While Trump blusters, and Netanyahu spins, is Iran already on the brink of the bomb?
Times of Israel · LC · trust 40/100
David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).
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 Truly gone, not just superseded by leaders he can claim are different, nicer and more rational, but who are in fact as dangerous or more so than their predecessors.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 attacking Pickaxe Mountain, sniping that “I don’t need Bibi” for intel on the nuclear facility — “I know exactly what’s going on” — and fuming that Netanyahu was speaking publicly about what the Iranians were up to there. His interviewers hadn’t even mentioned Netanyahu in their question about Pickaxe Mountain, and Netanyahu has not in fact spoken publicly about what is unfolding there, though two leaks attributed to Israeli sources last week claimed Iran last year moved both centrifuges and part of its stockpile of 60-percent enriched uranium to the underground site.
Trump then chose, atypically, to have Netanyahu enter the White House via a side entrance, and to keep reporters out of the Oval Office — no questions from the press, not even joint statements from the leaders. Yes, he vouchsafed hours later in a brief Truth Social post , they and their teams had had “a very good meeting,” and “obviously, many important subjects were discussed.” Thank you for your attention to this matter. That’s all you need to know right now. I’ve got this. I’m running the show.
For his part, Netanyahu, having rushed to release smiling photographs even as the talks were going on — including with the adversarial JD Vance — enthused over “one of the best” meetings he’d ever had with Trump, and later told Fox their alliance was “a wall of granite.” A key aide, who was not in the room but was briefed by the premier, claimed that there’d been no US pressure to withdraw troops from Syria or Lebanon, no push for progress in Gaza, no expressed concern over violent settler extremism in the West Bank.
To echo a senior Israeli official briefing Israeli reporters immediately after the meeting, “we are in a critical period” as regards Iran, and Trump will have to “make a decision soon on where he is heading.”
“We are not pushing him, but also aren’t burying our heads in the sand,” the official said, and went on to convey Netanyahu’s assessment that “there is no choice” but to attack Iran again: “significant attacks — on nuclear facilities, capabilities that have been rebuilt, and sites that weren’t previously hit” and strikes with the potential to “shake the stability of the regime.”
This is indeed a critical period — for Israel, the region, and the free world, in the fateful battle against a demonstrably ruthless, spectacularly dangerous regime bent on destroying this country, dominating the Middle East, and exporting its extremist Islamic ideology worldwide.
It is a critical period, too, for the two warily friendly leaders. One is facing an election three months from now which could see him ousted, or triumphally returned for yet another term in which he would aim to complete his grab for all of Israel’s levers of power. The other is indirectly facing an electorate a week later who could immensely complicate his final two years in office by removing his majority in one or both chambers of Congress — including placing all manner of obstacles to his pursuit of this war.
Both these men would like nothing more than for the regime in Iran to be definitively defeated ahead of their respective polling days. Netanyahu is…
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