The paradox of the Netanyahu-Trump strike on Iran

This is a very strange political moment.

As a result of the Israeli and American aerial assaults of June 2025, the threat of an Iran with nuclear weapons has, for some indeterminate length of time, been lifted. This is wonderful news for Israel, the United States, and the world.

As a result of Israel’s decision to go on the offensive after October 7th, Hamas and Hezbollah no longer pose an existential threat to Israel’s existence. The fall of the Assad regime is one clearly beneficial aftereffect of the devastating blows against Hezbollah.

Iran’s strategy of surrounding Israel with proxies lies in ruins, as does much of its nuclear program, ballistic missile efforts, and air defenses. Iran has now suffered from a war that it had previously been waging abroad.

The Russian and Chinese bets on Iran have, at least in the short run, proven to have been a mistake. Internally, the repressive instruments of the Islamic Republic remain intact, but the Israeli and then American attacks have opened the possibility of a Middle East no longer facing the imminent threats of Iranian imperialism.

Force where diplomacy failed

It was Benjamin Netanyahu, with the cooperation and then follow-up from Donald Trump, who enabled this turn of the tide by choosing to use force to slow – perhaps stop – Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons. The leaders of Iran must assume that, should they persist in their effort to build nuclear weapons, the current leaders of Israel and the United States will be willing to use force once again to prevent them from succeeding.

This is the first time since the nuclear issue loomed large in the 1990s that the Islamic Republic of Iran must reckon with a new reality – namely, that both Israel and the United States have resorted to force to slow or stop its nuclear program.

The era of Western diplomacy without the credible threat or use of force has, at least for the next three years, come to an end.

Presidents Clinton, George Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden all declared that American policy prohibited Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. That view was shared across the political spectrum in Israel.

But for the past two decades, it was obvious that diplomacy without the credible threat or actual use of force would fail to prevent Iran from developing a bomb. President Obama, Trump in his first administration, and then Biden all gave Iran multiple opportunities to abandon its nuclear program – one which these presidents all recognized was intended to produce nuclear weapons.

They offered an end to sanctions and assistance with nuclear projects specifically devoted to energy production. But these carrots failed to divert Iran’s leaders from their theologically driven goal of destroying the state of Israel, with nuclear weapons if necessary.

Theocratic fascism, ignored

The paradox of the current moment is striking. Two right-wing leaders were the first to resort to force to stop Iran’s nuclear program.

In every dimension by which we place movements on a spectrum from right to left, the Islamic Republic of Iran belongs on the extreme right. It attacks liberal democracy, political pluralism, cultural modernity and, of course, Israel and the Jews, using rhetoric soaked with the hatreds of pre- and anti-modern religious fanaticism.

It denies equality to women, oppresses homosexuality, fosters Holocaust denial, celebrates the fusion of theocracy and political power, and holds rallies of hatred about the United States and Israel that are reminiscent of the totalitarian spectacles of Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Mao’s China.

A good case could be made that its moronic chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” have been an ongoing violation of the incitement clause of the UN Genocide Convention – a violation for which it has never been held to account. Yet it did not occur to any of the famous human rights organizations to accuse Iran of fostering an ideological climate that served to justify a genocidal war against Israel. This, despite one Iranian leader describing Israel as a “one bomb country.”

The ayatollahs have sought to present their regime as part of the revolutionary Third World confronting the evils of Western imperialism. Yet the reactionary essence of their government was obvious in its first years when it trained its guns on thousands of leftists who had participated in the revolution against the Shah.

Despite Iran’s profound hatred of liberalism, Presidents Obama and Biden did not dwell on the full dimensions of its ideology in their presentations to the American public.

Though Obama noted the regime’s antisemitism, he mistook Iran’s pragmatic negotiating strategy for an abandonment of the regime’s core ideological hatreds. Neither resorted to force from the air as Netanyahu, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and other reliable sources reported Iran’s progress toward a bomb.

In the United States, Democrats complained that Netanyahu made the issue a partisan one, though only a small minority among them criticized the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) deal that slowed but did not stop Iran’s march toward a nuclear weapon.

As I wrote in this blog in 2015, a close reading of that agreement indicated that it was “incoherent” to conclude that it would prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Rather, the years of diplomacy without the threat or use of force amounted to a resigned acceptance in the long run of a policy of containment of an Iran with the bomb, rather than a consequential effort to use all means to prevent a nuclear Iran.

