The U.S.-Israel relationship under Donald Trump has settled into a pattern so predictable it could be scripted by Charles Schulz. Netanyahu is Charlie Brown. Trump is Lucy. And the football is whatever promise Trump has just made that Israel is staking its survival on.
The routine never varies. Trump makes grand assurances—of solidarity, of shared objectives, of ironclad coordination. Netanyahu commits Israeli blood and treasure on the strength of those assurances. And then, at the critical moment, Trump yanks the football away, leaving Israel flat on its back to absorb the consequences.
He has done it repeatedly over the past year. He now appears prepared to do it again—this time with far higher stakes in Iran.
Contrary to the fevered claims of antisemites, this is not a war fought on Israel’s behalf. Iran has been at war with the United States for 47 years, ever since the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. It has killed more Americans through its proxies than any actor except Al-Qaeda on Sept. 11, 2001. It has plotted assassinations of American officials on American soil. Its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs threaten not just Israel but every U.S. base and ally in the Middle East. Until Feb. 28, the battle was one-sided, with Iran alone prosecuting it, and no American response.
Now, the United States has an opportunity to enhance its own security and that of the rest of the world, targeted by an Iranian regime whose raison d’être was the destruction of Israel and the global expansion of radical Islam. To do so, it must eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, dismantle its missile arsenal, end its terror network and remove the regime.
From the outset, Trump signaled that he wanted a short war. He has never committed to seeing it through to its strategic conclusion. Like a schoolyard bully who declares “we quit, we win” the moment the game gets uncomfortable, he seems prepared to walk away the instant he “feel[s] it in his bones,” regardless of the state of play.
It’s no secret that Trump is more concerned about the U.S. economy, the midterm elections this fall and his own financial interests than Israel’s security. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has placed the president’s interests in jeopardy and was entirely predictable, yet the United States failed to secure it in the war’s opening phase.
That failure may be partly explained by the decision to launch “Operation Epic Fury” earlier than planned to exploit the opportunity to decapitate Iran’s leadership. But it is now nearly a month into the fighting, and Iran’s chokehold over one of the world’s most vital energy routes has not been broken. Worse, Trump has handed Iran a financial lifeline by allowing its ships to deliver oil to China and given Russia a similar gift by easing sanctions designed to strangle its economy.
Meanwhile, the panic over energy prices and predictions of economic apocalypse are wildly overblown. Prices today are still below levels seen under former President Joe Biden. As Ariel Cohen of the Atlantic Council has noted, in 2008, the price of oil reached the equivalent of $223 per barrel in today’s dollars, roughly double the current price. The hysteria is manufactured. The risk to Israel is not.
We have seen this movie before, and we know how it ends.
When Trump declares victory, the war is over for Israel. Recall last June: Israel was ecstatic when Trump ordered the destruction of three of Iran’s nuclear facilities. But then he forced Netanyahu to recall Israeli planes and accept a ceasefire before the mission was complete.
Trump claimed at the time that Iran’s nuclear capability was “completely obliterated.” It was not. We are fighting this war in part because Iran still possesses enough enriched uranium for a dozen bombs and accelerated the production of ballistic missiles that Israel had planned to destroy. Trump’s premature declaration of victory in June is the direct cause of the war we are now fighting.
We should have learned from the catastrophic failure to stop North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons. But the critics of this war would apparently have us wait until a mushroom cloud forms over Washington before acknowledging an “imminent threat.” That, evidently, is their threshold. These same critics dismissed Iran’s missile capabilities—capabilities we now see have twice the range they acknowledged, able to reach most European capitals and every American base in the region.
Left unchecked, Iran would have likely followed North Korea’s example of seeking an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead capable of striking the United States.
The advocates of diplomacy chose to ignore decades of Iranian duplicity—duplicity that bamboozled former President Barack Obama into a deal that allowed Tehran to continue pursuing a bomb while developing the ballistic missiles whose sole purpose was to deliver it.
Despite the fevered claims about the omnipotence of the pro-Israel lobby, neither it nor the Israeli government has been able to stop Lucy from pulling the football away. It has already happened with Hamas. With Hezbollah. With Syria. With the Houthis. And with the Gulf states.
Netanyahu wanted Trump to defeat Biden in the belief that Israel would finally be given free rein to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah. Instead, the president has micromanaged Israeli operations and forced the prime minister to accept ceasefires with both. In Gaza, Hamas still controls 47% of the territory and is actively rebuilding while Israel waits in vain for the International Stabilization Force that Trump promised would disarm the terrorists.
In Lebanon, Trump allowed Israel to continue fighting in the south while Hezbollah used the time to rebuild. For the moment, Trump is too consumed with Iran to intervene, but like Biden before him, he dictates what Israel is allowed to target in both Lebanon and Iran.
In Syria, Trump embraced a jihadist regime and lifted sanctions without securing a single Israeli interest in return. With the Houthis, he declared victory while they continued to fire missiles indiscriminately at Israeli cities.
And then there are the Gulf states.
The United States holds all the leverage over Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which—as this war has made clear—are totally dependent on the U.S. military for their survival, despite having purchased tens of billions of dollars’ worth of American weapons ostensibly to defend themselves from Iran. Rather than exploit that dependence to compel normalization with Israel, Trump gave them security guarantees and still more weapons without demanding they join the Abraham Accords.
Now we hear that Trump is concerned about Iran’s ability to recover after the war. This is not a strategy. It is an excuse for stopping short. The Allies did not agonize over Nazi Germany’s postwar recovery while the Wehrmacht was still fighting. They bombed its oil, its electricity and its industry to destroy its capacity to wage war. They demanded unconditional surrender. Victory came first. Reconstruction came later. The Powell Doctrine—that if force is used, it must be applied overwhelmingly to achieve decisive victory—exists precisely because half-measures produce defeats.
Trump demanded Iran’s unconditional surrender. Yet if current reports are accurate, it is the United States and not Iran that is preparing to capitulate.
If this war ends with the regime unbroken, its nuclear ambitions merely delayed, its missile capabilities only partially degraded and its terror networks still functioning, it will not be a victory. It will be one of the most consequential strategic failures in modern American history—and one of the most devastating betrayals of an ally.
None of this erases what Trump has done right. Breaking the long-standing taboo against fighting openly alongside Israel was historically significant. Killing the 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was a seismic event. The damage inflicted on Iran’s military infrastructure has been enormous. But these achievements make what happens next even more important. A war that begins with a decapitation strike and ends with a whimper is worse than a war that was never fought because it leaves the enemy wounded, enraged and determined to rearm.
Israel cannot afford to be Charlie Brown when the football is a war with a nuclear-threshold state. If Trump walks away early—if he declares victory where none exists, if he leaves the Islamic Republic battered but intact—it will not merely be a policy failure. It will be a historic defeat for the United States and a momentous betrayal of the one country that trusted him enough to go to war alongside him.
