{"id":122503,"date":"2025-07-11T17:05:54","date_gmt":"2025-07-11T15:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=122503"},"modified":"2025-07-11T10:38:30","modified_gmt":"2025-07-11T08:38:30","slug":"11-05-117","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=122503","title":{"rendered":"The Trump-Bibi Bond"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>The Trump-Bibi Bond<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Lee Smith<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Like Reagan and Thatcher, and Roosevelt and Churchill, an American president found a fighting partner\u2014this time in the Middle East<\/strong><\/h4>\n

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President Donald Trump shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House in Washington, D.C., April 7, 2025<\/em><\/span>
\nBrendan Smialowski\/AFP via Getty Images<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet Donald Trump today at the White House for their fourth meeting in a year. Last July, Netanyahu traveled to Palm Beach, Florida, to meet with candidate Trump at his Mar-a-Lago mansion. During their last official meeting at the White House on April 7, the president seemed to throw a curveball at Bibi when he announced that the administration would engage in direct talks with Iran over its nuclear program. Both the left-wing media and the Tucker Carlson-led faction of the right erupted with glee at the thought of the Israeli prime minister getting publicly spanked. As it turned out, the meeting was camouflage for Trump and Netanyahu\u2019s joint plans to eliminate Iran\u2019s nuclear program through military action\u2014part of the most successful high-level deception operation since the Allied landing at Normandy.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This time, there\u2019s little doubt about the strength of the relationship between the two world leaders, who will discuss plans for a cease-fire in Gaza and no doubt celebrate the historic victory they won together by destroying the bulk of Iran\u2019s nuclear weapons program. \u201cBibi and I just went through HELL together,\u201d Trump posted on Truth Social on June 25. \u201cBibi could not have been better, sharper, or stronger in his LOVE for the incredible Holy Land.\u201d The American president added, \u201cPerhaps there is no one that I know who could have worked in better harmony with the President of the United States, ME, than Bibi Netanyahu.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Certainly, the relationship between the two men, each of whom prides himself on being at war with his country\u2019s elites, has gone through some rocky patches. Still, it is nonetheless the most consequential relationship between world leaders since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher teamed up to end the Cold War\u2014and perhaps even since Winston Churchill enlisted Franklin Delano Roosevelt\u2019s aid in defeating Nazi Germany. It\u2019s easy to say that the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship was far more significant to the world at large than Trump\u2019s partnership with Bibi to bomb Fordow. But we\u2019ll never know the extent to which the Islamic Republic threatened to destabilize the world order, since the United States and Israel destroyed the terror regime\u2019s nuclear weapons program before it tested our peace\u2014a peace that has been kept by two resolute leaders.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Over the course of the war, Churchill and FDR\u00a0exchanged<\/a>\u00a0more than 2,000 letters and telegrams. Five days after Churchill was named prime minister in May 1940, he wrote Roosevelt: \u201cIf necessary we shall continue the war alone and we are not afraid of that. But I trust you realize, Mr. President, that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long. You may have a completely subjugated, Nazified Europe established with astonishing swiftness,\u00a0and the weight may be more than we can bear. All I ask you now is that you should proclaim non-belligerency, which would mean that you would help us with everything short of actually engaging armed forces.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The relationship between the two men is the most consequential relationship between world leaders since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher teamed up to end the Cold War\u2014perhaps even since Churchill and FDR defeated Nazi Germany.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Polls showed that while Americans backed aiding Great Britain, most wanted to stay out of the war. FDR nonetheless prepared them for the role that he believed the United States was destined to play. \u201cNever before has our American civilization been in such danger as now,\u201d he said in a late December 1940 speech. \u201cIf Great Britain goes down, all of us in the Americas would be living at the point of a gun.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Nearly 19 months after Churchill took charge, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States, and FDR brought his fellow Americans into a war to save civilization.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Netanyahu spent nearly three decades waiting for an American leader who understood the stakes of Iran\u2019s nuclear weapons program the way he did. He began warning about the dangers of an Iranian bomb in his 1995 book,\u00a0Fighting Terrorism<\/em>. The Islamic Republic, he wrote, was between three to five years away \u201cfrom possessing the prerequisites required for the independent production of nuclear weapons.\u201d However, the Clinton administration wasn\u2019t paying attention even after Iranian-backed group Hezbollah al-Hijaz killed 19 U.S. airmen and wounded nearly 500 more when it bombed the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The murder of Americans on Saudi soil underscored a point that U.S. policymakers would continue to obscure, or miss entirely: Iran saw neither Israel nor Saudi Arabia as its chief foe; rather, that was America. The Iranians targeted Saudi interests and made war on Israel, primarily through its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, because Saudi Arabia and Israel are U.S. allies, pillars of the Washington-led security alliance in the Middle East that Tehran intended to destroy and replace with its own regional order. Since the end of WWII, we have been the major power in the region. Thus, as the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the kidnapping of 52 hostages for 444 days made clear, the Islamic Republic had America in its crosshairs from the start.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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U.S. hegemony in the Persian Gulf was one of the prizes that FDR won by bringing America into the war. In a February 1945 meeting on Egypt\u2019s Great Bitter Lake with the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, the U.S. president agreed to protect the kingdom in exchange for cheap Saudi oil. This arrangement would keep global markets humming throughout the Cold War and ensure that, should Washington ever need to mobilize troops against the Red Army, they\u2019d never be short of fuel. Yes, the Eastern Mediterranean was an important Cold War testing ground where Israel\u2019s serial victories over Soviet proxies demonstrated American military and technological supremacy. But for the United States, the most crucial part of the Middle East was always the Gulf, the cornerstone of our postwar peace and prosperity.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For Netanyahu, managing relations with Israel\u2019s superpower patron often involved reminding forgetful U.S. policymakers how our regional security architecture worked and why Iranian ambitions threatened America\u2019s greatness. According to a 2009 diplomatic\u00a0cable<\/a>, Bibi told a U.S. congressional delegation that \u201ca nuclear Iran [is] the greatest threat facing Israel, and urged strong economic sanctions backed by a viable military option to confront a problem that he said threatened the region and could prove a \u2018tipping point\u2019 in world history.