Secretary of State Antony Blinken is spending part of this week in the Middle East, where he’s scheduled to meet with Israeli, Palestinian and Egyptian officials to reduce the roiling violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But you can bet that Blinken will also take this opportunity to refocus attention on another issue that is simmering to a near boiling point: Iran and its ongoing nuclear program.

By its own actions, Israel has forced the subject on the agenda. Last weekend, three drones struck an Iranian Ministry of Defense facility in the city of Isfahan that was reportedly connected to Tehran’s missile program. While nobody claimed credit for the strike, a U.S. official stated that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency was likely responsible. While Israeli officials are notoriously tight-lipped for operational security reasons, it certainly wouldn’t be surprising if the Israelis planned and executed the attack. Israel, after all, has the motive and operational acumen to conduct an operation like this, given its heightened concern over Tehran’s weapons programs.

Israel and Iran are therefore in the middle of an escalatory cycle that isn’t expected to end anytime soon. Israel, worried about Iranian weaponization, tries to undermine as much of Tehran’s program as it can. Iran, in turn, responds by reinvesting and recommitting to that very same program, which in turn convinces Israel to organize and execute even more daring operations on Iranian territory. It doesn’t take a foreign policy genius to speculate where this cycle may be heading.

For the United States, the Israel-Iran dynamic makes an already complex situation even more so. The Biden administration’s Iran policy resembles a trapeze artist walking the thinnest of wires. On the one hand, it wants to curtail Iran’s nuclear program and, if possible, eliminate it altogether. But on the other, it wants to avoid plunging tens of thousands of U.S. troops into what would be America’s fourth war in the Middle East in 20 years.

Up until September, the White House was trying to accomplish both objectives through negotiations with Tehran. The aim: bring the Iranians back into compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal the Trump administration callously withdrew from.

But those negotiations have seen no movement whatsoever. Robert Malley, President Joe Biden’s lead negotiator, has all but declared the negotiating process dead for the time being. Biden himself actually used the word “dead” in November. The U.S. and Iran are refusing to mollify the other, with both believing they have already demonstrated the necessary compromise and flexibility.