Mr Netanyahu comes calling to peddle a war

A Desperate Gamble: Netanyahu’s Agony

Benjamin Netanyahu comes to Washington not as the triumphant wartime conqueror, but as a politician on the threshold of political and personal ruin. His two-year campaign against Hamas has disintegrated into a strategic debacle. Despite its sheer military superiority, Israel remains mired in an unwinnable attrition war in Gaza, with hostages still in the grip of the captors and Hamas’s war machinery still intact. The much-touted Israeli Defence Forces have been bogged down in street combat while failing to achieve any of their declared objectives.

Netanyahu’s own domestic position is also troubled. Threatened by charges of corruption that could send him to prison, the Israeli Prime Minister has calculated that there is only one desperate roll of the dice that will preserve his skin: forcing the United States into a full-blown war with Iran. The short twelve-day war in June not only exposed Israel’s failure to destroy Iran but also the danger of a far greater conflagration that could remake the entire regional equation.

This is Netanyahu’s final attempt to avoid the wrath of Israeli courts. He comes to Washington not to seek advice or consultation, but to insist upon American blood and dollars to repair the strategic mess of his own making. His bag of tricks is not only classical diplomatic pressure, but also the threat of playing on sensitive and compromising information that will put immense pressure on the Trump administration to comply.

The economic apocalypse: When the strait closes

The strategic vulnerability Netanyahu desires to exploit has apocalyptic global ramifications. The Strait of Hormuz—that 21-mile narrow chokepoint for a fifth of the world’s oil and over 30 per cent of global liquefied natural gas to travel each day—represents the world’s most vulnerable economic leverage point. Iran has regularly and publicly threatened to close this waterway in response to any major armed attack. In contrast to its previous sabre-rattling, Tehran now possesses the military capability to carry out this threat.

The economic devastation would be instantaneous, apocalyptic, and unprecedented. The cost of oil would skyrocket to such an extent that it would dwarf the 1970s energy shortages. Pump gas stations would deal a devastating blow to American commerce, inflict massive job losses, and place the world economy into a recession worse than the 2008 financial meltdown. European economies, already struggling with energy security, would face industrial shutdowns. Asian production centres that rely on Middle Eastern oil would come to a standstill.

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The political reckoning: Trump’s Nobel dreams crash into reality

Netanyahu’s war sales pitch is a possible death knell for Donald Trump’s painstakingly built reputation as a peace broker who makes deals. Trump’s entire foreign policy brand rests on his claimed ability to end wars, rather than start them. Trump never tires of promising to resolve the Ukraine conflict,  avoiding new military entanglements, while appealing to his America First constituency, weary of perpetual foreign wars.

A cataclysmic conflict with Iran, forced at Netanyahu’s behest, would annihilate this rationale. As gas prices soar and American military bases in the Gulf region and across the Middle East are bombed by Iran, Trump’s MAGA base would experience a bitter disillusionment. Those very voters who voted Trump into office to end America’s wars abroad would have him launch the most economically devastating war in decades, not for America, but to bail out a foreign politician, likely to end up in jail.

The arithmetic of politics is dire: a war that collapses the global economy and appears to be in Israel’s, not America’s, interests would unleash the kind of populist outrage that would rewrite American politics for decades to come. The clout of pro-Israel lobby organizations, already threatened by growing suspicion among young Americans, would be at existential risk as opinion unites against policies that bleed American families’ pocketbooks for the benefit of foreign political interests.

Netanyahu is aware of these stakes to perfection, which is why his campaign of pressure will be unrelenting and could even include using any compromising information, pictures, videos, or testimonies to force obedience. This is not diplomacy, but rather political extortion, aimed at coercing America into a war that is not in America’s strategic interest.

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The collapsed architecture of Cold War statecraft

The animus that exists between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran is not an ideological one but the product of a series of consecutive strategic miscalculations taken year after year throughout decades before the 1979 revolution. The 1953 CIA-backed coup d’état of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, undertaken in cooperation with Britain to restore Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power, positioned Iran as a pivotal but volatile American proxy in the Cold War context of containment. Washington’s unwavering support of the Shah’s increasingly repressive regime was a classic Cold War trade-off in favour of stability over democratic legitimacy. This policy, in pursuit of stabilizing oil supplies and checking Soviet expansion, ultimately engendered deep anti-American resentment among the Iranian populace and clerical elites, laying the groundwork for eventual geopolitical collapse.

The nuclear file and maximum pressure’s strategic failure

The central strategic problem now remains Iran’s rapid march toward nuclear weapon capability.  The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement, reached by the Obama administration, was a short-term strategic accommodation: Iran agreed to drastic restrictions on its enrichment program in exchange for the suspension of economic sanctions. The 2018 US withdrawal from the JCPOA, coupled with the implementation of the “Maximum Pressure,” was a strategic failure. Sanctions devastated the Iranian economy. Tehran responded with a policy of “strategic patience,” systematically breaching the JCPOA limitations on uranium enrichment. Iran retains reserves of 60 per cent enriched uranium, bringing the nuclear “breakout” window down to weeks and leaving the US and Israel in an uncomfortable position.

Conclusion: The doomsday scenario

Tehran’s stance appears to be one of calculated defiance. As stated by the Iranian President recently, “We do not seek war. But whoever attacks us will be given the strongest response.” That determination guarantees that any resort to force would not result in one-sided capitulation, but rather a ruinous long regional war of attrition. 

Netanyahu comes to Washington not as an ally in need of advice, but as a desperate politician seeking America to surrender its economic strength and global standing to rescue his political career. The question for Trump is whether he will allow himself to be dragged into ending his own presidency to rescue a foreign leader who is looking at the prison bars.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.