The “new thinking” about Syria and Iran that has rocked the international scene in the last month may prove to be an isolated and short-lived experiment. But if the successful US-Russian cooperation on Syria and the associated engagement between Washington and Tehran take hold, the change will be felt throughout the region and beyond. No more will this be the case than in Israel, which will be challenged to defend and rationalize its rejection of any change in its doctrines in a rapidly changing regional and international environment — or modify them to suit and to influence the new rules of the game. Adapt … or die, as the saying goes.

The current thaw suggests the possibility of a welcome change in relations between Iran and the United States and more broadly in Iran’s place in the international community. Such a development would by its very nature challenge the rules of regional security that have long been in place — rules that Israel, and not Israel alone, has found so comfortable.

If its signature policy initiatives in the region progress, the Obama administration too will be challenged to refashion policies regarding Israel's place in the region with which it has lived comfortably for two generations, policies which are in many respects the mirror opposite of its policies toward Iran. Any effort to base the “new Middle East” on the preservation of Israel's unilateral prerogatives in non-conventional arena — nuclear, chemical, and biological — may well undermine Washington’s broader regional security objectives in the newly emerging environment.

It is impossible to deny that these are the stakes of the game unfolding. Progress in relations between a US-led coalition and the “resistance axis” is necessarily placing not only Israel's nonconventional capabilities in the spotlight. The transformations occurring throughout the region are challenging a broad array of policies that have long defined Israeli interests in the region.