The president smiled as he sank into a brown leather armchair for an after-dinner chat with his hosts – the prime minister and defense minister of Israel. His tone remained friendly, but his message was serious.
Looking at the defense minister, and then at the prime minister, he said, “I want to tell both of you now, as president: We are totally against any action by you to mount an attack on Iran’s nuclear plants.
“I repeat,” he added. “We expect you not to do it.”
Why We Wrote This
Israel had been hoping for years to have a chance to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, which it fears could produce a nuclear weapon. Washington has always nixed such plans – until now.
The president was George W. Bush, not Donald Trump. The year was 2008, not 2025.
Successive presidents since then have made it clear – and successive Israeli governments have understood – that Washington opposed an Israeli military attack on Iran’s nuclear program.
Among the web of reasons that explain why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did order a strike last Friday on Iran’s nuclear facilities was one critical consideration: This decades-old U.S. policy had changed.
Whether Mr. Trump merely nodded approval – or, as a leading Israeli defense specialist has reported, offered “the greenest of green lights” – Mr. Netanyahu knew that, for the first time, Israel could attack nuclear targets in Iran without risking a rift with its key military and political ally.
Indeed, he still hopes that Mr. Trump will go further, and order a bunker-busting U.S. attack on the Iranians’ main underground enrichment complex at Fordow, south of Tehran.
It is conceivable the Israeli leader might have gone ahead even without an American OK.
Militarily, Iran is at its most vulnerable in years. Its proxy force, Hezbollah, has been hobbled in Lebanon. Its main regional ally, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, is in exile in Moscow. Iran’s air defenses were largely defanged during a missile and air battle with Israel last year.
Mr. Netanyahu also had compelling political reasons to act.
On the home front, he could be confident that a full-scale assault on Iran would unify Israelis, and overshadow criticism of his handling of the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023; his conduct of the war in Gaza; and his failure to secure the return of Israeli hostages.
And there was a geopolitical consideration.
The U.S. president was pursuing a deal with Iran that would limit Iran’s nuclear program below weapons-grade enrichment levels. This is a path that the Israeli prime minister has long opposed.
Since George W. Bush’s postprandial caution in 2008, Israel has sought on numerous occasions to reverse that thinking. Never, until now, had it succeeded.
When President Bush delivered his no 17 years ago, Iran’s nuclear program, and Israel’s attack planning, were in more rudimentary stages.
But the president thought it prudent to weigh in because the Israelis had begun asking if they might acquire the heavier munitions and refueling planes they would need to attack nuclear targets, and which they then lacked.
Within a couple of years, Israel’s capabilities had advanced to the stage where a workable attack plan was ready. But misgivings among top military and security officials meant that it was put aside.
By the early 2010s, however, Israel felt a growing sense of urgency.
Iran was enriching more uranium, dispersing its nuclear activities, and protecting key components of its program in heavily fortified underground locations.
In 2008, the Israelis estimated that if they had gotten a green light from President Bush – and had the tools to attack – they could have set Iran’s nuclear program back by about six years. By 2012, with the projected delay reduced to two years, a new attack plan was ready.
David ‘Dee’ Delgado/Reuters
But President Barack Obama made his views clear in a White House meeting with Israel’s Defense Minister, Ehud Barak.
There was no argument on the need to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon.
But while Mr. Obama did not explicitly veto an attack, he, like Mr. Trump during his first term and President Joe Biden later, left no doubt that he was not in favor of one.
He feared it would harm efforts to negotiate curbs on Iran’s nuclear program, and preempt the prospect of far more effective military action, by U.S. forces, if necessary.
“Think of it this way,” President Obama said. “You get to school in the morning and there’s this big, nasty bully. You can take him on, maybe give him a black eye. But you have this bigger, stronger friend, who can knock him out cold. The only problem is he won’t be there until the afternoon.”
Israel’s dilemma, Mr. Barak said, was that it couldn’t be sure its schoolyard friend would show up. And if he didn’t, by then Israel wouldn’t “even be able to give the bully a black eye.”
Israel almost did go ahead with its planned attack, the nearest it got to doing so until last week.
It was called off because it threatened to clash with previously scheduled joint U.S.-Israel military exercises. That timing, Mr. Barak explained later, would have made an attack look like a “deliberate attempt to implicate our most important ally in a potential conflict with Iran, against the wishes and policy” of the president.
That was a challenge that Mr. Netanyahu found he no longer had to face.
