Netanyahu should never have trusted Trump

The prime minister ought to have remembered the wisdom of “The Godfather Part II.”

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“Your father did business with Hyman Roth, your father respected Hyman Roth, but your father never trusted Hyman Roth,” the beleaguered mafia captain Frankie Pentangeli tells Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ought to have remembered this, and acted accordingly, in his dealings with President Donald Trump. If he had, the current disaster that is the end of the war with Iran might have been avoided.

Netanyahu’s war, and it was Netanyahu’s war, has been defined by many hubristic miscalculations, but above all, Netanyahu miscalculated the obvious interests of the Trump administration. He should have known that, at soon as the war threatened to become elongated and grueling, an instinctively isolationist administration would cut its losses and run.

Netanyahu should have known as well that, eventually, American domestic considerations would rule: The war was unpopular from the beginning. The US economy was suffering from inflation and other issues due to Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. There would be a price to pay in the upcoming midterm elections that the Trump administration would not tolerate. Above all, there was the impossibility of American boots on the ground, making the regime change that Netanyahu so covets impossible.

As a result, contrary to all his intentions, Netanyahu has left Israel in a weaker, not stronger, strategic position. Hezbollah will now unquestionably survive, and Israel may yet be forced out of its buffer zone in southern Lebanon. Iran’s other proxies remain intact, and Iran will soon be flush with cash to fund them. Iran’s nuclear capabilities remain intact as well, and the regime will no doubt accelerate towards their weaponization. Further Israeli military action in general may become impossible under a resentful and embittered Trump administration. Whatever goodwill Netanyahu cultivated with the president and, especially, Vice President JD Vance, is gone.

Perhaps worst of all, Netanyahu forgot or forwent the first principle of Israeli strategy: Israel must be able to defend itself by itself at all times. Instead, Netanyahu went all in on the US, in other words, all in on Trump, and by making Israel’s defense entirely dependent on the US, turned Israel into a vassal state, with no choice but to bow to American dictates. Having alienated almost every other American politician, Netanyahu, and thus Israel, is now entirely under the thumb of an increasingly hostile president and unquestionably hostile vice president.

All of this is based on Netanyahu’s primordial mistake: he trusted Trump. That is, he trusted that the president would stay the course, maintain his intensely pro-Israel stance even in the face of his own domestic political considerations and personal ideology, and come through when the going got tough.

This, one regrets to say, was always folly and, in some ways, an inexplicable folly. Put simply, Netanyahu should have known what everyone else has known for years: Trump is a mercurial, unscrupulous, narcissistic, and self-interested man. He will act according to what benefits him at any given moment. Whether one regards this as appalling or simple dedication to American interests—at least as Trump understands them—is immaterial. It means that Trump is what he is, he will never change, and Netanyahu should have known this.

He should have known, above all, what Frankie Pentangeli could have told him: You don’t trust a man like Trump. You manage him, you maneuver him, you try to get what you need out of him as best you can. You do business with him, and you respect him. But you never trust him, because he is dedicated to his own interests above all, not yours. Instead, Netanyahu entrusted Israel’s security to the man, and the results are now before us.

Alex Stein recently wrote that this is par for the course for Netanyahu, in that he is a brilliant politician but a terrible statesman. I do not necessarily agree with this: I think the Abraham Accords were a diplomatic tour de force and they have held throughout a war that should have destroyed them. As someone who opposes a Palestinian state, I also admire Netanyahu’s success in preventing the creation of a second such state in Judea and Samaria.

Nonetheless, there is no denying Netanyahu’s catastrophic failure as a statesman in this case. He trusted the wrong man, and it brought the entire edifice of his strategy and legacy crashing down around him. It is close to Samson’s declaration, “Let me die with the Philistines.” Netanyahu chose to die with Trump, and it proved his undoing.

I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that it will take Israel years to repair the damage. Moreover, it is likely that the damage will be compounded in the coming months. While Netanyahu may never trust Trump again, he will continue to obey him when he should not—because he has no choice. Netanyahu trusted Trump and now Trump is all he has, for better or worse, and probably for worse.