Trump’s Iran strike is a huge win for Netanyahu but the endgame is as unclear as ever

The smile on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s face was impossible to hide.

The smile on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s face was impossible to hide. Minutes after President Donald Trump announced that the US had bombed three of Iran’s nuclear facilities, Netanyahu effusively praised the American leader as someone whose decisions could lead the region to a “future of prosperity and peace.” Since Israel launched its attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities and other targets, Netanyahu and the country’s other political echelon had been careful not to be perceived as dragging Trump into another war in the Middle East. In the end, the US joining the campaign – and taking credit for the results – is arguably an even bigger success for Netanyahu, who brought the world’s superpower into what had been Israel’s mission. Netanyahu has talked about the threat of Iran for much of his political career, parading out visual aids on occasion – like a cartoon of a bomb at the UN General Assembly in 2012 – to help his audience. But the longstanding criticism was that Netanyahu’s rhetoric was all bark, no bite. For all the talk of the threat Iran posed to Israel and the wider region, Netanyahu never pulled the trigger on a major military operation. Instead, he authorized sporadic high-risk, high-reward operations from Israel’s Mossad spy agency, including the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists and the stealing of the country’s nuclear archive. But Iran’s nuclear program survived largely unscathed, and Netanyahu was left for years with no measurable achievement against an issue he came to see as an existential threat to Israel.