{"id":817156,"date":"2026-05-23T16:09:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-23T16:09:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/817156\/"},"modified":"2026-05-23T16:09:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-23T16:09:13","slug":"once-trumps-co-pilot-against-iran-netanyahu-is-now-a-mere-passenger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/817156\/","title":{"rendered":"Once Trump\u2019s Co-Pilot Against Iran, Netanyahu Is Now a Mere Passenger"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the run-up to the Feb. 28 attack on Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was not only in the Situation Room with President Trump<\/a>, he was leading the discussion, predicting that a joint U.S.-Israeli strike could very well lead to the demise of the Islamic Republic.<\/p>\n

Just a few weeks later, after those sanguine assurances proved inaccurate, the picture was starkly different. Israel was so thoroughly sidelined by the Trump administration, two Israeli defense officials said, that its leaders were cut almost entirely out of the loop on truce talks between the United States and Iran.<\/p>\n

Starved of information from their closest ally, the Israelis have been forced to pick up what they can about the back-and-forth between Washington and Tehran through their connections with leaders and diplomats in the region as well as their own surveillance from inside the Iranian regime, said the two officials. Like others for this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.<\/p>\n

The banishment from the cockpit to economy class has potentially significant consequences for Israel, and especially for the prime minister, who faces an uphill re-election battle this year.<\/p>\n

Mr. Netanyahu has long sold himself to Israeli voters as a kind of Trump whisperer, uniquely capable of enlisting and retaining the president\u2019s support. In a televised speech early in the war, he portrayed himself as the president\u2019s peer, assuring Israelis that he talked to Mr. Trump \u201calmost every day,\u201d exchanging ideas and advice, \u201cand deciding together.\u201d<\/p>\n

He had led Israel to war in February with grand visions of achieving a goal he has pursued for decades: stopping Iran\u2019s push for nuclear weapons once and for all. As the war began with a stunning decapitation of much of the government in Tehran, it seemed as though an even more grandiose dream might come true: the toppling of the regime.<\/p>\n

But many in Mr. Trump\u2019s inner circle had always viewed the idea of regime change as absurd. And it wasn\u2019t long before American and Israeli priorities began to diverge more, especially after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil prices soaring and pressuring Mr. Trump into agreeing to a cease-fire.<\/p>\n

Far from vanquished, the Islamic Republic has behaved as though it won the war, merely by surviving it.<\/p>\n

Israel, by contrast, has seen its biggest objectives for the war elude its grasp.<\/p>\n

Mr. Netanyahu set three goals at the start of the war: toppling the regime, destroying Iran\u2019s nuclear program and eliminating its missile program. None have been realized.<\/p>\n

Instead of burying Iran\u2019s nuclear ambitions, a recent American proposal called for a 20-year suspension of, or moratorium on, Iranian nuclear activity \u2014 and that time frame may have gotten smaller in subsequent proposals. That raises the prospect that an eventual deal could resemble the Obama administration\u2019s 2015 nuclear accord<\/a>, which Mr. Netanyahu fought against at the time and Mr. Trump exited from three years later.<\/p>\n

With the Trump administration excluding Israel from the negotiations, Iran\u2019s arsenal of ballistic missiles may have been left off the table, as far as Israeli officials know. In that respect, any deal would fail to improve on the 2015 agreement, which Mr. Netanyahu assailed in part because it did not address Iran\u2019s missiles.<\/p>\n

It would also be a dismaying setback for the Israeli public, for whom life largely ground to a halt as the nation was bombarded by Iranian missiles in March and April. <\/p>\n

There are other concerns for Israel about the possible contours of a U.S.-Iran agreement, including a lifting of economic sanctions against Tehran. Doing so could amount to an economic lifeline, flooding Iran with billions of dollars that it could then use to rearm and to help its proxy forces, like Hezbollah, replenish their own arsenals with weapons to use against Israel.<\/p>\n

While little is certain yet about the shape of an eventual deal \u2014 and any agreement could still be postponed by a renewal of fighting \u2014 what seems clear is that Israel\u2019s partnership with the United States has come at a steep price. A country that for generations prided itself on \u201cdefending ourselves by ourselves,\u201d and whose leaders exasperated a succession of American presidents with their hardheaded recalcitrance, is now making little secret of its need, and willingness, to submit to Mr. Trump\u2019s demands.<\/p>\n

As Defense Minister Israel Katz said on April 23, as President Trump threatened to resume the war and bomb Iran back to the \u201cStone Age\u201d: \u201cWe are only waiting for the green light from the U.S.\u201d<\/p>\n

That admission was a humbling climbdown from the heady first days of the war, when the two countries achieved air supremacy and were so confident of success that they urged the Iranian people to topple the regime and secure their future.<\/p>\n

