Israel, US and Iran: The tail that wagged the superpower

How Benjamin Netanyahu handed Donald Trump a war and a bill he may never stop paying

On the morning of March 18, 2026, Israel struck the South Pars natural gas field in the Persian Gulf, the world's largest, without telling the United States it was going to do so. Donald Trump, the man whose military is also fighting the war, found out when everyone else did.

Trump went to Truth Social. Israel had, he wrote, “violently lashed out” out of “anger for what has taken place in the Middle East,” and "the United States knew nothing about this particular attack.” Within hours, a US defence official told NBC News that was not true: Washington and Tel Aviv had coordinated on the strike, as they have on strategically significant targets throughout the campaign.

Either the President of the United States was blindsided by his own ally, or he was covering for them. Both explanations are extraordinary. Both are consistent with everything that has happened since February 28th.This is where we are, three weeks into America's largest military operation in the Middle East in two decades. An ally strikes the world's largest gas field. The president says he didn't know. His own officials say he did. Gulf states that trusted American security guarantees are watching their refineries burn. And the man at the centre of all of it, the man who pushed, lobbied, and manoeuvred until the bombs finally fell, is not in Washington. He is in Jerusalem, fighting for his own political survival, watching his poll numbers, and reportedly counting on regime change in Tehran to finish the job.

Welcome to the most consequential outsourcing deal of the modern era.

The story of how this war began is, at its core, the story of a phone call. On February 23rd, Netanyahu rang Trump with a piece of intelligence: Iran's supreme leader and his top advisers were all convening at a single location in Tehran that Saturday morning. They could all be killed in one strike. It was, Netanyahu told the President of the United States, a now-or-never moment. Trump took the deal.

Netanyahu had visited the White House a record-breaking six times in the prior year. In call after call, he had been methodically shifting Trump's gaze toward Iran's nuclear ambitions. When Omani mediators were reportedly on the verge of announcing a potential diplomatic breakthrough in Geneva, Netanyahu worked to derail those talks. Then came the Saturday morning airstrike.