For nearly half a century, from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama, American presidents shared a common conviction: that their job was to manage Israel. They pressured, pleaded, and clashed with Jerusalem (al-Quds), but never surrendered the premise that America was the senior partner. George H.W. Bush was so infuriated by settlements that he banned a young Benjamin Netanyahu from the State Department.

 Bill Clinton looked at Bibi and famously asked, "Who's the fucking superpower around here?" Obama's relationship curdled into open hostility; a senior official famously called Netanyahu a "chickenshit”, a slur that became the White House's in-house code name for the Israeli leader. For 40 years, US presidents saw Netanyahu as an obstacle to peace, but a necessary evil. They fought over borders and Iran, but never surrendered American primacy.

Then came Trump. He did not view Israel as a client state. He viewed it as a kindred spirit. He moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, recognized the Golan Heights, and gave Netanyahu a free hand against the Palestinians. But the most consequential shift, now bringing the region to the brink, was on Iran. Obama had constructed the JCPOA precisely to block Israel's path to war. Netanyahu hated it because it removed the Iranian threat as a rationale for military action. Under Trump, the firewall was demolished. When Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018, he walked into Netanyahu's trap. Israeli intelligence had spied on the Iran negotiations to leak material to Republicans and kill the deal. Trump never pushed back. Netanyahu, a master manipulator, understood that Trump did not ask, "Is this good for America?" He asked, "Is Netanyahu happy with me?" The man Obama's aides derided as "chickenshit" outmaneuvered the American system by capturing the one president who refused to say no, either due to secret causes such as possible Epstein files or Trump’s volatile character.   

But Trump and Netanyahu made a far more dangerous miscalculation. They fundamentally underestimated the Islamic Republic. First, they misread Iran's ideational power, the revolutionary spirit since 1979. Trump's "maximum pressure" campaign was designed to trigger a popular uprising. Instead, it triggered the opposite. The revolutionary Iran reverted to its founding DNA: defiance, martyrdom, and the conviction that endurance against foreign hostility is a religious duty. Trump assumed economic pain would produce surrender. He forgot that a government born from a revolution against the CIA does not negotiate from fear. Second, they misjudged Iran's structural military power- its missile and drone arsenal. Unlike every other regional power, Iran's deterrent is innate, indigenous, and independent. It relies on no second country. The Shahed drones, the Fateh missiles, the Kheibar Shekan -all designed, engineered, and mass-produced inside Iran.

Trump's entire theory of victory rested on Iran being weak, isolated, and dependent. Once, the April 2024 attack proved the opposite. Iran is a civilization-state of nearly 90 million people with a sophisticated military-industrial complex hardened in underground cities. Finally, Trump was trapped by his own information bubble. Channeled media -from conservative outlets to briefings from Persian Gulf allies -presented a caricature of Iran on the verge of collapse. This was never true. But it was what Trump wanted to hear. Netanyahu ensured the flow of intelligence reinforced Trump's prejudices rather than challenging them.

Donald Trump shattered four decades of consistent American foreign policy by rejecting the "senior partner" role that previous presidents maintained, instead personalizing the relationship to the point where “Israel First” replaced “America First”. This fundamental shift led him to destroy the JCPOA, withdraw from the nuclear deal without a replacement, and provide offensive weapons, and now, entering into a full-scale war.

Trump's willful ignorance of intelligence, consuming only information that flattered his prejudices while Netanyahu fed him a distorted picture of Iran's weakness, completed his entrapment. Trump's "maximum pressure" campaign, now backed by open warfare, has failed to achieve its stated objectives: Iran has not collapsed, and its revolutionary leadership, despite the martyrdom of its Leader, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, has proven far more resilient than Trump's intelligence bubble predicted. Unlike previous presidents who understood that Iran could be negotiated with but not broken, Trump, blinded by Netanyahu's manipulation and his own hubris, tried to break it, and in 2026, the world is watching that failure unfold in real time.

(The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of the Tehran Times.)