike on the three Iranian nuclear sites at Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan.

In Israel and certainly within the administration — and I share this assessment — that campaign is viewed as being incredibly successful. And unlike when President Trump traveled to the region, this is a case where Israel presents him with a big and visible win and he’s touting it as much as he can.

So Israel gives him a win on Iran, and now, as President Trump is wont, he’s looking for another win. On Sunday, he tells reporters that a deal on Gaza is close. What do you think he’s trying to telegraph and what happens if he’s wrong? Does he take it out on Netanyahu?

There are two things that President Trump has consistently talked about in terms of his vision for the Middle East and what he wants to accomplish. One was preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. And whether that has now been done definitively or not, President Trump is certainly treating it as if this is mission accomplished, and Iran is now not going to get a nuclear weapon.

The second thing that he’s consistently talked about is bringing the fighting in Gaza to an end and expanding the Abraham Accords and bringing other countries into the circle of normalization, all of which I think in his mind is supposed to lead to the Nobel Peace Prize, which really I think is the goal that he seems to put above almost anything else in the realm of foreign policy.

To accomplish that second one, he needs Prime Minister Netanyahu to go along with what he wants because there is no world in which the fighting in Gaza will end unless Prime Minister Netanyahu agrees to do it. If Prime Minister Netanyahu does not go along with it, there may be consequences, and it may be that President Trump eventually moves on.

I think that what we’re seeing right now from Prime Minister Netanyahu is an effort to really extend the clock. The first part of this is a potential 60-day ceasefire in Gaza that will not bring a permanent end to the war, but will give President Trump the opening that he seeks at the moment. And if this negotiation is successful, then it also buys Prime Minister Netanyahu two months to figure out whether he wants to keep it going or whether, at the end of 60 days, the fighting in Gaza will resume.

[Netanyahu] likes extending his options as much as he can, and so buying this time will be important and it will allow him to give the president something that the president is really demanding from him, and that should keep the heat off at least for a little bit.

These two men have different motivations when it comes to the Palestinian people. Netanyahu doesn’t seem to care about Palestinians. He cares about Israel’s security. Trump wants a deal in Gaza because he likes doing deals. Do you think that Donald Trump cares what happens to the Palestinian people?

When President Trump speaks about Palestinians, certainly during this term in office, he tends to do it with a degree of empathy that we don’t always see from him on other issues. It’s pretty consistent when he talks about Gaza for him to talk about the fact that Palestinians are suffering and that they deserve better. We don’t often hear that sort of language from Prime Minister Netanyahu and from many Israeli leaders.

The problem is that for any real resolution to Gaza, you need some sort of political vision. President Trump often talks about how Palestinians deserve better lives and should have better lives. But it’s rare to hear him talk about how he thinks they will get there politically as opposed to this just being a quality of life issue.

We saw it when he announced his “Gaza Riviera” plan during that first Netanyahu trip to Washington, and we saw it again even last night when President Trump got a question about two states, and he didn’t answer it. He punted it to Netanyahu. Netanyahu made it very clear that Israel does not see a Palestinian state as part of the Israeli-Palestinian political future.

Both Trump and Netanyahu need this relationship. Trump needs Netanyahu. Netanyahu needs Trump. Who needs whom more, do you think?

Netanyahu absolutely needs Trump more than Trump needs Netanyahu.

The things that Trump wants right now from Netanyahu are things that would be nice to have. He wants to expand the Abraham Accords. He wants to have better coordination throughout the region. He wants his Nobel Prize. But ultimately, the United States has lots of other issues on its plate. The United States is a global superpower, whereas Israel is not. And the United States can work on all sorts of other things even if the Trump-Netanyahu relationship turns out to be poor and the coordination turns out to not be what President Trump wants.

From Prime Minister Netanyahu’s side, the United States is indispensable, and there are all sorts of things that he wants that he has to have President Trump for. We saw this in practice with Iran, where Israel embarked on airstrikes on its own, but it was clear from the beginning that it needed the United States not only to buy into what Israel was doing but to actually step in and act.

