Netanyahu Wanted This War; He’s Getting Trump’s Peace

Donald Trump says he has his deal. On Sunday, the President pronounced the agreement with Iran “complete,” ordered the U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz lifted, and set a signing for Friday — by his own hand or Vice President JD Vance’s. The verdict from the foreign-policy salons will be that Trump lost: that a President who promised regime change and vowed to bomb Iran into submission has settled for a memorandum that leaves the mullahs standing.

But the man who lost most is the one who wanted this war most: Benjamin Netanyahu.

First, a quick reality check: What Trump actually has is far narrower than peace. The memorandum extends the spring ceasefire by 60 days, halts the shooting and reopens the strait; it is initialled, not yet signed, with “pre-implementation discussions” still pending and Iran openly sceptical of his timeline. The questions at the start of the war — how much uranium Iran may enrich, what becomes of the stockpile it already holds, the missiles, the militias — are to be taken up in talks that may run for years or collapse outright. None of it is settled; it is barely begun.

But it may already be enough to finish the Israeli prime minister.

As analysts like Danny Citrinowicz have noted, for 30 years the Netanyahu doctrine was based on the proposition that Iran was an existential threat, that only force could stop it, and that he alone could make Washington exert the necessary force. Every Israeli leader since Yitzhak Rabin feared the Iranian bomb. Netanyahu alone turned the fear into a brand. He carried a cartoon bomb to the rostrum of the United Nations. He lectured a joint session of Congress, over a sitting President’s objections, against the 2015 nuclear accord. He told Israeli voters, campaign after campaign, that he was the one man who could deliver an American President willing to finish the job.

On February 28, he got his man and his war. American and Israeli forces opened Operation Epic Fury by killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, in the first hours, and laid waste to much of the country’s military and governing apparatus. For a week in March, the Netanyahu doctrine looked vindicated.

But it wasn’t. The regime held. Command in Tehran turned out to be horizontal rather than vertical: local commanders improvised, one of them shutting the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has since converted into a standing threat. The missile stocks that Israeli and American intelligence had written down survived in the thousands; Iranian warheads reached central Israel, killing nine in Beit Shemesh on the opening day and more in the weeks after.

By the time Pakistan brokered an eight-week ceasefire in April, all three of Netanyahu’s declared war aims — the nuclear program, the missiles, the proxies — stood unmet. The Islamic Republic was standing: sanctions easing, the supreme leader of nearly four decades succeeded by his son Mojtaba, the Revolutionary Guard stronger than before, its very survival a kind of victory. The premise of the whole campaign — that enough force would make Iran fold — has, as the RAND Corporation’s Shira Efron put it to the Financial Times, “blown up in [Israel’s] face,” and no one in Israel is buying it as a victory.

Now the truce completes the humiliation, and Israel is not even in the room. Netanyahu’s office, reduced to spin, points out that Israel “is not a party to the memorandum.” Trump has dispensed with the last courtesy. Asked last week whether his ally would come around, he replied that Netanyahu “won’t have any choice.” Then he added: “I call the shots.” No American President has spoken that way about an Israeli prime minister in public.

So what is left to a leader who has staked everything on force? His instinct is to hit Lebanon. With Iran out of reach, Hezbollah was supposed to be the arena where Netanyahu could still play the wartime commander without asking anyone’s permission. He tried it twice this month, and twice found that permission was exactly what he needed. When he sent jets over Beirut’s southern suburbs on June 1, Trump turned the operation around and got on the phone to Hezbollah himself to arrange a ceasefire. When Israel struck the Dahiyeh again on Sunday, hours before the grand announcement, Iran warned of an “imminent” response and Trump scolded his ally on the record: the raid “should not have happened” with a deal this close.

Worse, that last option is now booby-trapped. The deal is Trump’s trophy, the headline of the record he will put before American voters in the midterms, and anything Israel does to slow or spoil it will be read in Washington as an insult to the President. The only move Netanyahu has left to him is the surest way to blow up the alliance his career was built on. And the terms Trump announced would seal that exit too: both sides are to halt operations on all fronts, Lebanon expressly included — even though Israeli officials let it be known they have no intention of stopping.

And the calendar is closing in on the prime minister. The Knesset has voted to dissolve itself, with an election due by late October and the ultra-Orthodox pressing for September — the same partners now drifting from Netanyahu over their sons’ exemption from the draft. The brief lift the war gave Likud is gone; the latest polling leaves his bloc around 51 seats, a long way from the 61 a majority requires. And the deal has already become a cudgel in the hands of his opponents, and some of his allies: Yair Lapid, Avigdor Lieberman and voices inside his own camp are competing to brand it a gift to the Islamic Republic. The autumn vote will not turn on the deal’s clauses, but on the doctrine that produced them.

The Saudi prize has gone the same way. Netanyahu spent years promising that breaking Iran would open the road to Riyadh. Instead, Saudi Arabia drew closer to Pakistan and Turkey, stiffened its insistence on a Palestinian state, and joined Qatarin pushing for the very American-Iranian deal he was trying to strangle. The kingdom he counted on as his reward helped engineer his defeat.

Trump, sentimental about little, has tallied what this war cost him — the missiles on Gulf capitals, the spike in oil at home, the regime change that never came — and he will not pay it twice. The threat that underwrote Netanyahu’s entire strategy, that Washington could be summoned to do the bombing, has gone hollow; few believe Trump himself will reopen a major war in the 60 days before the midterms.

Nor will his successors after 2028. The next time an Israeli prime minister enters the Oval Office to ask the US to attack Iran, the answer will be no.

And the worst of it for Netanyahu is that none of this reverses if the deal stumbles. Even if Friday’s signing slips, even if the wider bargain over enrichment never comes together: Israel is still left holding the war’s bills and none of its winnings — a regime that endured, a uranium stockpile still on Iranian soil, an American patron cured of the appetite for this kind of war, and an Arab world that has stopped waiting on Jerusalem.

Benjamin Netanyahu wanted a war to remake the Middle East. He is getting a deal that remakes his career instead — drawn up by others, signed without him, aimed squarely at the argument he has made his entire life.

This piece first appeared in Ghoshworld, Bobby Ghosh’s Substack page.