Put yourself in Donald Trump’s shoes. It was his 80th birthday and he was planning to cap White House festivities with his US-Iran deal. The agreement nearly unravelled, however, when Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu ordered a Sunday evening strike on Beirut. A flurry of White House calls averted Iranian retaliation. Assurances were given via mediators and the deal was saved. Trump’s late Rome-flavoured cage fight could go ahead.
But Trump was still in a foul mood. “Why did Bibi have to do a f**king attack?” he told Axios. “I was so pissed off. I let him know. He has no f**king judgment. I let him know that.” The answer to Trump’s question is that his Iran deal is likely to be a political death sentence for Netanyahu. He thus has every incentive to reignite Gulf War III. He has bet his own and Israel’s future on getting Trump to bring about regime change in Iran. That bet has exploded in his face.
Wooing back Trump will be a challenge. Going by the adage “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me”, the US president has grounds to feel burned by Israel’s prime minister. As does the electorate in Israel, which will have a general election by the end of October.
Netanyahu sold Trump and his own public on the idea that, after 47 years, Iran’s theocrats were finally meeting their Waterloo. All Operation Epic Fury required was some lethal targeting and the Iranian people would do the rest.
Rarely has a geopolitical roll of the dice gone so rapidly wrong. Netanyahu played on Trump’s vanity to help convince him to start this war. That same vanity will now be deaf to any future bridges Netanyahu might try to sell. The Israeli leader thus faces an unpalatable choice. Either he submits to a deal that leaves Iran considerably stronger than it was before February 28th, or he breaks with the US by trying to scupper the deal. There is little scope here to split the difference. Netanyahu has the 60-day US-Iran negotiating period to figure it out.
He will have fewer allies in Washington than before. In the early days of Epic Fury, the US capital went through a brief neoconservative revival. Here was a chance to exorcise the damaging (and Iran-boosting) legacy of the 2003 Iraq War by getting rid of the ayatollahs. Here, also, was an opportunity to convert Trump to their worldview. In crude political terms, the early decapitation strikes on Iran were a good moment for Marco Rubio, the hawkish US secretary of state, and a bad one for JD Vance, Trump’s America First vice-president.
It would be hard to overstate the reversal of mood between these two camps since then. Most of Trump’s base accepts whatever he does on trust. If he wants to bomb Iran into the Stone Age, so be it. Should he instead promise billions of unfrozen assets to Iran and even more in future investments, also so be it. In Washington, however, those contrasting paths represent factions that increasingly loathe each other. All they ultimately share is reflexive loyalty to Trump.
Can he keep both in one tent? The interventionist camp, which includes many Republican senators, such as Lindsey Graham, will need to tread carefully. Assuming the talks do not hit an early landmine, their shrunken parameters will offer a painful teachable moment for Trump and those who urged him into this war. Trump initially claimed he was motivated to help Iran’s protesters, thousands of whom were killed by Iranian security forces at the start of the year. Now he praises Iran’s modified regime.
Having run through an extravagant list of war aims, Trump has settled on one – reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Difficult though it will be to swallow, loyalists will try to present the reopened waterway as a triumph, even though the strait was unimpeded before the war began. They will also brush off the unfreezing of up to $24 billion (€20.7 billion) in Iran’s assets as a feature of the natural order. Woe betide those who dare liken it to the $1.7 billion in cash that Barack Obama sent to Iran as part of a settlement in the wake of his 2015 deal. “That’s not going to happen with Trump,” the president promised at the start of Epic Fury.
The America First camp will be primed to praise whatever deal Trump strikes, even if it is less good than Obama’s, which Netanyahu also did his best to scupper. From their point of view, Trump’s flirtation with Middle Eastern forever wars is over. He is back to the president they thought they knew. Netanyahu is often called Israel’s Houdini. Even he, however, will find this vice hard to escape. Should he try to jeopardise the Iran talks, Trump’s reaction could be worse than mouthing off to a reporter.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
