For decades, American foreign policy was built on a hybrid of realism, self -interest and idealism.  Today, it is being rebuilt on the hallucinatory terrain of a ‘post-truth’ era where Benjamin Netanyahu acts as the master architect. By framing a modern regional war as a biblical struggle against ‘Amalek’, Netanyahu has successfully aligned his own political survival with the fever dreams of American evangelical eschatology. It is a high-stakes strategy that offers Donald Trump exactly what he craves: a world where geopolitical strategy is replaced by a transactional theatre of ‘good versus evil,’ and where the machinery of the state is used as a personal shield against the accountability of facts. Together, they are no longer just fighting a war; they are inviting the Apocalypse to the negotiating table.

The key to understanding the current moment is recognising that these elements – evangelical end of times theology, Zionist expansionism, Trump’s transactional politics, and the post- truth information environment, are not merely parallel phenomena. They are symbiotic. Each feeds the other, creating a self-sustaining cycle of chaos that makes the dystopian feel normal. 

And while the missiles dominate the headlines, the Epstein files are the unspoken context: a potential byproduct of a compromised leadership across the political spectrum.  Their full release and their potential for blackmail would be catastrophic, not just for Trump, but for an entire network of elites who have spent years ensuring the truth stays buried. This war has now pushed every inconvenient story off the frontpage, and any congressional inquiries onto the back burner.

 Narcissist incentives: 

Trump’s need for adoration is clinical; his view of power is absolute. Everything is a deal: money, loyalty, missiles. He sees war not as a human tragedy, but as ratings, as distraction, as the thing that finally makes people stop talking about whatever scandal is currently circling his legal team.  In Trump’s binary world, there are only winners and losers, good guys and bad guys. He speaks of the Middle East the way a fourth grader describes a video game: ‘we hit them hard’ he says, ‘they’re tough guys, but we’re tougher’. On a scale of 1 to 10 on how the Iran war was going in the first 48 hours, Trump stated it was 1 out of 15.  On day nine, he said the war is ‘very complete, pretty much’, adding ‘We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough’.  As of 13th March, POTUS declared he would end the US/Israeli war on Iran ‘when I feel it in my bones’.  

The vocabulary is simple and the syntax is stunted. Pundits have for years dismissed this as colourful rhetoric, but this is missing the point.

Trump’s linguistic limitations are not a communication quirk, they are the window to a psychology that is now shaping the destiny of the Middle East, if not the world at large. 

Trump’s linguistic limitations are not a communication quirk, they are the window to a psychology that is now shaping the destiny of the Middle East, if not the world at large. 

For a man who measures his worth in victories, the temptation is irresistible. He has already commented on 7th March that Iran had effectively ‘ surrendered’ and that ‘it is the first time that Iran has ever lost, in thousands of years, to surrounding Middle Eastern Countries.’ 

But Trump is not the architect of this chaos; he is the instrument.  The blueprint was drawn decades ago in Jerusalem by a man who understands exactly how to exploit a narcissist’s needs.  Netanyahu, the master of this game, has spent forty years waiting for a US president he could finally influence to enter a war with Iran.

But Trump is not the architect of this chaos; he is the instrument.  The blueprint was drawn decades ago in Jerusalem by a man who understands exactly how to exploit a narcissist’s needs.  Netanyahu, the master of this game, has spent forty years waiting for a US president he could finally influence to enter a war with Iran.

The master and his blueprint

Taking a step back, a different figure comes into focus. In 1982, an Israeli journalist and diplomat named Oded Yinon published an article in a Hebrew journal called Kivunim setting the strategy for Israel in the 1980s.  Israel’s long term security and existence he maintained, depends on breaking up the Arab world into its constituent ethnic and sectarian parts – a Maronite state in Lebanon, a Druze state in southern Syria, a Kurdish entity in the north, an Alawite state on the coast, a Sunni leftover in between. A mosaic of weak, warring mini-states, none capable of challenging Israeli regional supremacy, which ‘naturalises’ a Jewish state in such a mosaic.  

For decades this was dismissed as conspiracy theory. But Benjamin Netanyahu who entered politics in the same year the Yinon plan was published, has spent his career making this a reality.  It has been argued that Yinon’s plan was adopted and refined in a 1996 policy document entitled   A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, written by a research group at the Israeli-affiliated Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in Washington, led by the neoconservative Richard Perle.  

