Israel’s prime minister deserves to be judged not only by his willingness to strike Iran, but by whether he can turn military initiative into a clear, durable strategic outcome.

The issue is no longer whether Benjamin Netanyahu is prepared to fight Iran. That question has been answered. The war that began with U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28 has widened across the region, and even now continues to expand, with the Houthis entering the fight directly and European leaders openly questioning whether Israel and the United States have a sufficiently clear endgame. Netanyahu himself said this week that Israel is continuing to strike the Iranian regime forcefully. The real test now is harder, not launching war, but defining victory in a way that Israel can defend militarily, politically, and historically.

On one level, Netanyahu has earned the right to say, I told you so. He has sought a tougher American stance against Iran for decades, and that in the run-up to this war he successfully argued that this was a now-or-never moment to stop Tehran’s nuclear and ballistic ambitions. For years, much of the Western establishment treated his warnings as exaggeration, or at least as politically useful alarmism. But history has not been kind to those who mocked the Iranian threat. Iran did not build a........

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