This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

Is US President Donald Trump so lacking in self-confidence, so uncertain of his goals and so easily played as to have been dragged into a war with Iran by the rhetorical brilliance of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? The critics within his own broad base, asserting that he has sent American soldiers to die in Israel’s war, evidently have a very dim view of his intellect and skill set.

In fact, the Islamic Republic has acted murderously against its own freedom-seeking people, and can be relied upon to do so again if it gets the chance. Unprovoked, it is currently firing missiles and drones at its own Arab neighbors, including some that maintained correct and even warm relations with it. After years in which Israel highlighted that it was expanding its missile range to bring in Europe, and was seeking the capacity to bring the US into range as well, it is indeed now targeting Europe.

As Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff recounted with some amazement on Monday, its negotiators bragged “with no shame” to him and Jared Kushner, as the duo tried last month to negotiate a diplomatic solution to its nuclear program, that it had sidestepped oversight protocols and amassed and maintained enough 60% enriched uranium “to get to a place where they could deliver 11 nuclear bombs.”

It went straight back to advancing its nuclear weapons ambitions the moment last June’s war was over, even as Trump was confidently asserting that it would do no such thing. And while doing everything in its power to destroy Israel, our tiny country is merely the “Little Satan” in the ideology set out by the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, way back in 1979, while the United States is the corrupt, imperialist “Great Satan.”

Trump on Tuesday described the regime as “lunatics.” He does not doubt the danger it poses to its own people. He has, since his first term, recognized the combined threat that its ideology and a potential nuclear arsenal pose to the free world in general and America in particular.

What is unfolding in Iran right now is indeed Israel’s war; the regime has been working for decades to destroy us.

But it is America’s war, too, as Trump well understands, but his domestic detractors — from his camp and the other side, too — clearly do not.

Planning for ‘total victory’

For almost two-and-half-years now, Netanyahu has been seeking and predicting “total victory” against Hamas in Gaza. As of this writing, Hamas controls almost half of Gaza, where almost all Gazans live. It has not given up its arms, is determined not to do so, and is working to ensure it will retain maximal control in Gaza even if other Palestinians or international bodies and boards attempt to marginalize it.

The prospect of “total victory” over Hezbollah in Lebanon is less remote. Israel’s exploding beeper operation against thousands of the terror group’s operatives in September 2024 caused devastation in terms of its capacities and its morale, and was followed by the killing of most of its leadership. Naim Qassem is a pale, uncharismatic shadow of his eliminated predecessor Hassan Nasrallah. Far more significantly, Lebanon, entirely unlike Gaza, has a government that rightly feared Hezbollah would drag the country into the current war, and has the will, though not the means, to disarm it. Again, entirely unlike Gaza, much of the Lebanese public loathes the........

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