Trump-Netanyahu Debacle

David Finkel

Strait of Hormuz: Nice oil shipping lane there. A real pity if something would happen to it…

PERHAPS DONALD TRUMP was misunderstood: He always promised that the war with Iran would end in “Unconditional Surrender,” but didn’t mention that it would be by him.

But seriously, Trump and some of his advisers are furious with Benjamin Netanyahu for suckering the U.S. president into launching the war on the absurd promises of instantaneous military victory, rapid Iranian regime collapse and installation of a client government on the Venezuela 2.0 model. In the end Trump has surrendered to reality, achieving nothing of what he arrogantly promised at the outset of “Epic Fury.”

Part of the MAGA base is furious with Trump for starting the war; many pro-Israel neocon hawks and even some “pragmatic centrists” are angry that he failed to continue and “finish the job;” financial markets verged on panic of world economic hemorrhage if the war continued; and most decisively, the U.S. population was staggering under the war’s inflationary surge for what people (correctly) saw as having no constructive purpose.

Inside Israel — where the majority of the Jewish population since October 7, 2023 has become tragically inured to the genocide in Palestine and catastrophic suffering in Lebanon — when the war began Trump’s popularity surged well past their own prime minister Netanyahu’s.

With the U.S.-Iran “Memorandum of Understanding,” Trump’s political standing in Israel has slumped. As for Netanyahu, he needed the war to preserve his coalition of far rightists, religious fundamentalists and essentially neonazi settler pogromists, and to keep his own corruption trials suspended.

For this Israeli government, then, it is essential to blow up the U.S.-Iran agreement and force the resumption of this ruinous war. That’s the number-one reason why Israel continues bombing Lebanon immediately after announcing yet another “ceasefire” deal.

Where this leads in U.S., Israeli, Iranian broader regional politics and global economy will take time to emerge. But let us not overlook how the peoples of the Middle East (as some now call it, Western Asia) and the world are collateral damage in this imperial debacle.

The longterm effects of the Strait of Hormuz blockage have implications for hunger in the Global South that won’t be fully known for at least a year.

Israel’s occupation-annexationist rampage in southern Lebanon threatens the very existence of the Lebanese state. In Gaza and the West Bank, the Palestinian people are human sacrifices on the altar of settler-colonialism and U.S. and European indifference.

If the Iranian regime has won the war, at least in terms of its survival and control of the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian people have not, with over a million newly unemployed and thousands or tens of thousands murdered by the government earlier this year.

And let’s remember that the Iranian president a year ago — before the 2025 “twelve day war,” before the mass murders of protesters and before the most recent war — was warning the nation that the capital Tehran would have to be “evacuated” as it would ultimately run out of water, as if there were anywhere for the population to go.

Iran’s internal crises rule out the scenario proclaimed by some geopolitical pundits, and part of the anti-imperialist left that should know better, that Iran is now a “fourth global power.”

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is yet another example of imperialism creating problems it can’t solve. The U.S. defeat in this war is to be welcomed — but without illusions that it opens a road to progressive solutions anytime soon, or the fresh deadly crises to come. —June 23, 2026

July-August 2026, ATC 243