US President Donald Trump wants this war with Iran over. Truly over, not just rhetorically. He wants the regime gone. Truly gone, not just superseded by leaders he can claim are different, nicer and more rational, but who are in fact as dangerous or more so than their predecessors. He wants the Strait of Hormuz open. Genuinely, dependably open, not just purportedly open by dint of him saying often that it is. And he wants Iran’s path to nuclear weapons blocked. Truly and protractedly blocked, not ostensibly obliterated but actually revivable if not already reviving.

But the Islamic Republic has proved tougher to crack than he had anticipated. Time and again in the five months since he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened their war to, euphemisms aside, bring down the regime, Trump has accurately described the colossal damage the joint assault has done to the Iranians’ military capabilities, and highlighted how long it will take them to recover. Time and again he has attempted to will the regime into capitulation, reasonably arguing that, by any normal standards, the Islamic Republic has been soundly defeated.

But the regime has not been defeated, simply because it is still there. The regime does not look reasonably at its massively depleted war machine, and the devastation it has brought down upon its country with its pursuit of nuclear weapons and its mass-murdering crackdown on internal civilian opposition — any more than Hamas looks around the ruins of Gaza and rues the day it invaded Israel. Rather, it surveys with satisfaction its tightened hold on power, and the deterrence it has elevated against its own citizenry. And it pokes away at a conflicted, erratic and unpopular American president, deeply reluctant to have his party face the electorate in November’s midterms in the lingering midst of a costly, grinding and inconclusive war.

Ahead of his meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, Trump twice publicly slapped the Israeli prime minister down — determinedly underlining that it is he, and not Israel’s leader, who is setting America’s policy when it comes to Iran, and everything else for that matter.

On Monday, he declared, after Netanyahu had implored the US not to sell F-35 fighter jets to Hamas-loving President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, “Nobody tells me what we should be selling.”

And on Tuesday, just a few hours before the prime minister arrived at the White House, he blasted Netanyahu in a Fox News interview for ostensibly trying to push him into........

© The Times of Israel