Benjamin Netanyahu’s gamble has paid off. The Prime Minister has shown he understands Donald Trump perhaps better than Trump understands himself. We’ve grown used to assuming that when a U.S. president publicly says "no," it means "no." Not so with Trump. According to The New York Times, this "no" was also conveyed during two conversations Trump had with Netanyahu.
Post-October 7, Netanyahu has been in a mindset of having nothing to lose. He demonstrated uncharacteristic resolve, hoping that a successful strike on Iran would overshadow the failures of October 7. He dismissed the traditional reservations of the military, which didn’t want to launch an attack without American involvement. He gambled that drama-loving Trump wouldn't be able to stay out of the spotlight—especially not if an Israeli strike succeeded.
Netanyahu assumed that Trump wouldn’t pay much attention to his intelligence community, which assessed that Iran had not yet made a decision to break out toward a nuclear bomb. He managed to create a sense of last-minute urgency, circulated intelligence about Iranian advancements in weaponization, and—on the basis of a highly successful opening strike—dragged Trump into war. It turned out that Netanyahu knows how to read Trump much better than journalists like me, who made the mistake of listening to what the president actually said.
One of the most interesting decisions of the war was National Security Advisor Tzachi Hanegbi’s choice to give an interview on the very first day and state that there is no military way to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program. It seems the experienced Hanegbi understood that the high branches Netanyahu climbed with his early declarations — "We will destroy Iran’s nuclear program" — required precision and moderation. "We will destroy it through an agreement," Hanegbi explained. Even that goal will be hard to achieve. If the regime doesn’t fall, the opposite may happen. By the war’s end, the long-standing internal Iranian debate over the bomb might end, with a decision to go nuclear. “If we had a bomb,” those whose survival depends on the regime might say, “they wouldn’t have dared attack us.”
The harder point to crack is this: Why did Netanyahu set two more goals for this war — one of them during the war itself — eliminating Iran’s ballistic missiles and halting the funding of terrorist organizations? Both goals are justified and commendable, but they have no groundwork—no negotiations, no agreements, no oversight. How does Netanyahu plan to avoid a war of attrition when these two goals will not be achieved, even superficially?
A senior official close to Netanyahu told me: “We’ll just stop when we want to. The Iranians won’t dare continue.”
“And if they do?” I asked.
“We’ll return too,” he said. “We have absolute superiority there.”
It’s clear that Netanyahu’s real goal is regime change. That’s the only shift that can truly ensure the ambitious objectives are met. As long as the regime survives, it’s hard to see how it can be stopped from funding terror, developing ballistic missiles, and potentially breaking out toward a bomb.
So far, there are no signs of regime collapse—certainly not during a war, which only pushes many power centers in Iran to defend their country against attack. The truth is that regime collapse is almost impossible to predict. The Soviet Union, Egypt, and Syria all crumbled suddenly, without a fight, after decades of surviving despite being deeply hated by most of their populations.
The big question is whether Trump is done — or if this is the beginning of a sustained aerial campaign. A joint American-Israeli campaign would weaken the Iranian regime further. Will it break its stubbornness to continue a war of attrition until it feels it has restored some honor? That’s a more elegant way of asking:
When will we get our lives back?