Calling the Shots

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, June 08, 2026

 

If you believe our secretary of state, which I do not, America lost control of events in Iran before the first bombs fell on February 28.

 

Remember that? Days after the war began, Marco Rubio claimed that the United States had joined Israel’s opening strike in a spirit of what we might call “preemptive self-defense.” The Israelis intended to attack whether the Trump administration approved or not, Rubio suggested; the White House believed the Iranians would respond by targeting U.S. assets in the region, dragging us into the war.

 

So the president decided not to wait. Better that our country participate in Israel’s initial raid and maximize the damage done to the enemy, Rubio reasoned, than give Iran a free shot at American troops before we enter the fight.

 

I’ve never believed that story. It reeks of a pretext invented to obscure a more embarrassing truth, which is that the president thought Iran’s regime would collapse after a day or two of bombing and prostrate itself before him, as Venezuela’s did. Donald Trump wasn’t dragged into war by Benjamin Netanyahu. He went willingly because his grandiosity convinced him he would be the man who finally plucked the Khomeinist thorn from America’s side.

 

Trump was in control of events when the fighting started. But not anymore.

 

Early yesterday, Hezbollah fired missiles at northern Israel. Netanyahu retaliated with an airstrike (which the U.S. didn’t approve) on one of the group’s command centers in a suburb of Beirut. Iran has insisted all along that its ceasefire with the U.S. also covers its foreign proxies, so it deemed Israel’s reprisal against Hezbollah a violation and responded by firing missiles of its own at the Jewish state.

 

That caused the president to spring into action—to try to prevent the Israelis from hitting back.

 

Trump was so frantic to avert further escalation, in fact, that he babbled about it to Axios reporter Barak Ravid before even speaking to Netanyahu.

 

“I am going to call Bibi right now and tell him not to retaliate. Each of them had their fun. Israel had its strike, and Iran had its strike. We don’t need another one,” Trump said.

 

…

 

“The Iranian strikes didn’t hurt anybody,” Trump tells Axios. “Hopefully Israel is not going to retaliate. If Bibi strikes them back, it’s just gonna keep going like the last 47 years—or the last 3,000 years.”

 

Trump added: “We are very close to a final deal with Iran. It is going to be a good deal. I don’t want it to blow up because of what is happening now.”

 

Ravid filed an update after the two leaders spoke. A senior U.S. official assured him that Netanyahu had “pseudo agreed” to stand down for now, adding, “I don’t think anything is imminent in terms of an Israeli strike.” The Associated Press also quoted a senior U.S. official as saying that Trump “got Bibi to hold off for the time being.”

 

The president himself boasted of his influence over the Israelis in a separate interview with the Financial Times. When asked what would happen if his ally objected to the terms of a U.S. peace deal with Iran, he assured the paper that they’ll have no choice but to accept. “I call the shots,” he told reporter Edward Luce. “I call all the shots. [Netanyahu] doesn’t call the shots.”

 

A few hours later, Israel bombed Iran.

 

“The U.S. didn’t agree or support these strikes,” a U.S. official later whimpered to Axios. Trump was reduced in the aftermath to one of his now-habitual “all is well, a deal is coming” posts on Truth Social to try to calm investors before markets opened. That deal, incidentally, was supposedly being finalized and its terms were set to be “announced shortly” … on May 23.

 

Iran and Israel agreed this morning to stop shooting but that pact is, and will remain, one new Hezbollah provocation away from disintegrating.

 

The United States is no longer calling the shots in the war. Why?

 

Goals.

 

It’s because, of the three combatants in this conflict, the United States is the only one whose priority is to end it as soon as possible—and the other two know it. Go figure that a party that’s spoiling to withdraw might have trouble dictating events to two that share an incentive to fight on for at least a bit longer.

 

The White House’s goal at this point is straightforward: save face. Convince Iran to agree to a peace deal that stabilizes oil markets and includes enough nuclear concessions that it can be credibly spun as better than the nuclear bargain Barack Obama made with Tehran in 2015.

 

Trump needs a way to answer critics who’ll say that the war did nothing to make America better off and may have made it worse off. He’s vulnerable to the first criticism if a peace accord replicates what Obama managed to achieve without bombs and embargoes. He’s vulnerable to the second if oil shipping in the Strait of Hormuz remains subject to Iranian extortion, as Iran insists it will.

