This is Netanyahu’s war. Trump was just afraid of missing out

By the end of the second week of the US-Israeli war on Iran, the earlier suspicion that there is no plan is now a certainty. The objectives of the war change daily. Is it to end Iran’s nuclear programme? No: this cannot be done without an incredibly risky ground operation to seize the enriched uranium. Is it to precipitate regime change? Well, the appointment of the son of the previous ayatollah as supreme leader is the clearest expression of continuity. Is it to foment an uprising? That ship has probably sailed: talk of arming the Kurds appears to have died down, and only a few weeks ago, the Iranian regime killed thousands of protesters – as many as 30,000, according to health officials. 

Whilst the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries reel from drone attacks and the wider world looks on dismayed at soaring energy costs, Russia finds itself in a dream scenario. Its hydrocarbon-based economy gets a boost from these developments – particularly now that the US has lifted sanctions in a desperate attempt to stabilise supply – while it can also help its ally Iran target US strategic locations in the Middle East, such as radar stations in Bahrain and Qatar.

In Trump’s own National Security Strategy from late last year, which I wrote about in January, the risks from Iran were described as having vastly reduced: “Conflict remains the Middle East’s most troublesome dynamic, but there is today less to this problem than headlines might lead one to believe. Iran – the region’s chief destabilizing force – has been greatly weakened by Israeli actions since October 7, 2023.” Trump himself insisted that Iran’s nuclear programme had been completely destroyed by military action in 2025, although later statements from his chief negotiator Steve Witkoff contradicted this. 

So the idea that the US was forced to act in response to a sudden, imminent threat from Iran is clearly untrue. And therefore the question remains: why did Donald Trump do this? I think the answer is as simple as it is underwhelming: FOMO. He is easily manipulated and can’t bear not to join in.

The role of Benjamin Netanyahu, who unlike Trump has had almost no media interactions since the start of the war, is perhaps the key here. Netanyahu has argued for military action against Iran publicly and consistently for four decades. Over the same period, US presidents have declined to join this escapade, ranging from George W Bush (who coined the term “axis of evil” for Iran) to Barack Obama and Joseph Biden, as well as first-term Trump – showing us that caution on a war with Iran is unlikely to be a partisan question and might be due to deeper realities. Even at the height of hubristic US neoconservatism (for example, the years 2003-05) the Americans realised that removing the government of a vast country of nearly 100 million people, riven with complex regional and sectarian divisions, would bring unintended consequences of the most dangerous kind. 

For years, scenario planners have known that Iran would close the strait of Hormuz and attack GCC countries if it felt existentially threatened. This is one of the most widely discussed possibilities in international affairs. If you do a Google search on this, limiting results to before the current war, you’ll see that this was extensively covered in the mainstream media long before Operation Epic Fury, and was even the subject of a motion in the Iranian parliament last year – hardly a secret plan. With Iran now laying mines in the strait, the idea that the US navy will be able to restore the flow of shipping and stabilise world oil prices now looks remote, whatever brave words we might hear from Trump and his lieutenants.

The common thread here is a president who doesn’t rely on advisers. In a previous era, a national security adviser existed to help a president weigh up difficult decisions, such as whether to enter a war. Trump doesn’t have a national security adviser. His secretary of defense (now “secretary of war”) is an intemperate second-rate Fox News host who believes that “woke” culture has destroyed the US military and that Republican politicians who have been consistently opposed to “foreign wars” are now enthusiasts for them. So it’s not that we can identify an underlying rationale for Trump’s actions (there isn’t one): it’s that the guardrails that have existed in other presidencies are now completely gone. With the Iranians likely to be able to hold out for months, their mantra that “survival is victory” may prove decisive.

Arthur Snell hosts the Behind the Lines podcast. His book How Britain Broke the World: War, Greed and Blunders from Kosovo to Afghanistan, 1997-2022 is published by Canbury Press