In his four years in office, Biden did not seize the opportunity to resort to force from the air either before or after Israel had destroyed Iran’s air defenses in fall 2024. Though Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were determined to find a “longer and stronger” deal than the 2015 agreement, the Biden team continued to hope that somehow diplomacy without the use of force would lead Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. It never did so.

Two flawed leaders

In 2020 and again in 2022, I wrote that Trump’s “America First” doctrine would lead to a possible abandonment of Israel in favor of closer ties with Putin’s Russia and with the oil-rich Gulf States. With his decisions of spring and early summer 2025, Trump has demonstrated that, at least for now, his understanding of “America First” does not lead to that conclusion.

He is the American president who has both weakened American influence around the world and undermined our alliances, yet has also concluded that it is necessary to resort to force in order to implement a policy goal that his recent predecessors repeatedly asserted was theirs as well.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program is as extensive as the well-informed, reliable sources say it is. If so, this means that two leaders of the hard right in Israel and the United States have done more to “fight fascism” in the form of the reactionary regime in Tehran than their liberal predecessors.

Netanyahu’s decision rested on a consensus in Israel. It is likely that a Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Benny Gantz, or Naftali Bennett would have made the same decision. However, that same consensus had not extended nearly as much into the Democratic Party in the United States, where a paucity of frank discussion of the radical antisemitism of the Islamic Republic combined with a reluctance to combine the use of force with diplomacy.

Two Democrats – Obama for eight, and Biden for four years – tried diplomacy without force. It did not succeed in stopping the Iranian nuclear program.

The Netanyahu who launched the attack is the same Netanyahu who unnecessarily divided Israeli society, brought hard-right ministers into his cabinet, threatened the independence of Israel’s judiciary, and appeased the growing power of a medieval form of Judaism among the Haredi that was anathema to modern, more secular and Zionist Israelis. He was also a leader who refused to accept responsibility for the failures of October 7.

The Donald Trump who sent B-2 bombers to strike the Fordow enrichment site is the same Trump who has: refused to face the obvious truth that Russia invaded Ukraine; undermined Ukraine’s efforts to withstand Russia’s brutal attacks; insulted Ukraine’s President Zelensky in the White House; found “good people on both sides” in Charlottesville in 2017; fired thousands of competent civil servants of the US government from USAID, Voice of America, and the National Endowment for the Humanities; undermined scientific expertise at the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Environmental Protection Agency; appointed a conspiracy theorist ignorant of modern science, medicine, and the benefits of vaccines to head the Department of Health and Human Services; appointed a Director of National Intelligence who was a former left-wing isolationist; illegally deported and jailed immigrants and fanned racist falsehoods about them; attacked the contribution of American universities to our country’s scientific and medical preeminence; abandoned essential support for American manufacturing of “clean energy”; called for cuts to Medicaid, a program of health coverage for lower-income groups, while supporting tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans; introduced chaos into a well-functioning global economy with proposals for tariffs opposed by the vast majority of economists; needlessly antagonized our close allies while finding bizarre kind words for our adversaries; and spewed a torrent of invective, insults, lies, and threats about his political opponents – raising the specter of the most authoritarian presidency in American history.

The strangeness of this moment lies in the fact that it was these two conservative political leaders who made the decisions to prevent a reactionary – not revolutionary or leftist – regime from acquiring the bomb, and did so when their American liberal predecessors had refrained from doing so.

A decade ago, speaking at the United Nations, Netanyahu said that “the greatest danger facing our world is the marriage of militant Islam with nuclear weapons.” He was right.

Tragically and illogically, in American politics this insight has found far more support within the Republican rather than the Democratic Party. As a result, the willingness to use our Air Force and Navy to block Iran’s path to the bomb became a partisan issue.

The leaders of the Democratic Party – the same party that led the fight against fascism in the 1940s – refrained from deploying military force to prevent the nightmare that Netanyahu accurately described. They desired the end but did not use the means needed to achieve it.

In our polarized American political climate, it is difficult to acknowledge what Netanyahu and Trump have accomplished while also sustaining criticism of other aspects of their policies. It is necessary to both sustain the criticism but also to offer the acknowledgement.