 

But if he can get those two concessions, he’s out. Plainly, he would love to be done with this foolish war and pivot to Cuba, another of his grandiose fantasies about plucking a longtime thorn in America’s side and one with a much lower degree of difficulty than the current one.

 

Israel’s goal is different. It doesn’t much care about helping Trump save face; what it wants is to continue to degrade Iran and its proxies in anticipation of the “new” Middle East that the war is creating.

 

That Middle East will be one in which the United States is much less active than it’s been over the past 35 years. Neither American party is likely to support the Jewish state militarily going forward, with Democrats having grown hostile to Israel and the post-Trump postliberal GOP likely to trend further toward isolationism in response to this war’s costs.

 

That Middle East will also be one in which Iran has gained stature, having repelled a U.S. military regime-change effort and demonstrated its ability to apply a death grip to global energy markets in the process.

 

This may, in other words, be the last chance Israel will have for many years to cripple the Iranian terror state before it gains strength and uses its new leverage to weaken Sunni resistance to its hegemony in the region. If Trump can’t bring the Iranians to heel at the bargaining table, and he probably can’t, why shouldn’t Israel continue to take military measures against an existential threat?

 

Iran’s goal in the war also requires keeping the conflict active, at least in the short term. That goal is to humiliate the United States and its president by demonstrating that America is no longer “calling the shots” in the war or in the region writ large.

 

That strategy has a shelf life, I assume, as eventually America’s naval blockade of Iran’s own oil exports will create meaningful hardship for the regime. But until then, holding out on a deal with Trump and deputizing Hezbollah to harass Israel serves numerous purposes for the Khomeinists. It shows Sunni rivals that Tehran’s will in war is indomitable. It gives anti-war (and anti-Trump) sentiment in the United States time to grow, and fruitfully so. It weakens U.S. alliances around the world by demonstrating that America’s military may not be as effective against mutual enemies as they’ve assumed.

 

And it pits America against Israel by pitting Trump’s desire to end the war against Netanyahu’s desire to win it. Even by the standards of this kakistocracy, it’s preposterous that the president was on the phone yesterday with a reporter pleading Iran’s case publicly (“The Iranian strikes didn't hurt anybody”) in his desperation to stop Netanyahu from retaliating against a missile attack. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump is so eager to keep the Iranians at the table that he’s told aides he won’t resume the war unless they kill more American troops—and even then, he’ll only “consider” it.

 

By stringing Trump along with promises of peace, the regime has turned him into a sort of spokesman on its behalf against further Israeli strikes. Which is another reason for it to delay for as long as possible before agreeing to terms, of course: If the president is already this needy about finding a way out, imagine what sort of concessions he might be willing to make in another month or two.

 

Iran’s goal in the endgame stage of the war is to show the world and its neighbors in particular that it now controls events in the Strait of Hormuz and the region at least as much as the mighty United States does. If that’s not a strategic victory in the making, what is?

 

Trump’s awareness of Iran’s success probably explains the doth-protest-too-much defensiveness of what he told the Financial Times when asked whether Israel would accept the peace deal he brokers. They’ll do what I tell them is the sort of boorish brag you’d expect from a dominance-obsessed megalomaniac panicked that the other combatants in a major conflict to which he is a party have stopped listening to him.

 

I’m not sure it’s true, either.

 

Reasserting control.

 

There isn’t much left that he can do to reassert control over Iran. Hawks would say we’re one more spectacular bombing run away from forcing the Iranians to cry uncle, but I get the sense that people like Pete Hegseth have been telling Trump that since day one. The president no longer seems to believe it, and for once I agree with him.

 

Sending troops to seize the uranium buried at Iranian enrichment sites or territory along the coast of the strait would count as reasserting control, but the risk-reward ratio is poor. Either mission would stand a fair chance of failing and would almost certainly get Americans killed, further poisoning opinion against the president and the war. Last week Trump told reporters that he hasn’t tried to grab the uranium because “I didn’t feel like being like Jimmy Carter,” alluding to the Operation Eagle Claw fiasco. Here again, his instincts are uncharacteristically sound.

 

Waiting out the regime until the embargo bites is his least bad option, which explains why he’s begun leaning so hard on Israel to maintain the ceasefire. Unlike with the Iranians, he does have leverage over Netanyahu. So he’s using it.

