Trump, Netanyahu and how war in Iran is reshaping US politics

It is the morning of February 11 and a US president — whose rambling speeches and erratic, violent and profane social media posts have led to increasing questions about his diminishing mental faculties — has ceded the floor of the White House Situation Room to the leader of another country.

Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was making a "hard sell" to US President Donald Trump and his team, suggesting that Iran was ripe for regime change and expressing the belief that a joint US-Israeli mission could finally bring an end to the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

We know this because of some extraordinary reporting in The New York Times this week by journalists Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman.

Apart from the sheer amount of gripping detail the two journalists document, their report — part of an upcoming book — is hugely significant for two reasons.

The first is that its account seems to confirm the view that Trump was led into the war by Israel: an idea now causing increasing anger in the United States in a population which started out against the war and has increasingly turned against Israel.

New research this week by the Pew Research Centre showed 60 per cent of US adults now have an unfavourable view of Israel, up from 53 per cent last year.

What is more, 59 per cent have little or no confidence in Netanyahu to do the right thing regarding world affairs — up from 52 per cent last year.

Particularly significant is the fact that the majority of Republicans under 50 now have an unfavourable opinion of Israel at 57 per cent, up from 50 per cent last year.

This is not just about winning a popularity contest. Presuming the US mid-term races are conducted in a fair and free way, and the Democrats' results reflect the current polling on Trump, that could mean big trouble in the future for Israel and the staggering amounts of financial and military support it receives from the United States.

This shift in US views of Israel represent a profound realignment in American politics.

The known unknowns

The second reason why the report is so significant is that it stands in such contrast to the shortfalls in real, reliable information that the public gets about this conflict, not to mention the apparent shortfall in information going to the participants.

For example, six weeks of the Israeli-US assault on Iran have now passed in which the world has had little reliable information about who is actually running Iran, or what the impact of the war has been on its population, infrastructure or war fighting capacity.

Similarly, we know little reliably about what toll the conflict has had on Israel and the US or, for that matter the Gulf states which have found themselves the target of Iranian assaults.

Information has emerged in trickles, belatedly, about the actual toll from an Iranian strike on the US embassy in Riyadh being much greater than initially suggested, for example. We know little about the damage sustained by aircraft carrier the USS Gerald R Ford which took it out of action for some weeks — either because of an Iranian strike, or a fire in the laundry.

The Gulf states have mostly downplayed and muted the impact of attacks on their infrastructure. News, for example, was belatedly reported that Saudi oil production capacity is now down by 600,000 barrels a day.

The level of stockpiles of air defence systems is believed to be badly depleted in the Gulf and Israel and, for that matter, globally. But we don't know.

Confusion reigns over just how many ships may or may not have got through the Strait of Hormuz, other than the general observation that is not many.

Both Iran and the United States claimed overwhelming victories this week as a dubious ceasefire was announced.

Outsiders are left to assess events by what we can physically observe: the Strait of Hormuz is not opened; Iran maintains its capacity to strategically fire missiles and drones at Israel and the Gulf.

Both these facts blunt the denials of the claims by the US and Israel that they have won the war.

'Sounds good to me'

The demand for attention implicit in Donald Trump's ever-changing stream of pronouncements — and the eternal question of what he will say next — tend to overshadow some of the perplexing aspects of the entire US-Israeli enterprise in Iran.

Most notable in that is the yawning disparity between the apparent quality of Israel's intelligence and its equally apparent profound misjudgement of outcomes.

The world has been stunned in the last couple of years by the lethally-granular quality of the intelligence that Israel has had on its enemies in Iran and in Lebanon that has allowed it to undertake repeated devastating hits on the leadership of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.

But even that level of intelligence does not appear to have stopped it from making spectacularly bad overall assessments of its chances of defeating those enemies.

Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman report that, in that Situation Room meeting, Netanyahu and his team "outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory: Iran's ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks".

"The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against US interests in neighbouring countries was assessed as minimal."

Further, "Mossad's intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would begin again and — with the impetus of the Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion — an intense bombing campaign could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime".

In what may prove one of those statements that will echo down the historic record, Trump's assessment was: "Sounds good to me."

His advisers were reportedly not so sure and prepared an overnight assessment of the Israeli briefing.

The New York Times says CIA director John Ratcliffe used one word to describe the Israeli prime minister's regime change scenarios: "Farcical."

"At that point, [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio cut in. "In other words, it's bullshit," he said.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, described the Israeli briefing as their "standard operating procedure", in his experience.

"They oversell, and their plans are not always well-developed. They know they need us, and that's why they're hard-selling," General Caine reportedly said.

Growing cynicism

Let's leave aside for now the issue of the breathtaking weakness of the senior circle of advisers to the US president that has been exposed in this story: that none of them told Trump he should not commit to this conflict, despite their clear deep reservations about it.

Instead, focus on how the overselling was a prelude to the very obvious gap that has now opened up in the past week between the war aims of the United States and Israel, and which are perilous for both.

The US president is now under immense pressure — at home and globally — because of the catastrophic impact the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is having on the world economy, and because he hasn't been able to deliver a clear victory, despite both his bluster and the immense firepower of the US military.

The Israeli prime minister's war aims, and the pressures he feels from them, are much more localised. He remains determined to crush and destroy the regime in Iran, and to keep the war going.

Israel's massive attack on Beirut this week — hitting 100 targets in 10 minutes, killing over 300 people — was a signal to the world that he wasn't going to quit even if others were.

But he faces the humiliation of not having been told about Trump's last-minute ceasefire plans until they were virtually a fait accompli, and the need to now navigate Trump's demand that Netanyahu go "sort of a little more low-key".

This explains the PM's announcement that he had "authorised" ceasefire talks with the Lebanese government, even while vowing to keep attacking Hezbollah.

While no-one actually expects such talks to achieve anything — given his fight is with Hezbollah, not the Lebanese government — it possibly gives Netanyahu enough cover with Trump to claim that he is not impeding negotiations in Islamabad.

But it does not stop the growing cynicism being reported in Israel about Netanyahu's strategies.

Israel has now been at war since October 7, 2023, and despite the savagery of attacks on civilian populations that have seen the country — and its leader — accused of war crimes that include genocide, Hamas has still not been disarmed in Gaza, Hezbollah continues to strike northern Israel and most analysts believe Iran has only been made more radical and vengeful.

The question for Israelis is whether Benjamin Netanyahu has made them less safe in their neighbourhood, in campaigns that have often lacked moral clarity.

Laura Tingle is the ABC's global affairs editor.