On February 23, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Donald Trump in the White House Situation Room. He told Trump that he had received a tip that the entire Iranian leadership would be meeting at a single location in Tehran on Saturday morning, according to three sources who told Axios about the Trump-Netanyahu call and the events that followed.
It's been clear for several years that the Israeli intelligence had an asset highly placed in Iran's inner leadership. Now, Trump and Netanyahu planned the most extraordinary decapitation attack of the 21st century.
But first, Trump had to deliver his State of the Union speech on February 24. He had to be careful not to concentrate too much on Iran in the speech lest he spook the Iranians.
Days passed before the CIA was able to confirm the Israeli intelligence on the high-level meeting. Also on Thursday, negotiations in Geneva with Iran broke down as Iran envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner reported that the Iranians weren't budging on giving up their stockpile of highly enriched uranium.
"If you decide you want to do diplomacy, we will push and fight to get a deal. But these guys showed us they weren't willing to make the deal you will be satisfied with," a U.S. official with direct knowledge of the call said Trump was told, according to Axios.
After further consultation with his aides, Trump gave the order to attack on Saturday morning, February 28.
The Trump-Netanyahu partnership has been fruitful in the past, having severely crippled Iran's nuclear infrastructure the previous June. The two leaders "met twice and spoke by phone 15 times in the two months leading to the war," according to U.S. and Israeli officials.
Trump saw Netanyahu as a close partner and was genuinely open to his counsel on Iran — but he was also determined to exhaust diplomacy first.
"One side of the house was negotiating and the other side of the house was doing joint military planning" with Israel, a U.S. official said. "He was assessing both things all the time."
Between the lines: Under fire for suggesting the U.S. had been dragged in by Israel, Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted Tuesday that this operation "had to happen anyway," and that it was simply "a question of timing."
"This weekend presented a unique opportunity to take joint action against this threat," he told reporters on Capitol Hill. "We wanted this to have maximum success."
"Trump wanted to strike earlier — in early January. It was Bibi who asked to delay," one Israeli official said, stressing that the timing was "fully coordinated" with "the understanding that it would be carried out jointly."
One White House official said that the U.S. moved more quickly than they wanted. The White House wanted the war timeline to extend into late March or April to prepare the country for what was to come. Reportedly, Netanyahu wanted to go to war sooner because the Israelis believed that Iranian opposition leaders, in safe houses to avoid arrest or execution, were in imminent danger the longer they had to stay hidden.
"We didn't make the case in advance as well as we could have because the opportunity came on us so fast," an official told Axios. Also, the administration actually began to make the case for the war after the bombing started. This led to confusion and opened a political opportunity for the Democrats.
Like a snowball rolling downhill, that Trump-Netanyahu phone call started an extraordinary sequence of events in the Middle East that has changed the map in ways that benefit the U.S.
It's different than the first Gulf War in 1991 when the U.S. tried to build a pre-war coalition and leave Israel out of it.
Israel’s then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir made what was arguably the most difficult decision: to hold back. Even though Saddam Hussein fired Scud missiles at Israel, Jerusalem refrained from responding militarily in order to not fracture the Arab coalition. For years afterward, that decision was simply known as “restraint.”
What we are seeing now is almost the exact opposite. Here the war begins right away, and only after the bombs have started to fall does the coalition start to form. Arab states, including those that do not have diplomatic relations with Israel, are joining a coalition that clearly includes leadership from both Washington, D.C., and Jerusalem, Israel.
There are developments that would once have seemed unthinkable: Qatar, and possibly Saudi Arabia as well, appear to be part of this new emerging alignment. Just yesterday there was even discussion that Germany might join—something that, viewed with a wide historical lens, would be extraordinary.
Wars have a tendency to redraw maps and scramble alliances. They are, by nature, very destabilizing. The difficult part of any war has always been winning the peace. Donald Trump has a historic opportunity to sideline Iran, neuter Hamas and Hezbollah, strengthen the Gulf states, and establish a wary peace between Israel and states like Syria and Qatar.
There are a million landmines that the U.S. could step on and that might blow up in our face in the coming years. But the opportunity is there. The best leaders have always created their own opportunities and then seized them.
Is Trump one of those leaders?
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