Paradoxically, it was Netanyahu’s long record of warning against the imminent threat of the Iranian nuclear program that began raising questions as early as 2012, and again in recent months, before he and Trump partnered to obliterate Fordow, Isfahan, and other nuclear sites. Namely, if the midnight hour is always so near, why don’t the Iranians have the bomb yet? Isn’t this a case of the Bibi who cried wolf?

That’s a good question. Why didn’t Iran already have the bomb? After all, nuclear technology dates back to the 1930s, so it’s not esoteric knowledge. Lots of other countries got the bomb, even countries as backwards and corrupt as Iran—such as Communist China, North Korea, and Pakistan. College students know how to build the bomb; truck drivers too. You can buy blueprints for a bomb online.

The Iranians spent billions building the infrastructure for a bomb and stole what they couldn’t buy, yet they still couldn’t get it done because the Israelis kept pushing them back. While Netanyahu and other Israeli officials kept warning of the Iranian bomb, Jerusalem also fought a decades-long shadow war against the terror regime—often with American help. For instance, the Israelis and the George W. Bush administration reportedly worked together on Stuxnet, a computer worm that destroyed Iranian centrifuges. The Israelis also interdicted equipment and killed nuclear scientists, which showed that even if you can’t destroy the knowledge it takes to build a bomb, you can certainly discourage scientists, whether homegrown or foreign mercenaries, from using their talents to further that mission.

Maybe the Israelis would have been able to keep delaying Iran’s program forever, if not for Barack Obama: He wanted Iran to have the bomb. Obama believed that Israel was the destabilizing force in the Middle East and thus the best way to stabilize it was by balancing Israel against Iran—that is, by withdrawing U.S. support from its ally and strengthening an anti-American regime responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans in Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, and elsewhere. Obama’s rebalancing act, what he called a new geopolitical “equilibrium,” required getting Iran the bomb to keep the Israelis in check.

Obama’s problem, and Iran’s, was that Israel kept setting back the mullah’s nuclear program. Thus, the purpose of Obama’s Iran deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was to get the international community to help Iran build the bomb and commit America to protecting the Iranian bomb from Israel.

The idea was so dangerously crazy that in a hearing on Capitol Hill, then Sen. Marco Rubio asked Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry to clarify Annex III of the JCPOA, which obligated the United States, world powers, and the European Union “to strengthen Iran’s ability to protect against, and respond to nuclear security threats, including sabotage.” Rubio wanted to know if the JCPOA required the United States to defend Iran from an Israeli cyberattack. Kerry replied, “I think we just have to wait until we get to that point.”

In March 2015, Netanyahu spoke out against Obama’s apocalyptic policy before a joint session of Congress; he’s made four such appearances before U.S. lawmakers, one more than Churchill, and more than any other world leader. “Iran’s regime is not merely a Jewish problem, any more than the Nazi regime was merely a Jewish problem,” said Netanyahu. “The 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis were but a fraction of the 60 million people killed in World War II. So, too, Iran’s regime poses a grave threat, not only to Israel, but also the peace of the entire world.”

Of course, Obama wasn’t listening: His policy’s goal of hobbling an ally that projects power on behalf of America is evidence that it was really America he wanted to weaken, a goal he shared with the Iranians. Donald Trump saw the problem clearly. After declaring his candidacy in June 2015, Trump spoke about the Iran deal frequently on the campaign trail, calling it “the worst deal ever negotiated” and saying it could lead to a “nuclear holocaust.” It must have seemed a terrible irony to the Israeli prime minister that the American leader he had been waiting for was an underdog outsider seemingly destined to lose to Hillary Clinton, who made a point of declaring neither her full support nor her open opposition to the deal. But then fate intervened: Trump won.

At the end of April 2018, Netanyahu briefed Trump about the nuclear archives Israel had lifted from a Tehran warehouse, showing that the Iranians had lied for decades about their nuclear activities. In early May, the president withdrew from the JCPOA and embarked on a maximum pressure campaign, imposing further sanctions on the regime that emptied its war chests and checked significant advancements in the nuclear program. In January 2020, Trump liquidated the commander of Iran’s expeditionary terror unit, Qassem Soleimani. Killing the man responsible for the deaths of hundreds of U.S. servicemen in Iraq gave evidence that the American president was determined to end the Iranian threat.

