Everyone in the world is urging Donald Trump and the United States to end the war with Iran and reach a deal, but the POTUS is unfortunately waiting for Netanyahu’s next phone call before making up his mind.
To give you a quick recap, the ceasefire with Iran is on life support. The Middle Eastern country has retained 70% of its missile stockpile despite a relentless 40-day air campaign by the U.S. and Israeli air forces. The Strait of Hormuz, vital for global trade, remains closed. The Islamic Republic regime is still in power, and gas prices are at an all-time high around the world.
Somewhere in all of this, the president of the United States is struggling to find an off-ramp. Welcome to the war that Tel Aviv is running from a war room 5,700 miles away.
On Sunday, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu (per The Times of Israel) spoke by phone about Iran — the same day Netanyahu convened a high-level security meeting with his cabinet and Israel began coordinating with the U.S. about a possible resumption of the war.
Netanyahu said to his ministers that “our eyes are also open” regarding Iran and that he was “prepared for any scenario.” That is the opposite of the diplomatic posture adopted by every other world leader who has weighed in on this conflict. The rest of the planet — from Beijing to Brussels to Islamabad — has spent weeks urging Washington to reach a deal. Netanyahu, predictably, has spent those same weeks urging the opposite.
Why is no one stopping Trump?
What America’s own intelligence community thinks about all of this continues to be treated as background noise. The National Intelligence Council warned before the first bomb dropped that neither limited airstrikes nor a full-scale campaign was likely to produce regime change in Iran. And they were right.
Classified assessments show Iran has regained access to 30 of 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz. It also possesses roughly 70% of its pre-war missile stockpile, and has recovered approximately 90% of its underground launch facilities. Trump, who has publicly claimed Iran has “nothing left in a military sense,” dismissed the findings without addressing a single one of them.
Add all of this to the fact that Pete Hegseth has spent the Iran war conducting a parallel purge of his own chain of command in the Pentagon, firing Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George mid-war alongside two other generals, Gen. David Hodne and Gen. William Green Jr.
The most damning voice, though, came from inside the house. Joe Kent — Trump’s own director of the National Counterterrorism Center, a decorated Special Forces veteran with 11 combat deployments — resigned in March, writing that he “cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran” and that the U.S. had been dragged into it by “pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Well, believe it or not, it seems like we’re going in for another round, and nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody, can tell you what’s changed since the last 40 days of bombing, which accomplished nothing.
