BEIRUT: The biggest casualty of the U.S.-Iran deal may not be Israel’s Iran strategy, but the political brand Benjamin Netanyahu spent decades constructing as the Israeli leader who could uniquely bend Washington to his will on Iran, analysts, former U.S. officials and diplomats say.
Netanyahu built his political identity on an audacious assertion: that he alone could keep the U.S. and Israel in strategic lockstep on Iran. Cultivating Republican support, he cast himself as the only Israeli leader capable of influencing successive U.S. presidents and insisted that only sustained military pressure could contain Tehran.
At the height of his power, he was described by diplomats as the “American whisperer” — the Israeli leader who could pick up the phone and ensure Washington’s strategic calculus aligned with that of Israel. No other Israeli prime minister, they note, addressed Congress as often or built such enduring political capital across the American political system.
But analysts say Washington and Tehran’s interim pact to end the war that the U.S. and Israel launched in February shows how that narrative has been reversed. Rather than shaping Washington’s Iran policy, Netanyahu is now forced to accept it, as U.S. President Donald Trump pursues a settlement that increasingly treats Israeli objections as constraints.
At home, the reckoning is equally stark, said former U.S. official Dennis Ross. Netanyahu is increasingly boxed in between a U.S. president intent on ending the conflict and a domestic base resistant to concessions, particularly in Lebanon, he said. Withdrawal risks political backlash while escalation risks confrontation with Washington.
The war Netanyahu hoped would cement his legacy as the leader who confronted Iran may instead be remembered as the conflict that dismantled a central source of his power. Isolated abroad, constrained by his closest ally and vulnerable ahead of an autumn election, he now finds the political asset on which he built his career has become his greatest liability.
At the outset of the war with Iran, Netanyahu promised ultimate victory. He delivered neither the collapse of Iran’s ruling system, nor the defeat of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, nor safe return for residents of northern Israel.
“The U.S.-Iran deal is a decisive blow to Netanyahu,” said Aviv Bushinsky, a former Netanyahu adviser. “Not only did he lose the war with Iran, he has also lost Trump as a friend. He is now isolated not only internationally, but locked in a major dispute with Trump,” he said.–Reuters
