Netanyahu Finally Found a President Willing to Buy Into His Iran Dream

The only way for the Israeli prime minister to redeem himself after October 7, 2023, was to turn that calamity into a region-altering strategic triumph. For that he crucially needed the U.S.

On September 12, 2002, Benjamin Netanyahu—then out of government and power—was invited to the U.S. House of Representatives to provide “an Israeli perspective” on a possible U.S. invasion of Iraq. With his usual hubris and swagger, Netanyahu made a confident prediction: “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.… I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots, is gone.”

In March 2015, Netanyahu contrived an invitation from the then speaker, Republican John Boehner, to address a joint session of Congress behind President Barack Obama’s back, something unheard of in the annals of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Netanyahu, then prime minister, vehemently attacked the Iran Nuclear Deal, or JCPOA, after years of trying to convince the United States how critical it was to reach such a framework. It will never work, he claimed. In May 2018, he pressed President Trump to unilaterally withdraw from the agreement, explaining to him with conviction that if only the U.S. reimposes “crippling sanctions” on Iran, the Islamic Republic would beg for a new, improved deal.

On all three assessments, Netanyahu was tragically and comprehensively wrong. That somehow did not diminish either his credibility with most American officials or his campaign against Iran. By June 2025, he persuaded Trump to join an Israeli attack and together “obliterate” (as Trump later boasted) Iran’s military nuclear program. As for Iran’s ballistic missile development and production, Netanyahu flaunted that after Israel’s military achievements, a historic change had taken place. Eight months later, there is neither obliteration nor historic change.

Which leads to the three-part question: Who started the current war, why, and what is the strategic objective? Is it “regime change”? That would be a desirable outcome, but surely Netanyahu, a self-declared ardent student of history, knows that “regime change” has never been induced through aerial or........

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