It’s the defining anecdote for any article of this type, repeated ad infinitum without entirely losing its resonance: After his first meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Bill Clinton reportedly asked a circle of aides: “Who the f**k does he think he is? Who’s the f**king superpower here?”

That was in the summer of 1996, just after the 46-year-old Netanyahu had won his first election as leader of the Likud party. He was already a media star in the U.S., familiar to CNN viewers as an Israeli government spokesman during and after the first Gulf War. He spoke flawless American English, having spent much of his childhood in upstate New York and then attended MIT, where he earned multiple degrees. No one mistook Bibi — a nickname deployed in countless New York Post headlines — for a liberal even then, but his affect and demeanor suggested an energetic pragmatist fashioned by the neoliberal era, ready to lead the Middle East into the future.

Clinton was the first president to perceive the powerful will and lust for dominance beneath Netanyahu’s telegenic surface, but he certainly wasn’t the last. Nearly 30 years later, Donald Trump finds himself facing Clinton’s rhetorical question in a new register, as Netanyahu has started a war without him and reduced Trump to a non-comic sidekick role. Bibi has relentlessly pursued his vision of the Middle East’s future, in defiance of nearly unanimous opposition from the rest of the non-American world, and is closer than ever to realizing it.

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Now that Israel’s longtime leader has rolled the dice on a long-anticipated war with Iran, clearly aiming for a “death blow” against the greatly weakened theocratic regime in Tehran, it’s time to appreciate the scale of his accomplishment, and the extent to which he has been underestimated. How long this war will last and where it will lead is unknowable, and the possibility of catastrophic blowback — either now or in the future — for Israel, the region and the entire world is unmistakable. 

Don’t misunderstand my tone as........

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