The unravelling of America’s Iran policy began with a single act of demolition. When Trump withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in May 2018, he dismantled a framework that — whatever its imperfections — had extended Iran’s nuclear breakout time from two to three months to well over a year. The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation estimated that, after the US withdrawal, the breakout time would collapse to just a couple of weeks. The deal was gone; the danger was not. What replaced it was a posture dressed up as strategy: “maximum pressure,” a campaign that squeezed Tehran while simultaneously narrowing Washington’s own options. Iran’s proximity to a nuclear weapons capability gradually increased, and the Trump administration’s approach got the United States no closer to its stated goals.

Each subsequent move deepened the trap. Diplomacy was hollowed out. Military posturing raised the stakes without offering a roadmap. European and Gulf allies — sceptical of being dragged into a conflict they had not designed — resisted pressure to fall in line. The president who had promised America would act alone found himself dependent on partners he had spent years alienating. “Maximum pressure narrowed US options,” analysts at the Baker Institute noted, leaving Washington holding a hand it could neither play nor fold.

The recklessness was not accidental. It had a co-architect. Netanyahu has, since the late 1990s, sought to drag the United States into a war with Iran, a fact the Biden administration understood too late, and the Trump administration chose to ignore. Since 1992, when Netanyahu addressed Israel’s Knesset as an MP, he has consistently claimed that Tehran is only years away from acquiring a nuclear bomb — a warning that has transcended shifting intelligence assessments and diplomatic developments for more than three decades. He drew his red lines at the UN General Assembly. He lobbied the US Congress. He killed the JCPOA by stealth — Netanyahu’s “Iran Lied” intelligence presentation preceded Trump’s withdrawal announcement by barely a week. His campaign was relentless, ideological, and ultimately successful.

Trapped by his own image: Trump’s Iran war and the politics of ego

“Trump was not obsessed with war with Iran in the same manner that Netanyahu has been for 25 years,” Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, has argued. “Trump would not have on his own gone in this direction, but the Israelis did manage to convince him that this is something that he needs to do”. The result, by June 2025, was US airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan — and by February 2026, a full-scale joint military operation aimed, at least in rhetoric, at regime change. From the Israeli standpoint, Parsi has noted, “for more than three decades now, this has not been about a nuclear issue. It’s been about domination in the region.”

Netanyahu’s own analysts have acknowledged the arithmetic of incompletion. After the June 2025 war, one Israeli intelligence figure conceded: “We caused the nuclear project very devastating damage, but we didn’t finish the job.” — Iran still held hundreds of kilograms of highly enriched uranium in underground tunnels. Netanyahu declared “a historic victory, one that will last for decades.” Eight months later, he was announcing a new operation. History has a word for this cycle. It is not a victory.

And Lebanon is the proof. In 1982, Israel reached Beirut. It occupied the south for eighteen years. Hezbollah fought Israeli forces during that occupation, in 2006, and again in 2023–24 — each round ending without the strategic transformation Israel sought. Netanyahu invaded Lebanon in October 2024 with the stated goal of destroying Hezbollah’s military capabilities, warning its six million inhabitants they faced “destruction and suffering as we see in Gaza.” Yet as a Brandeis University scholar observed, Netanyahu has always been deeply suspicious of grand moves, watching predecessors like Begin, Barak, and Sharon take big risks — the 1982 Lebanon invasion, Camp David, Gaza disengagement — none of which ended well. He knows the history. He repeated it anyway.

Talks without balance: Why Tehran and Trump remain locked in escalation

As of 2025, Israel maintains forces at five sites in southern Lebanon and continues to conduct military operations targeting Hezbollah, including strikes on Beirut. Hezbollah, embedded in the hills and villages of the south, is not an army to be destroyed from the air. It is a political and military organism that has survived Israeli occupation before — and will wage a guerrilla campaign for as long as it takes. Professor Vali Nasr has warned of the potential for the United States to be drawn into a “quagmire” situation, where a war drags on and becomes unpopular even if there was some initial enthusiasm for it. He was right about Iraq. He may be right again.

The lesson threading through both misadventures is the same: bravado is not a substitute for strategy, and a dream of regional dominance is not a security policy. Trump boxed himself in by confusing the destruction of a framework for the exercise of strength. Netanyahu has spent thirty years engineering a confrontation with Iran and now owns every consequence of it — the unfinished nuclear program, the Hezbollah entrenchment, the region inflamed. While most Israelis are willing to endure current hardship, they want to know this is “the elusive last round — one that will vanquish the existential threat Iran has posed for decades”. That assurance, history suggests, is not Netanyahu’s to give.

When leaders mistake obsession for vision and revenge for policy, it is not they who drown in the waters of the Gulf, the shifting sands of the Levant, or the rolling hills of Lebanon. It is the people they lead — and the ones on the other side of every border they have crossed.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

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