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America Can't Let Israel Pull It Into a Renewed Iran War
It was Dwight Eisenhower, a very different kind of American president to Donald Trump, who warned that “we will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.” There’s no record of him using that precise wording, but the phrase stuck because it seemed so succinctly to capture his many speeches on the dangers of getting driven to war for the wrong reasons.
Eisenhower was no pacifist. But as a career soldier and World War II’s supreme allied commander in Europe, he knew the costs, risks and limitations of war in ways that the men taking decisions in the Middle East today do not.
In the case of Trump, that’s because he never saw military service and only hears the counsel that suits him. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is different. He saw significant special-forces combat, was wounded and lost a brother in action. But unlike Eisenhower, he sees the use of armed force as the preferred and often only tool in Israel’s foreign policy kit.
This is why — according to two convincingly reported accounts, from the New York Times and Bloomberg News — Netanyahu played down the risks and uncertainties involved in attacking Iran to get Trump to join in, promising this would end Tehran’s threat once and for all. It’s also why he only reluctantly agreed to join the two-week ceasefire the US has reached with Iran and, via Lebanon, was doing his best to derail it.
Eisenhower was no pacifist. But as a career soldier and World War II’s supreme allied commander in Europe, he knew the costs, risks and limitations of war in ways that the men taking decisions in the Middle East today do not.
In the case of Trump, that’s because he never saw military service and only hears the counsel that suits him. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is different. He saw significant special-forces combat, was wounded and lost a brother in action. But unlike Eisenhower, he sees the use of armed force as the preferred and often only tool in Israel’s foreign policy kit.
This is why — according to two convincingly reported accounts, from the New York Times and Bloomberg News — Netanyahu played down the risks and uncertainties involved in attacking Iran to get Trump to join in, promising this would end Tehran’s threat once and for all. It’s also why he only reluctantly agreed to join the two-week ceasefire the US has reached with Iran and, via Lebanon, was doing his best to derail it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-04-10/lebanon-trump-cannot-let-netanyahu-pull-him-into-renewed-iran-war?srnd=homepage-americas
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