THE WASHINGTON POST: Netanyahu returns to a sceptical Trump as Iran war grinds on

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met President Donald Trump on Tuesday as the two leaders managed a widening gap about how to manage the war in Iran five months after they jointly launched a regime change effort.

It was the leaders’ first in-person meeting since the February offensive, after Netanyahu convinced Trump the time was right for an attack. Since then, a war that was promised to last weeks has dragged on even as Trump has searched for an exit. Hard-line members of the Iranian regime have entrenched their rule. And there is no clear path to an end as Iran continues to throttle shipping through a vital chokepoint, driving up global energy prices — and, late Tuesday, hitting US forces in the region with a large-scale drone attack that was met with an immediate response.

Trump has signalled daylight with Netanyahu, saying they were largely — but not totally — aligned on Iran as he seeks a diplomatic path forward despite Israeli desires to press a new offensive.

Trump said little publicly about the encounter on Tuesday, a marked shift for a man who until recently revelled in the spectacle of impromptu Oval Office news conferences. But before the two men met, Trump flashed irritation at Israeli reports that Netanyahu planned to show him intelligence about alleged new Iranian activity at Pickaxe Mountain, an underground site believed to be a hard-to-reach shelter for Iran’s nuclear program.

“I heard Bibi announce that,” Trump said on Tuesday, referring to the Israeli leader by his nickname. “I said, ‘Why don’t you just tell it to me? Why do you have to announce it to the world?’”

Trump’s only readout of Tuesday’s encounter came many hours later.

“Had a very good meeting! Obviously, many important subjects were discussed,” he posted on his social media account.

In the United States, the war has been increasingly unpopular with the middle-of-the-road voters who will determine control of Congress in November, as gas prices have surged.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, faces October elections and has long told his voters that only he can manage close U.S. relations. A fractured relationship with Trump is a danger to him.

Emblematic of Trump’s increasingly dismissive attitude toward Israel, he also wants to sell advanced F-35 fighter jets to Turkey and may also allow Saudi Arabia to develop nuclear power, dismissing Israeli concerns that each choice could worsen their security situation.

Netanyahu said after the meeting that the encounter was “Excellent. It’s not just lip service.”

The conversation was about “full partnership, of mutual support, with an understanding of the shared goal to ensure that Iran will not have nuclear weapons, and also other goals,” he said.

“The issue of Pickaxe Mountain was not raised” in the meeting between Trump and Netanyahu, Tzipi Hotovely, head of public diplomacy in Netanyahu’s office, told The Washington Post.

Trump in recent days has been unusually willing to acknowledge their divisions.

“We have a little difference, but pretty close,” Trump said Monday about Netanyahu’s approach to Tehran.

“Iran took a beating over the last 14 days and they asked us very nicely, ‘Please stop, let’s meet,’ and that’s where we are right now. We’ll see what happens. If we don’t make a deal, we go back to the same thing.”

Noting that Israel “wouldn’t survive without us,” Trump said that “nobody tells me what we should be selling or not. Turkey has been a tremendous ally for me.”

Before Tuesday, Netanyahu had already met with Trump in the White House seven times this term, more than any other world leader.

Ahead of the war with Iran, the Israeli leader successfully appealed to Trump’s sense of himself as a historic figure — one who could finally resolve the 47-year challenge of Iran’s theocratic leadership.

But the regime in Tehran has proved far more durable than Netanyahu suggested, leading to frustration in the Oval Office.

Days into the conflict, Trump noted the intense Israeli attacks on senior Iranian leadership killed many of the people Washington had identified as potentially more moderate alternatives.

On Monday, Trump referred to Netanyahu in the past tense, perhaps forecasting his expectation for the election.

“Bibi has been great. I’m not going to say — he was a wartime prime minister. He did very well together,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One as he travelled to Michigan.

Netanyahu travelled this week to Washington for the Trump meeting and to attend the funeral of Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, a firm ally of Israel who favoured maximum military force against Tehran.

“One way or the other, they have to end their nuclear program,” Netanyahu told Fox News on Sunday, ahead of his trip to the United States.

Trump has taken an on-again, off-again approach to diplomacy with Iran, signing an interim deal with Tehran last month to reopen the Strait of Hormuz that collapsed within weeks and plunged the two sides into a renewed round of fighting.

At the time he signed the deal, he said that he was worried about the consequences of continued fighting for the global economy. He said he didn’t want to be remembered like Herbert Hoover, the president who was in office at the start of the Great Depression.

But managing the conflict has proven to be not fully within his control.

Iran has a say — and on Tuesday, hours after the Oval Office meeting with Netanyahu, it struck.

US forces in the Middle East intercepted multiple ballistic missiles on Thursday that Iran had fired at American personnel there, the US military said, later saying that it had joined with Saudi forces to attack Iran-backed groups in Iraq.

It was a reminder of the fragility of situation, especially the involvement of the Saudi military, which opened the door to regional escalation.

Both sides have reasons to contemplate a truce.

Iranian leaders are battered by the economic pressure of a naval blockade and want to rebuild after months of US airstrikes.

Washington, meanwhile, is confronting dwindling stockpiles of advanced air defence missiles that have been eroded by Iran’s far cheaper drones.

Still, the landing path for a negotiated deal appears narrow. Iranian leaders have little desire to give up the nuclear program that they proved they can defend. And they see the ticking clock to the US midterm elections in November, conscious that the economic pain of high energy prices will only add to their leverage over time.

Trump also met Tuesday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has swung into the US leader’s good graces following a rocky resumption of the relationship last year.

Zelensky has noted that Russia has been supplying assistance to Iran over the course of this year’s conflict, as the two wars increasingly intertwine.

Trump kept both meetings off-camera, a shift from earlier encounters in which leaders have needed to play for public consumption as Trump has entertained questions from the media.

The lower-profile decision had the effect of depriving Netanyahu of television footage for his re-election campaign — and also dampened potential flare-ups with Zelensky, whose first trip to the Oval Office last year was derailed by an argument with Trump that led to his ejection from the White House.

After the meetings, Zelensky and Netanyahu’s offices released photographs that showed friendly interactions with Trump.

“President Trump has concluded his meetings in the Oval Office with President Zelensky and Prime Minister Netanyahu. Both meetings were positive and productive,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote on X.

Like Netanyahu, Zelensky traveled to Washington to pay respects to Graham, who had just returned from a visit to Kyiv when he died of an aortic dissection earlier this month.

Trump ally and MAGA die-hard Laura Loomer has been on a high-profile visit to Ukraine following years in which she echoed Russian talking points about the Ukraine war, a notable change of heart that she has said she will take back to Trump.

Tara Copp in Washington and Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.