Trump critics, especially isolationists in his own party, wondered why the Iranian nuclear issue had become so urgent again after Trump’s reelection. Why was Netanyahu, the first foreign leader to visit him in February, invited to visit the White House again in April? What was wrong with simply maintaining the status quo, instead of rushing to war?

The reason is simple: The Joe Biden administration had let Iran out of the box. During Biden’s four years, he’d given the regime access to billions of dollars while its proxies made war on Israel. In fact, the Biden team saw the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack as an opportunity to topple Netanyahu from power and replace him with a more pliable leader. The Biden team wanted a PM who’d allow Israel to be balanced against Iranian proxies in Lebanon and Syria, agree to a Palestinian state, and accommodate a new regional order led by a nuclear-armed Iran backed by Washington—Obama’s order.

Trump saw that was madness. As Israel prepared to retaliate against an Iranian strike in October 2024, Biden warned Netanyahu not to hit Iran’s nuclear facilities. Trump thought that was nuts. “That’s the thing you want to hit, right?” said the then candidate. “It’s the biggest risk we have, nuclear weapons.”

Trump’s opinion about the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran has been consistent throughout his political career, from his 2016 campaign through his third campaign in 2024. At virtually every campaign stop, Trump explained that Iran couldn’t be allowed to have the bomb. Once elected to a second term in the White House, he regularly warned of the dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran. He said he’d prefer to handle the threat diplomatically, but he’d do it the other way if given no choice. In either case, he’d never let Iran get the bomb.

From Trump’s perspective, the problem wasn’t just the prospect of a terror regime launching nuclear weapons at Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other U.S. allies—and in time at Europe and even the U.S. homeland. A nuclear-armed Iran threatened America’s historic position in the Gulf. After all, the chief purpose of the postwar U.S. Navy was to keep shipping lanes open and ensure the free flow of cheap Gulf oil that has given the U.S. ultimate control over global oil markets, including the energy supplies of its leading trade partners in Europe and Asia. No postwar arrangement has been more important in keeping the United States secure and prosperous than our role in the Gulf.

An Iranian bomb did not pose the same level of direct threat to the U.S. homeland as the Soviet Union’s enormous nuclear arsenal did. But it could hardly be wished away. A nuclear Iran could, among other things, close the Strait of Hormuz, send oil prices soaring, and destabilize global markets. In this framework, it would also thwart Trump’s most important foreign-policy initiative: rolling back China. What was the point of a trade war with Beijing to reshore manufacturing and fix the trade imbalance that had impoverished the American middle class if China’s main Middle East ally could close a major trade route through which one-fifth of the world’s energy passes? Iran could never have the bomb.

Then there was the not negligible fact that the Iranians kept sending hit squads to hunt Trump in retaliation for killing Soleimani. A nuclear Iran could deploy terror squads around the world with near impunity. Iran must never have the bomb.

In time, perhaps we’ll have the full story of how, when, and where Trump and Netanyahu plotted their strategy, and how they used misdirection and ambiguity to throw off Iran as well as their domestic adversaries. Like FDR, Trump also had to fight off an isolationist faction in his party, while Netanyahu has been under continuous siege by Israel’s version of the Deep State. In his June 25 post on Truth Social, Trump told his partner’s domestic opponents to lay off, because Bibi is a hero.

“Bibi Netanyahu was a WARRIOR,” Trump wrote, “like perhaps no other Warrior in the History of Israel, and the result was something that nobody thought was possible, a complete elimination of potentially one of the biggest and most powerful Nuclear Weapons anywhere in the World, and it was going to happen, SOON! We were fighting, literally, for the Survival of Israel, and there is nobody in Israel’s History that fought harder or more competently than Bibi Netanyahu.”

Soon after, Netanyahu thanked Trump on X. “I was deeply moved by your heartfelt support for me and your incredible support for Israel and the Jewish people. I look forward to continue working with you to defeat our common enemies.”

Churchill and Roosevelt’s voluminous correspondence gives us details of the relationship they forged to save the world, and the same is so with the record of Reagan and Thatcher’s secure phone calls. But these were all private exchanges made public only later. What we’re watching with Trump and Netanyahu on social media is unique: the public declaration of a friendship, its goals and commitments, between two world leaders—a bond that makes the world safer.