Ultimately, Prime Minister Netanyahu cannot afford to be on President Trump’s bad side, and I think that that’s going to cause him some difficult choices ahead when it comes to Gaza, where there’s no question that President Trump wants that war to end. Prime Minister Netanyahu also may want it to end, but he wants it to end on very specific and narrow terms. And if the two men end up crosswise on that question, Prime Minister Netanyahu really cannot afford to get into a rift with President Trump.

Iran’s state broadcaster, which was bombed mid-broadcast by Israel on Monday, was many things to many people. It was the employer of hundreds of journalists, some of whom were injured in the attack, prompting protests from press freedom organizations. It was also the propaganda arm of a repressive regime, which has broadcast the “confessions” of hundreds of the regime’s opponents over the years, many believed to have been extracted by torture.

What it was not is an integral component of Iran’s nascent nuclear program.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his country had “no choice” but to launch airstrikes to stop Iran’s imminent rush to acquire a nuclear bomb. But it has also been apparent that this was the floor, not the ceiling, of Israel’s ambitions.

The Israeli military operation is called “Rising Lion,” evoking the pre-revolutionary flag often flown by opponents of the Iranian government, a theocratic regime that has crushed protests at home and backed armed groups throughout the Middle East. While one Iranian nuclear enrichment site has been heavily damaged, others have been hardly touched. (Some of these may be difficult or even impossible for Israel to destroy without direct US involvement in the war.) At the same time, Israel appears to be systematically wiping out the senior leadership of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and according to some reports, had a plan to kill Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which was vetoed by President Donald Trump. Netanyahu, meanwhile, has called for the Iranian people to overthrow their government, describing the strikes as “your opportunity to stand up.”

“From the beginning, it was apparent, based on the targeting and Israeli public messaging, that this had the potential to be something much more than just a counter-proliferation operation,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Iran project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Retired Gen. Giora Eiland, a former head of Israel’s national security council with close ties to the current government, told reporters on Monday that regime change was not the “explicit” goal of the Israeli campaign, which is focused on setting back Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, but added, “I cannot hide that this is the implicit goal or dream or hope of the Israeli government.”

Could Iran’s regime really fall?

The Iranian regime has clearly been weakened by sanctions and the damage dealt to its regional proxy network over the past year. It has few allies, the ones it does have aren’t doing much to help, and recent nationwide protests show that there is widespread and deep opposition. But that doesn’t mean that the regime is about to collapse after four decades in power.

So far, there hasn’t been much concerted anti-regime protest since the strikes began, not surprising given that thousands are fleeing the capital city, Tehran. Abdullah Mohtadi, the exiled leader of a Kurdish Iranian opposition party, told Vox that the airstrikes had caused “mixed feelings” for his movement’s supporters. While few will mourn the death of senior commanders who had been involved in crackdowns against peaceful protesters, regime opponents are also fearful about the destruction and strife the war could unleash, especially if it continues for a long time. “War itself is not a good thing, but sometimes it presents a window of opportunity. I hope this will be the case this time,” Mohtadi said. Other Iranian opposition figures have explicitly rejected Netanyahu’s calls for an uprising, saying the bombing doesn’t help their movement.

It’s difficult to generalize about public opinion in any country of 90 million people, much less one where speaking out against the government can be dangerous, noted Ellie Geranmayeh, senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, but she said there was a risk of Israel’s bombing provoking a “rally around the flag” effect for disaffected Iranians.

“There is very little love from the Iranian population for the ruling elite,” she said. “But the more they are seeing pictures of hospitals under attack, civilian deaths rising, state infrastructure, like oil, gas, electricity being hit, sooner or later, public opinion will shift.”

Does America want another regime change war in the Middle East?

Still, if overthrowing the Islamic Republic, not just halting its nuclear program, is Netanyahu’s dream, that changes the stakes for the Trump administration given that Israel is fairly explicitly hoping to directly draw the US military into the conflict.

Regime change in Iran had been an implicit goal of Trump’s first administration, which pulled out of the 2015 nuclear deal, applied “maximum pressure sections,” and authorized the assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the second most powerful figure in the regime.