At the time, they spoke proudly of achieving an unprecedented degree of cooperation, their militaries knitted together intricately, with Israeli officers assigned to Centcom\u2019s headquarters in Tampa, Fla., and U.S. officers embedded in \u201cFortress Of Zion,\u201d the so-called Pit deep beneath the Kirya, Israel\u2019s military headquarters in downtown Tel Aviv. Moment-to-moment decisions like how to respond to incoming Iranian missiles were being made jointly, officials said.<\/p>\n

Within two weeks, it became clear that the war would not produce instant victory, as Mr. Trump had hoped. The White House, and some Israeli leaders, put aside their hopes for regime change, and Mr. Trump turned his attention toward ending the fighting. He had viewed Mr. Netanyahu as a war ally, but not as a close partner when it came to negotiating with the Iranians, American officials familiar with his thinking said; in fact, he <\/strong>considered Mr. Netanyahu someone who needed to be restrained when it comes to resolving conflicts.<\/p>\n

Israel soon found itself demoted from equal partner to something more akin to a subcontractor to the U.S. military.<\/p>\n

Israeli intelligence had proposed sending Kurdish fighters into Iran from Iraq, and supported the plan by bombing targets in northwest Iran to help pave the way for such an invasion<\/a>. Mr. Trump, after publicly supporting the idea<\/a>, reversed himself two days later, on March 7. \u201cI don\u2019t want the Kurds going in,\u201d he said on Air Force One. \u201cI don\u2019t want to see the Kurds get hurt, get killed.\u201d<\/p>\n

That same weekend, Israel bombed oil facilities in Tehran and the nearby city of Karaj. The Americans, who had approved of the operation in advance, expected a small but symbolic strike that would signal to the Iranians that their vital energy industry could be targeted, according to two Israeli officials.<\/p>\n

The burning fuel caused vast clouds of black smoke carrying dangerous chemicals<\/a> that hovered over Tehran for days, prompting concerns that Gulf countries could face Iranian retaliation against their energy facilities. The Trump administration let it be known that it disapproved and that it had asked Israel to stop striking such infrastructure.<\/p>\n

It was not the only time that Israel cleared plans with the United States, only to have the Trump administration throw it under the bus after those plans were executed.<\/p>\n

A similar sequence of events played out when Israel later struck the South Pars natural gas field and oil facilities along the Persian Gulf in southern Iran.<\/p>\n

The aim of that March 18 strike, which was also coordinated with the United States, was to press Iran to agree to much better terms in an eventual cease-fire.<\/p>\n

Instead, Mr. Trump gave the order to call off such bombings, but not before a head-spinning series of statements. He at first denied advance knowledge<\/a> of the South Pars attack, then criticized Israel for having \u201cviolently lashed out,\u201d and finally suggested that he had, in fact, spoken about the strike beforehand with Mr. Netanyahu, but had urged him not to carry it out.<\/p>\n

That night in Jerusalem, Mr. Netanyahu took full responsibility. \u201cFact No. 1, Israel acted alone,\u201d he told reporters of the strike on Asaluyeh and South Pars. \u201cFact No. 2, President Trump asked us to hold off on future attacks and we\u2019re holding it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Trump even pressured Israel to bring a premature halt to its campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon within days after the cease-fire on April 8, forcing Israel to accept restraints on its fighting with a hostile adversary right on its border.<\/p>\n

The sidelining is particularly hard to take for some Israeli officials, who, speaking on condition of anonymity, noted that the country willingly shouldered some of the war\u2019s more controversial assignments. That included the extrajudicial killing of the leader of a sovereign nation, something that the United States has never openly done itself.<\/p>\n

For Mr. Netanyahu, it has meant repeatedly recalibrating his rhetoric, and even adjusting his description of Israel\u2019s war objectives, in response to Mr. Trump\u2019s frequent vacillations.<\/p>\n

After initially telling his citizens that Israel\u2019s goals were to \u201cremove\u201d the existential threats of an Iranian nuclear weapon and of its ballistic missile arsenal, by March 12 Mr. Netanyahu was articulating a new idea. This one downplayed the fact that those threats had not been removed, and instead exalted Israel\u2019s close partnership with the United States.<\/p>\n

\u201cThreats come and threats go, but when we become a regional power, and in certain fields a global power, we have the strength to push dangers away from us and secure our future,\u201d he said. What gave Israel such newfound strength in the eyes of its adversaries, Mr. Netanyahu asserted, was his alliance with Mr. Trump \u2014 \u201can alliance like no other.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from Washington.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the run-up to the Feb. 28 attack on Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was not…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":817157,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[29171,22497,218427,5959,4783,10273,83,99,13192,8992,50,375,12357,151365,277,69783,16852],"class_list":["post-817156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-barack","tag-benjamin","tag-defense-and-military-forces","tag-donald-j","tag-hezbollah","tag-international-relations","tag-iran","tag-israel","tag-lebanon","tag-netanyahu","tag-news","tag-nuclear-weapons","tag-obama","tag-peace-process","tag-trump","tag-united-states-international-relations","tag-united-states-politics-and-government"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116624763396505409","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=817156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817156\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/817157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=817156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=817156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=817156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}