On September 12, 2002, Benjamin Netanyahu—then out of government and power—was invited to the U.S. House of Representatives to provide “an Israeli perspective” on a possible U.S. invasion of Iraq. With his usual hubris and swagger, Netanyahu made a confident prediction: “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.… I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots, is gone.”
In March 2015, Netanyahu contrived an invitation from the then speaker, Republican John Boehner, to address a joint session of Congress behind President Barack Obama’s back, something unheard of in the annals of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Netanyahu, then prime minister, vehemently attacked the Iran Nuclear Deal, or JCPOA, after years of trying to convince the United States how critical it was to reach such a framework. It will never work, he claimed. In May 2018, he pressed President Trump to unilaterally withdraw from the agreement, explaining to him with conviction that if only the U.S. reimposes “crippling sanctions” on Iran, the Islamic Republic would beg for a new, improved deal.
On all three assessments, Netanyahu was tragically and comprehensively wrong. That somehow did not diminish either his credibility with most American officials or his campaign against Iran. By June 2025, he persuaded Trump to join an Israeli attack and together “obliterate” (as Trump later boasted) Iran’s military nuclear program. As for Iran’s ballistic missile development and production, Netanyahu flaunted that after Israel’s military achievements, a historic change had taken place. Eight months later, there is neither obliteration nor historic change.
Which leads to the three-part question: Who started the current war, why, and what is the strategic objective? Is it “regime change”? That would be a desirable outcome, but surely Netanyahu, a self-declared ardent student of history, knows that “regime change” has never been induced through aerial or missile power, with the unique and singular exception of Japan in 1945, but that was accompanied by a credible threat of invasion and, more importantly, two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If the objective was to defuse the nuclear threat supposedly posed by Iran, as Trump argued just before he argued something else, why hasn’t the U.S. attacked North Korea, which does in fact have both nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach the continental U.S.?
If the idea is to exploit Iran’s geopolitical and military weakness since 2024–2025 and further isolate it, both are legitimate goals, but wasn’t that supposedly achieved in June 2025? So why risk being accused of dragging the U.S. into a war in which it has no vested interests or benefits? Answer: because that’s what Netanyahu does.
Political critics and detractors will point to Netanyahu’s tedious fixation with Iran posing an imminent existential threat as a manifestation of his authoritarian, populist, and even quasi-fascist political character and persona. Authoritarians need an enemy; they need to stir existential anxiety in the public and unite it against that enemy; they habitually evoke existential threats; they demagogically fan fears and incite hysteria; they require and create a constant warlike atmosphere. For decades, Netanyahu grimly exuded “This is 1938 all over again” with respect to Iran, positioning and grooming himself as the Israeli Winston Churchill facing the Hitlers in Tehran, and playing on Israelis’ collective trauma of the Holocaust. His attitude was spurious, often manipulatively alarmist, and politically expedient, but it was not without foundations. Iran has been widely regarded as a dangerous nemesis threatening to “erase Israel.” The combination of an extremist and vociferously vile theocracy with nuclear weapons was a lethal geopolitical cocktail justifiably perceived as an existential threat not just by Netanyahu but by many in Israel’s defense, political, and diplomatic circles.
This idée fixe about Iran has deeper roots in Netanyahu’s interpretation of the cycles and trajectory of Jewish history. This is a concept he seemed to have borrowed from his father, historian Ben Zion Netanyahu, who in his magnum opus on the Spanish Inquisition inferred adverse cyclical trends to Jewish civilization. Every few hundred years, a power rises and threatens to annihilate the Jewish people, either ideologically and theologically or physically.
It begins with the Hellenistic period in the fourth century BCE, then under Roman rule, finally culminating in the rebellion of 66 C.E. and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E.; the 200-year-long Crusader “Kingdom of Jerusalem” (1099–1291); the Spanish Inquisition (1478 to roughly the 1830s); rampant antisemitism, persecution, and pogroms in the nineteenth century, leading to fascism and shortly thereafter German Nazism, the systematic racial and ethnic extermination of Jews.
By the late twentieth century, a new existential threat emerged, both Netanyahu senior and his son Benjamin concluded: Islamofascism, centered in Tehran and intent on destroying Israel. Iran became the defining feature of Netanyahu’s political life, despite Israel’s strength, military and technological superiority; its relations with the U.S.; and, most vexing and ominous, its unresolved conflict with the Palestinians.
Iran was the be-all and end-all of Netanyahu’s political identity, career, and self-image. Furthermore, his histrionic depiction of Iran as a threat to the entirety of Western civilization led him to develop delusions of grandeur that he is in fact not only the Lord Protector of Israel but the Savior of the West. All he needed to do was convince a succession of American presidents that this is history’s inexorable trajectory and they had better heed his advice and policy recommendations, meaning engage Iran militarily.
Enter the political rationale, and the dog-wagging aspects of the war. That President Trump was deflecting away from the toxic effects of Epstein files chaos, the Supreme Court decision on the illegality of his tariffs policy, his abysmal standing in the polls, and his swelling unpopularity on both the economy and immigration has been written about extensively in the days since the war began. That he lacks the constitutional basis to declare war when America was not attacked, that he contradicts himself and fumbles and jumbles with justifications for the war, is being dissected by American pundits and analysts.
His statements have been bizarre even by his own erratic and incoherent standards. Iran was developing missiles that could reach the U.S.? There is zero evidence of that, other than Netanyahu telling him that. Iran was planning an attack on the U.S., therefore the war is preemptive, as Secretary of State Rubio said? That’s a spurious claim at best, and American intelligence sources dispute it. That he was surprised Iran didn’t capitulate to his demands during negotiations? That warrants a new edition of The Art of the Deal. That he expects the Iranian military and Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps to lay down their weapons? Really? Like the Vietcong did in Vietnam? The Taliban in Afghanistan? The Houthis in Yemen? ISIS in Iraq? Where on earth did he get this nonsense from?
Unless he was prodded relentlessly and vigorously by Netanyahu, which he surely was. But while Trump’s rationale for an unprovoked war with Iran is unclear or inexplicable, with Netanyahu it is very simple: This is what he’s wanted for years, and in Trump he found the perfect accomplice. Trump is a narcissist eminently amenable to sycophancy, malleable when excessively praised, and susceptible to the “No president has done this before you” argument.
Notwithstanding his historical compulsion with Iran, Netanyahu also has a major “wag the dog” compulsion. He is on an ongoing trial for corruption, bribery, and obstruction of justice. He is facing an election in 2026 with an upset, dejected, and restive electorate.
More importantly, from Netanyahu’s perspective, the narrative has to change. The man responsible for the worst catastrophe and calamity in Israel’s history, October 7, 2023, the man who marketed himself as “Mr. Security” and a world expert on combating terrorism, was at the helm and accountable for the worst debacle since Israel was established.
The only way to redeem himself was to turn that calamity into a region-altering strategic triumph. For that he crucially needed the U.S. But if he was wrong on Iraq, wrong on the original Iran nuclear deal, wrong on urging Trump to withdraw from it, wrong on his Gaza policy—relying on Hamas to avoid negotiations with the Palestinian Authority—and profoundly wrong on the Palestinian issue writ large, is it possible that he is right here? Whatever he whispered to Trump, the template is more likely Iraq 2003 than Venezuela 2026.