But until just a few days ago, it appeared that the new Trump administration was different. Hawks like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were gone, replaced by America Firsters who argued the US should either be more restrained in using military force abroad, or that it should shift its focus from high-risk, low-reward engagements in the Middle East to the more important superpower conflict with China. The Republican Party, it appeared, had turned the page from the George W. Bush era.

In a speech in Saudi Arabia in May, Trump condemned the “neo-cons” and “nation builders” who he said had “wrecked far more nations than they built…intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”

This Trump administration was perfectly willing to go behind Israel’s back to cut deals with Iranian-backed proxies like the Houthis and Hamas as well as negotiate with Iran itself on a new nuclear agreement. Even after Israel’s airstrikes started, and Trump belatedly embraced them, he still expressed hope that the Iranians would return to the negotiating table.

On Tuesday, however, Trump said he was seeking a “real end” to the conflict and might give up on diplomacy entirely, hinting vaguely that something “much bigger” than a ceasefire is in the works. He has called for the Iranian government’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” and suggested that Khamenei could still be targeted.

Now, longtime regime change advocates — like Trump’s first-term national security adviser John Bolton and Sen. Lindsey Graham — are coming out of the woodwork and urging the US to join Israel’s war, with Graham telling Fox News, “Wouldn’t the world be better off if the ayatollahs went away and were replaced by something better? Wouldn’t Iran be better off?”

Trump appears to have turned on antiwar supporters like “kooky Tucker Carlson,” while Vice President JD Vance, who was warned in the past that a war in Iran could spark “World War III,” issued a long statement saying that the focus should remain on Iran’s nuclear program.

What might regime change look like?

In his tweet, Vance noted that Americans “are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of idiotic foreign policy.” The chaos that followed the US-backed toppling of autocratic governments in Afghanistan, Iran, and Libya looms over this conflict, as do Israel’s bloody occupations of southern Lebanon and more recently Gaza. It’s not an inspiring track record.

Eiland, the retired Israeli general, was more optimistic, suggesting that while Iranians were unlikely to rise up while bombs are falling, the operation could make such an uprising more likely down the road. “Seventy to 80 percent of the people are not only against the regime, they have a very, very pro-Western approach,” he said. “So it will be relatively easy for these people to create a real distinguished and successful society again, but only after they manage to get rid of the existing regime.”

The hope for Israel may be that regime change would look less like Iraq after 2003 or Libya after 2011 than Syria after last year’s overthrow of Bashar al-Assad. Though that hasn’t quite ushered in complete peace or democracy, there’s been far less instability and bloodshed than many feared following the fall of one of the world’s most repressive regimes.

On the other hand, that outcome came only after a 13-year war that killed more than half a million people and resulted in one of the world’s largest refugee crises and the rise of ISIS.

Ali Vaez, Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group, said a more realistic outcome might look more like either Syria after the initial uprising of 2011, or Iraq following the 1991 Gulf War. “You might have a weakened central government that loses control over some parts of its territory, but the regime itself will be entrenched, and even if it’s decaying,” he said.

None of these outcomes are foreordained. Trump’s stance on the war has shifted on a dime in recent days and could shift again. Trump’s restraint-oriented advisers may have lost some influence, but wealthy governments across the Persian Gulf and major oil companies may also be wary about a long war that could put them in the crosshairs. Trump has traditionally been more comfortable with short, overwhelming military actions — like the Soleimani strike, or the strikes against Syria in 2017 — than long, drawn-out wars, which this very well could become.

“It could be years of instability, and by the time he leaves the White House, that war would not be over,” said Alex Vatanka, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “All I can tell you is that this regime is hated by its people, but also that the US and Israel don’t have a good track record in nation building.”

For now, Trump appears all-in rhetorically on the war, using the pronoun “we” when referring to Israeli military action, but also hasn’t yet committed US military forces, though he has suggested that would change if US assets were targeted by Iran. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that early tactical success in a war has led the US into a much larger, more ambitious, and bloodier conflict than was initially planned.