THE ECONOMIST: Benjamin Netanyahu has his war. If it goes wrong, he will also get the blame.

Benjamin Netanyahu has spent much of his long career lecturing American presidents on the need to confront Iran.

In the Israeli Prime Minister’s own telling, during a visit by Barack Obama to Israel in 2013, “I argued again for an American strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.” Mr Obama demurred, answering that “nobody likes Goliath.” His successor, Donald Trump, was also reluctant. In 2018 he withdrew, at Mr Netanyahu’s urging, from the nuclear deal signed by the Obama administration with Iran. A year later he called off a strike on Iran at the last moment.

Yet today Mr Trump has become the partner Mr Netanyahu has always longed for: one willing to embrace the Israeli leader’s belief that “soft power is good, but hard power is even better.” In June Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear sites and persuaded America to join its mission. This year’s war has been a joint venture from the start.

Joining Israel in battle has also meant subscribing to the Israeli view that an enemy need not have any immediate intention to attack in order to justify a “pre-emptive” strike; it merely has to be capable of doing so at some future point. It was on this basis that, in 1981 and in 2007 respectively, Israel bombed Iraqi and Syrian nuclear reactors. Israel’s commitment to the doctrine has hardened since it was caught unawares by Hamas’s attack on October 7 2023. It now includes conventional military threats, including Iran’s ballistic-missile arsenal.

Israel’s leaders are upfront about this policy. When talking about the decision to go to war with Iran, one Israel Defence Forces (IDF) officer says, “We had an operational opportunity to act against an existential threat.”

American leaders, meanwhile, have been tying themselves in knots trying to claim they were acting against an “imminent” Iranian attack. On March 2 Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said America had acted “proactively in a defensive way”. Since they had known Israel was going to attack Iran, he continued, “that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

The next day Mr Rubio tried to walk back the impression Israel had somehow pushed America into war but his explanation, that Mr Trump had decided “Iran cannot have these missiles”, and that he had decided to attack because Iran is “the weakest they’ve ever been”, sounded just like Israeli doctrine. Mr Trump has also been keen to stress his own agency, insisting that “if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand,” and that he believed that Iran was going to attack.

The road to this war has not been straight. Shortly after the 12-day war in June, when Iran quickly began rebuilding its ballistic-missile factories and replenishing its arsenal, Israel’s armed forces began planning a new operation aimed at further degrading the missile project.

The plans were shared with the Pentagon and possible co-operation discussed. However, when in January Mr Trump promised the protesters in Iran that “help is on the way,” Mr Netanyahu worried that the limited American strike which the president was apparently considering would achieve little beyond prompting Iran to start firing missiles before Israel had fully shored up its defences. At that point he urged restraint.

Two things changed in the weeks that followed. First, a rapid military build-up in the region meant that America had the forces to inflict major damage on Iran and had the missile-defence batteries in place to bolster Israel’s own defences. Second, Mr Trump embarked on a diplomatic foray with the Iranians.

Mr Netanyahu feared any American deal with the Iranians would ignore the ballistic-missile issue and force Israel to shelve its attack plans. He was particularly worried about the influence of his rival for Mr Trump’s attention and affection, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, in brokering such a deal.

In an emergency visit to Mr Trump on February 11, Mr Netanyahu urged him to choose the military option over the diplomatic one. Before returning to Israel, he explained that he had not hidden his “general scepticism about the possibility of reaching any agreement with Iran” when talking to the American president.

Arguably, the Iranians helped to make Mr Netanyahu’s case to Mr Trump, by trying to draw out the talks and by refusing to negotiate over their missiles. When the intelligence arrived from both Israeli and American sources that a meeting of senior Iranian officials with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be held early on February 28, the die was cast. America and Israel would attack together and would not limit themselves to the missile and nuclear programmes, but also strike at the regime itself.

Seizing the day

Whatever the extent of Mr Netanyahu’s role in pushing Mr Trump to go to war, this is his moment. Convincing an American president was not his only obstacle. Over many years as Prime Minister he faced opposition both within his cabinet and the upper echelons of Israel’s security and intelligence establishment to an all-out war with Iran.

The attacks by Hamas, the threats of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programme and the sense of an unparalleled opportunity have swept all that away. His hard-right coalition is firmly for war, as are nearly all the opposition leaders. And while some securocrats have private reservations over the scale of the war, after the October 7 intelligence debacle, no one is counselling restraint.

Mr Netanyahu, who was also tainted in the eyes of many Israelis by Hamas’s attacks, is hoping a second successful war in Iran will convince them he has “changed the map of the Middle East”, as he often boasts; he hopes to secure re-election later this year. Sources in his Likud party believe that once the war is over he will bring forward an election which must take place before the end of October.

He may yet have an uphill struggle. According to one survey conducted in the first days of war, an overwhelming 81 per cent of Israelis support the strikes so far, yet only 38 per cent expressed high trust in Mr Netanyahu, compared with 71 per cent for the IDF chief of staff.

“The world is a better place without Khamenei, and weakening the Iranian regime is a positive thing,” says Ehud Barak, a former Israeli prime minister.

“But Netanyahu’s arrogance regarding this is misplaced, and the calls to the Iranian people to stand up to the regime are pathetic coming from him. They harm the legitimacy of the opposition to the regime, rather than strengthen it.”

Yet Mr Netanyahu’s greatest peril is that he is being set up as the fall guy. If the war in Iran is a swift success, he may be able to bask in Churchillian glory next to Mr Trump. But “the perception among many Americans of both parties that American soldiers might be dying in the war for us is extremely harmful to Israel,” warns Mr Barak.

In America, the war has never been popular. If it descends into debacle, Americans may well blame Mr Netanhayu.