 

But how much leverage, really? If he makes a bad bargain with Iran to end the conflict and the Israelis opt to resume the fight unilaterally, how much control would Trump plausibly be able to exert over the Jewish state to compel it to stand down?

 

Would it be more or less than the degree of control he had over Ukraine when he tried and failed to compel it to make a bad peace deal with Russia?

 

The Ukrainians chose to fight on despite the president’s famous admonition to Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office last year that “you don’t have the cards” to win. The newly elected GOP government set about making that assessment come true, slashing military aid to Kyiv by 99 percent in 2025 relative to the year before. The goal, obviously, was to erode Ukraine’s ability to defend itself and leave it with no choice but to make painful concessions toward peace.

 

Instead, the Ukrainians revolutionized drone warfare, developed their own long-range missiles, and are at present pushing Russia’s economy to the breaking point. Zelensky did have some cards to play, it turned out, and he’s played them more aggressively and effectively since he was forced to stop relying so heavily on Washington for help. Wouldn’t the same happen to Israel if it also defied the president by carrying on with a war he opposed?

 

Maybe not. Ukraine had many friends in Europe who were willing to help pick up the slack after America cut weapons to Kyiv. Israel has only one friend, as Trump reportedly reminded Netanyahu recently, and so the United States isn’t so easily replaced as a patron.

 

A sustained Israeli conflict with Iran would also damage the global economy more severely than Russia’s war with Ukraine has, assuming the Iranians closed the strait again to create international pressure on Netanyahu to back off. That would also give Trump a reason to pressure Israel more intensely than he pressured Ukraine.

 

But the Israelis have something that the Ukrainians don’t—namely, a devout base of support within the president’s party that’s been cultivated for generations, and which for some amounts to a religious obligation.

 

It is very hard to imagine Donald Trump crossing that base by threatening to sabotage an Israeli war against Iran by cutting off American weapons to Jerusalem the way he did to Kyiv. Even in a country and a party that’s grown cooler to the Jewish state over time, there are millions of right-wing hawks who would treat pulling the plug on U.S. aid to Israel during a death match with the Khomeinists as something close to treason.

 

Look no further than the outcry last month among normally quiescent loyalists when news leaked that the president was poised to make major financial concessions to Iran in a peace deal. There are precious few red lines in politics that will cause the Republican pipsqueaks in Congress to speak up against Trump for crossing them, especially in a matter as fraught as war, but weakness toward Iran is one. I can’t imagine how they’d react to weakness toward Iran coupled with a “betrayal” of Israel.

 

Trump would be squeamish about punishing Jerusalem for defying him even if congressional Republicans indulged him in it, I think. He’s boasted about being “the best president in the history of Israel” and enjoying 99 percent approval there, which isn’t true but nods at the reality that he’s more popular in the Jewish state than he is nearly anywhere else. I don’t think he has it in him to kiss off one of the few nations on Earth where he’s celebrated rather than vilified, particularly when doing so would benefit an enemy he loathes. Trump’s Russophilia explains why he’s never much cared whether Russian savages lay waste to Ukraine, but he’s an Iran-hater from way back.

 

Besides, if peace is his goal, cutting weapons to the Israelis would be counterproductive. There is no scenario in which reducing the Jewish state’s ability to deter its revanchist enemies will lead to less war in the Middle East rather than more, especially with respect to a regime like Iran’s that’s keen to reestablish its prestige by flexing muscle. Keeping U.S. weapons going to Israel would likely shorten, not lengthen, a sustained war with Iran—just like keeping U.S. weapons going to Ukraine might have forced Russia to the bargaining table by now.

 

All of which is to say that, in addition to losing control over the Iranians, the president also has less leverage over Jerusalem than he might like to think. Insofar as Netanyahu still feels obliged to follow his lead, I’m sure it has less to do with showing the sort of fealty or gratitude that Trump expects and more to do with not wanting to give right-wing isolationists further grounds to agitate against Israel within the Republican Party. Having already lost the American left, the Israelis can’t afford to lose the American right, and the surest way to do that is to make clear that you’re no longer following His Majesty’s commands.

 

So Netanyahu will go on obeying Trump whenever he can, right up until the moment when doing so becomes strategically indefensible, as it did yesterday. The president gets to call the shots for Israel as long as those shots aren’t doing real damage—but once they start to do so, as they might in a final U.S.-Iran peace accord, all bets are off. Stay tuned.