Look at the map today: Iraq has been fragmented into Sunni, Shia and Kurdish entities. Syria is disjointing before our eyes, with Israeli forces entrenching well beyond the Golan heights, currently positioned 21-25 kilometres from Damascus. Lebanon, the original laboratory of this strategy, is a failed state consumed by sectarian paralysis.  The plan was always on the shelf, waiting the moment. 

READ: Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claims strikes on 3 US air bases, threatens Netanyahu

A match made in hell 

The dynamic between the two men is critical to understand. Netanyahu does not need Trump to understand the Yinon plan. He needs him to execute it without looking too closely at the details. And the exchange has been remarkably clear:  Trump gets the ‘wins’ he craves, in return, Netanyahu’s lobby delivers the political muscle and campaign cash that keeps Trump’s coalition intact. 

When Trump announced nuclear negotiations with Iran in April 2025, blindsiding Netanyahu during a Washington visit, it looked like betrayal. Within weeks, the strikes came anyway. The lesson was clear: Trump would pose for the cameras, but Netanyahu would get what he wanted. The master understands his instrument.

And when Netanyahu recently unveiled his ‘hexagon of alliances’ a fantasy coalition including Israel, India, Greece, Cyprus and two unnamed Arab states, the press treated it as statesmanship, while analysts called it a ‘fantasy world’ and a ‘branding exercise’.  No government has endorsed it. As Greece and Cyprus are members of the International Criminal Court, which has an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, they would be legally obliged to detain him. This is the bottom line: when an unhinged leader retreats into fantasy alliances that exist only in press releases, it is because the actual alliances are crumbling.   Rather than forming alliances with Israel, Sunni majority states like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt have been coordinating diplomatically against Israeli aggression and moving away from previous normalisation trends.  Nothing, however, prepared the public for the true bombshell. 

In a press conference on Friday, 13th March 2026, Netanyahu made a rare and highly controversial statement explicitly linking Israel’s current military operations against Iran to messianic prophecy.

In a press conference on Friday, 13th March 2026, Netanyahu made a rare and highly controversial statement explicitly linking Israel’s current military operations against Iran to messianic prophecy.

The situation took a surreal turn when Netanyahu reportedly stated ‘I believe we all recognise the fact that we will reach the kingdom. We will make it to the return of the Messiah, but this will not happen next Thursday.’

None of this would be possible without a fourth layer of this catastrophe: the complete collapse of a shared factual reality.  We are living in Orwell’s 1984, where the past is constantly rewritten and the present is what whatever the last headline said.  Trump’s ‘alternative facts’, his very own Ministry of Truth Social and the sheer speed of the news cycle create a memory hole. Yesterday’s Epstein story is buried by today’s Iran strike.  Today’s civilian casualties are buried by tomorrow’s diplomatic summit. The public cannot keep up, cannot verify, and eventually stops trying. 

The fog allows all three groups to operate without accountability. The evangelicals see miracles. The strategist high priest sees his blueprint materialising. The narcissist sees winning headlines. And the rest of the world sees chaos and turns away, unable to distinguish fact from fiction, prophecy from policy, strategy from madness. 

Will it work?  Can Netanyahu succeed in fragmenting the entire region into sectarian statelets, with a ‘Greater Israel’ sitting securely at the centre? 

The evidence suggests otherwise. The strikes on Iran have not eliminated its nuclear program, they have driven it underground.  The genocidal devastation of Gaza has not produced security; it has produced a generation of orphans who will remember exactly who killed their parents. The unrelenting aggression on all fronts has not produced allies, rather the opposite. 

Trump’s declining popularity and constant need for validation are liabilities, not strengths. A president fighting for his political survival is unpredictable. When the reckoning arrives, – and it will- historians will trace the arc from Netanyahu’s phone calls stroking Trump’s gullible ego, to AIPAC’s cash flooding American elections, to the bodies piling up in Gaza, Beirut and Iran.  They will ask how the strongest nation on earth allowed its military and foreign policy to be outsourced to a foreign leader’s disturbed fantasies. 

We are not watching a master plan unfold. We are watching a psychological case study, a theological fever dream, and a colonial project collide in real time. The architect believes he can control the forces he has unleashed. The narcissist believes the victories are his own. The prophets believe they are witnessing the end of days.

The rest of us are left to pick up the pieces, unsure if we are living through history or the end of it. If there is a glimmer of hope amidst all this insanity, it is that the Netanyahu /Trump fantasies are so messy, so self-contradictory, so obviously detached from reality that people are refusing to live in them. 

OPINION: The prophecy and the profiteers: How Lindsey Graham, Paula White-Cain and Netanyahu sold America a holy war

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