Almost as soon as Israeli bombs started falling on Tehran last Thursday, a debate sprung up in Washington: Had Benjamin Netanyahu ignored Donald Trump’s request to hold off on striking Iran until the nuclear talks ran their course? Or was Trump, as some in the D.C. national security establishment contended, in on it the whole time? It’s a particularly fateful question now, as Trump publicly weighs whether the United States should join Israel in attacking Iran’s nuclear infrastructure or stick it out at the negotiating table. Today, he said he would make a decision “within the next two weeks.”
Unless, of course, the decision had already been made, and the president’s equivocation was just a smokescreen. According to this school of thought, Trump hadn’t just given Bibi the greenlight to start bombing last week, two days before U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff’s planned meeting with the Iranians in Oman; he’d been helping Israel prepare for the attack, and his warnings against such an operation were all part of an elaborate disinformation campaign to lull the Iranian leadership into complacency. “It was pre-agreed,” one D.C. foreign-policy insider assured me.
It sounded fantastical—can you imagine Trump keeping a secret of that magnitude?—especially when the U.S. continues to withhold the heavy ordinance the Israelis say they need. And there were others in the national security world who dismissed it as lunacy. Still, this theory was circulating on social media and on prominent OSINT channels, and being pushed by people like Aviva Klompas, a pro-Israel activist, who claimed that a “senior U.S. intelligence official” had told her that “the U.S. provided real-time reconnaissance support to Israel before, during, and after the ongoing strikes—using secure channels to coordinate every step.” The ostensible involvement of the U.S. was also reported in Israeli media, which was why I started hearing from friends in Israel that Trump and Bibi had run a brilliant psyop on the ayatollahs.
By Friday morning, this idea had found its way into a story by Axios’s ace Israel reporter, Barak Ravid. His piece was sourced to two Israeli officials, who insisted the attacks were “all coordinated with Washington,” and that the pretense of U.S. objections to them was actually just meant “to convince Iran that no attack was imminent and make sure Iranians on Israel’s target list wouldn’t move to new locations.” And though Ravid noted that “the U.S. side hasn’t confirmed any of that,” the fact that someone of his caliber had printed the suggestion gave it a whole new life in Washington.
But in the week since the Israeli attack on Iran commenced, it’s been looking more and more like the story of that brilliant Trump–Bibi psyop was itself a psyop, with Trump as the target. Whatever the president’s level of involvement in, or assent to, Israel’s bombing campaign—and all we have now are conflicting accounts—it’s clear that Bibi knows how to manipulate his counterpart, possibly right into a war that Trump has claimed he doesn’t want.
For the Win
In the intelligence world, agents tailor their approach to a target based on that person’s specific psychological makeup and desires. Two classic weak points, of course, are money and ego, so bribes and elaborate flattery can be simple ways to get someone to do what you want. This is why, for example, Daimler, now known as Mercedes-Benz Group, bribed the dictator of Turkmenistan with a German translation of his book of philosophical musings, the Ruhnama, stuffing hundreds of copies of it into a solid gold chest. (Daimler got the contract—and, in 2010, was charged with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.)
Anyway, Trump has never been shy about what he likes: money, and winning. You could get on his good side by, say, giving him a $400 million jet or investing in his family’s crypto business. But if you don’t have Gulf levels of cash sloshing around, you can always try to engineer something that looks like a win for him. Bibi was presumably aware that he risked doing the opposite—making Trump look like he’d failed to score a big, beautiful nuclear deal with Iran and ward off yet another Middle East conflict. But he has, at every step since beginning his bombing campaign, found ways to flatter Trump and attribute the stealth and ingenuity of the operation at least partly to the American president.
After all, Bibi’s goal isn’t just to keep Trump from being angry at him, but to get Trump to finish the job of destroying Iran’s nuclear program with B-2s and bunker busters. He has been so shrewd in publicly over-attributing the campaign’s successes to Trump, and constantly showering him with praise. “Happy birthday to you, Donald J. Trump,” Bibi said in a cringey video over the weekend, in which he wished “a double happy birthday” to Trump and the U.S. Army. “You’ve been an extraordinary leader: decisive, courageous, clear-visioned, clear-actioned. You have done great things for Israel. You have been an extraordinary friend to the Jewish state, and to me personally. And we appreciate what you’re doing now, helping protect Israeli lives against the criminal regime in Iran.” A few days later, he added that “American pilots are intercepting drones alongside our pilots.”
Trump likes a winner, which is why he changed his tone on the Israeli operation as soon as it became clear that it was being praised as a daring, ingenious success. While Secretary of State Marco Rubio put out a hasty statement last Thursday night to disclaim any American involvement in the just-commenced Israeli bombing campaign, by Friday morning Trump was calling reporters to praise what he called “a very successful attack, to put it mildly,” and to affirm that “we of course support Israel, obviously, and supported it like nobody has ever supported it.” By Tuesday, Trump was using the first-person plural to describe the Israeli attack, writing that “We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” adding, “Nobody does it better than the good ol’ USA.”
Two Weeks Later
Bibi’s been happy to let Trump take as much ownership as he wants, praising him, giving credit where it’s not necessarily due and—perhaps learning from Zelensky’s Oval Office experience—making sure to say thank you. For good measure, according to some reports, he has also reminded Trump that the Iranian regime has tried to kill him.
Meanwhile, the Israeli government continues to box Trump in by playing up the likelihood he will join their military operation. The closer he gets to his decision, it seems, the more anonymous Israeli officials are telling American reporters that Trump is leaning toward busting those Iranian bunkers. (In fairness, American officials are leaking much the same.)
Trump, however, continues to maintain what he sees as his singular competitive advantage: unpredictability. And he, too, appears to be playing for time. Yesterday, Trump told reporters, “I may do it, I may not do it.” Today, the White House gave itself a two-week window and pointed to “a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future.” If you followed the retreating horizon on when Trump would impose tough new sanctions on Russia, which receded two weeks at a time, you’ll recognize that time frame: two weeks seems to be Trump’s way of saying “maybe never.”
It is quite possible that Bibi will go too far, making Trump realize he’s being boxed in and manipulated. Then again, it’s Trump. He could easily take the thank-yous and the credit for an Israeli military job well done, pocket it, get cold feet, and give nothing in return. Which is perhaps why Bibi, standing at an Israeli hospital bombed by Iran on Thursday, declared that, actually, Israel can finish the job alone.