For almost four decades, Benjamin Netanyahu has defined his politics by his singular, animating idea: that Iran poses an existential threat to Israel, and only he possesses the vision and courage to confront it head-on. On February 28, 2026, in front of television cameras in Jerusalem, he made it official: “If we do not stop nuclear and missile programs now, they will become immune.” The war he had been urging, preparing for, and promising his country for so long was finally here.

It was to be brief, it was to be decisive, it was to be Netanyahu’s vindication. But weeks into the war, Israel finds itself in precisely the war it had hoped to avoid—a war of attrition, of prolonged conflict, of exactly the kind of war its generals had warned against—and at precisely the point when the Israeli public’s notoriously low threshold for war is beginning to assert itself in opinion polls and on the streets. The fantasy of a bloodless, surgical strike that topples the regime in Tehran has come up against the hard truth of the world, which is that fantasies so rarely come to pass.

The Calculus of Trump: Deal or Run

But none of this miscalculation is as significant as the split between Jerusalem and Washington that it represents. For Donald Trump, as analysts at Chatham House and elsewhere have pointed out for some time, politics is never about ideology but about self-interest. He has repeatedly made it known that he prefers a deal with Iran to a war with it. What he will not do is commit American ground troops or take on the domestic political consequences of an open-ended war in the Middle East. His instinct, shaped by his........

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