President Trump has made a habit of dropping major news when Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits the White House. In early February, during a joint news conference with the Israeli leader, Trump debuted his plan for the U.S. to take over Gaza and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Last week, with Netanyahu making an emergency trip to Washington to discuss tariffs, Trump broke the news that direct negotiations with Iran over the country’s nuclear program would begin in Oman over the weekend.
“Everyone agrees that doing a deal is preferable to doing the obvious,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, the “obvious” referring to military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. There was one person in the room, sitting just a few feet away, who has made clear over and over again that he would prefer that obvious option: Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump is making the right call by kickstarting diplomacy to deal with Iran’s nuclear program. Preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon through diplomacy advances U.S. interests in the Middle East. A new accord would not only put Iran’s nuclear program in a box, but give Washington a better shot at retrenching from a region of declining strategic importance. The president would be smart to ignore Netanyahu’s advice about the talks and the contours of a potential deal.
Netanyahu, the longest-serving premier in Israeli history, has an extensive history of providing counsel to U.S. policymakers that turns out to be at odds with U.S. interests. Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Netanyahu said there was “no question” that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons. He famously said that taking out Saddam’s regime would “have enormous positive reverberations on the region” and lead to a democratic uprising in Iran. As almost everyone now agrees, that advice has proven to be spectacularly wrong.
Since 1995, Netanyahu has been warning that an Iranian nuclear weapon was just around the corner. Thirty years later, Tehran has yet to develop an atomic bomb, though Netanyahu has pushed for policies that make Iran more likely to achieve a nuclear weapons capability. Netanyahu opposed President Obama’s signing of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (aka, the Iran nuclear deal), which curbed the country’s program. And he encouraged Washington to pull out of the deal despite Iran’s compliance with it, which Trump did in 2018. One reason Trump is having difficulty getting a new, better deal is that Tehran understandably fears another U.S. abnegation.
Netanyahu is touting the so-called “Libya model” as the basis for a U.S. position on a deal with Iran. This seems like a bad faith recommendation, a poison pill designed to kill negotiations. Netanyahu knows Iran would never agree to take the steps that Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi announced in late 2003. Bowing to Western pressure, Tripoli dismantled its nuclear program in exchange for the promise of sanctions relief. Less than a decade later, NATO provided air cover as a rebel militia overthrew the Libyan government and, ultimately, captured and killed Gaddafi in gruesome fashion. Iran would be foolish to take the same path. Even if the “Libya model” didn’t lead to a collapse of the Islamic Republic, it would involve Tehran’s giving away all its negotiating leverage.
The Trump administration should recognize that demanding the full dismantlement of Iran’s civilian nuclear program serves Netanyahu’s interests, not America’s. The United States has already done more than enough to support Israel’s war on Gaza since Hamas’s October 7 atrocities, providing roughly $30 billion in military support. The costs of U.S. support go beyond the financial expenditure. The State Department has warned that U.S. support for Israel has galvanized terrorist organizations’ recruitment efforts and ignited anti-American sentiment. As the U.S. wages war against Yemen’s Houthis, who are attacking ships in the Red Sea to protest Israel’s assault on Gaza, Washington is in the midst of a dramatic military buildup in the region, moving missile defense systems and long-range stealth bombers from Asia to the Middle East. While such moves may be aimed at deterring Iran and forcing it to the negotiating table, they also heighten the risks of regional conflict.
A new nuclear deal would allow the United States to reduce its military footprint in the Middle East. The original accord may not have been perfect, but it placed limits on Iran’s nuclear program and put inspectors on the ground. With Iran considerably weakened over the last year and a half, its incentives to develop nuclear weapons are considerably higher—and so is its willingness to negotiate.
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President Trump thus has an opportunity to pull the Middle East back from the brink of regional conflagration. Even before the ongoing military buildup began a few weeks ago, there were some 40,000 U.S troops in the region. A war with Iran would put them at grave risk. A deal with Iran would significantly mitigate that risk—and provide an opportunity to bring them home.
A new Iran deal would also stymie proliferation risks. If Tehran were to acquire nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia and other regional rivals might seek to build nuclear weapons of their own, igniting a dangerous arms race with dire implications for global security.
The Trump administration has made clear that the alternative to an Iran nuclear deal is war. Such a conflict would further destabilize a Middle East already in chaos. Moreover, since the American people reelected Trump in part because they viewed him as the anti-war candidate, a new Forever War against Iran could tank his approval ratings. If the administration truly intends to prioritize peace and the interests of the American people, it should resist Netanyahu’s attempts to undermine diplomacy with Iran.
