For nearly two decades, Israeli leaders have approached the Iranian nuclear threat with a curious strategic assumption. Iran was Israel’s problem, but America would eventually become the solution.

The names changed. The administrations changed. The speeches changed. Yet the underlying hope remained remarkably constant.

In 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert sought a green light from President George W. Bush to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Bush declined. Years later, Benjamin Netanyahu pressed Barack Obama to take military action against Iran’s nuclear program. Obama declined as well. In 2015, Netanyahu took the extraordinary step of addressing Congress directly to oppose the Iran nuclear deal, warning that Iran posed a grave threat not only to Israel but to the world.

Then came Donald Trump.

If there was ever going to be an American president willing to do what his predecessors would not, it was Trump. He withdrew from the JCPOA, imposed maximum pressure on Tehran, authorized the killing of Qassem Soleimani, and spoke about the Iranian regime with a clarity rarely heard in Washington. To many Israelis, Trump appeared to be the long-awaited answer to a question that had haunted successive governments.

Yet recent events have revealed something far more important than the details of any particular agreement with Iran. They have revealed that the problem was never Bush. It was never Obama. It was never Biden. And it is not even Trump.

The problem is the assumption itself.

Israel spent years searching for the American president who would finally........

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