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In a 2012\u00a0speech<\/a>\u00a0before the U.N. General Assembly, Netanyahu warned, again in Churchillian tones, \u201cAt stake is not merely the future of my own country. At stake is the future of the world. Nothing could imperil our common future more than the arming of Iran with nuclear weapons.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He told the U.N. audience that he\u2019d been \u201cspeaking about the need to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons for over 15 years.\u201d He said, \u201cI speak about it now because the hour is getting late, very late.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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Paradoxically, it was Netanyahu\u2019s 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\u2019t the Iranians have the bomb yet? Isn\u2019t this a case of the Bibi who cried wolf?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That\u2019s a good question. Why didn\u2019t Iran already have the bomb? After all, nuclear technology dates back to the 1930s, so it\u2019s not esoteric knowledge. Lots of other countries got the bomb, even countries as backwards and corrupt as Iran\u2014such as Communist China, North Korea, and Pakistan. College students know how to\u00a0build the bomb<\/a>; truck drivers too. You can buy blueprints for a bomb online.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Iranians spent billions building the infrastructure for a bomb and stole what they couldn\u2019t buy, yet they still couldn\u2019t 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\u2014often 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\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Maybe the Israelis would have been able to keep delaying Iran\u2019s 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\u2014that 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\u2019s rebalancing act, what he called a new geopolitical \u201cequilibrium,\u201d required getting Iran the bomb to keep the Israelis in check.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Obama\u2019s problem, and Iran\u2019s, was that Israel kept setting back the mullah\u2019s nuclear program. Thus, the purpose of Obama\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The idea was so dangerously crazy that in a hearing on Capitol Hill, then Sen. Marco Rubio asked Obama\u2019s Secretary of State John Kerry to clarify Annex III of the JCPOA, which obligated the United States, world powers, and the European Union \u201cto strengthen Iran\u2019s ability to protect against, and respond to nuclear security threats, including sabotage.\u201d Rubio wanted to know if the JCPOA required the United States to defend Iran from an Israeli cyberattack. Kerry\u00a0replied<\/a>, \u201cI\u00a0think we just have to wait until we get to that point.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In March 2015, Netanyahu spoke out against Obama\u2019s apocalyptic policy before a joint session of Congress; he\u2019s made four such appearances before U.S. lawmakers, one more than Churchill, and more than any other world leader. \u201cIran\u2019s regime is not merely a Jewish problem, any more than the Nazi regime was merely a Jewish problem,\u201d\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0Netanyahu. \u201cThe 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis were but a fraction of the 60 million people killed in World War II. So, too, Iran\u2019s regime poses a grave threat, not only to Israel, but also the peace of the entire world.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Of course, Obama wasn\u2019t listening: His policy\u2019s 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 \u201cthe worst deal ever negotiated\u201d and saying it could lead to a \u201cnuclear holocaust.\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Trump critics, especially isolationists in his own party, wondered why the Iranian nuclear issue had become so urgent again after Trump\u2019s 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?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The reason is simple: The Joe Biden administration had let Iran out of the box. During Biden\u2019s four years, he\u2019d 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\u2019d 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\u2014Obama\u2019s\u00a0order<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Trump saw that was madness. As Israel prepared to retaliate against an Iranian strike in October 2024, Biden warned Netanyahu not to hit Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities. Trump thought that was nuts. \u201cThat\u2019s the thing you want to hit, right?\u201d said the then candidate. \u201cIt\u2019s the biggest risk we have, nuclear weapons.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Trump\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019d prefer to handle the threat diplomatically, but he\u2019d do it the other way if given no choice. In either case, he\u2019d never let Iran get the bomb.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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From Trump\u2019s perspective, the problem wasn\u2019t just the prospect of a terror regime launching nuclear weapons at Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other U.S. allies\u2014and in time at Europe and even the U.S. homeland. A nuclear-armed Iran threatened America\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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An Iranian bomb did not pose the same level of direct threat to the U.S. homeland as the Soviet Union\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s main Middle East ally could close a major trade route through which one-fifth of the world\u2019s energy passes? Iran could never have the bomb.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In time, perhaps we\u2019ll 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\u2019s version of the Deep State. In his June 25 post on Truth Social, Trump told his partner\u2019s domestic opponents to lay off, because Bibi is a hero.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cBibi Netanyahu was a WARRIOR,\u201d Trump wrote, \u201clike 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\u2019s History that fought harder or more competently than Bibi Netanyahu.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Soon after, Netanyahu thanked Trump on X. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Churchill and Roosevelt\u2019s 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\u2019s secure\u00a0phone calls<\/a>. But these were all private exchanges made public only later. What we\u2019re watching with Trump and Netanyahu on social media is unique: the public declaration of a friendship, its goals and commitments, between two world leaders\u2014a bond that makes the world safer.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Lee Smith<\/strong> is the author of\u00a0Disappearing the President: Trump, Truth Social, and the Fight for the Republic<\/a>\u00a0(2024).<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The Trump-Bibi Bond Lee Smith Like Reagan and Thatcher, and Roosevelt and Churchill, an American president found a fighting partner\u2014this time in the Middle East . President Donald Trump shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House in Washington, D.C., April 7, 2025 Brendan Smialowski\/AFP via Getty Images Israeli Prime Minister […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122503"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=122503"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":122509,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122503\/revisions\/122509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=122503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=122503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=122503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}