How Did Trump Fall into Bibi's Trap?
Tehran - BORNA - In the broad literature of international relations, there is a term called "the tail wagging the dog" – an abnormal situation in which a smaller, satellite actor, through engineering the balance of power, succeeds in dictating the direction, interests, and fate of a larger superpower. Today's failed US military aggression against Iran is the most precise embodiment of this strategic inversion, where Washington, despite possessing a trillion-dollar army, finds itself in a war pit for which it had no initial plan for its commencement, no secondary plan for its consequences, and not even a picture of its endpoint.
But this strategic fall and descent into the quagmire was not the result of a sudden decision. This crisis is the culmination of forty years of continuous engineering, institutional influence, and the imperceptible control that Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of the Zionist regime, has exercised over the power structure in Washington.
According to an analysis by the Carnegie Endowment, "containing and destroying Iran" is not a temporary tactic but the fundamental mission and the "project of Netanyahu's entire political life" over the past forty years. He has whispered this personal project, with tireless and unrelenting insistence, into the ears of every single US president and every member of Congress who has set foot in Tel Aviv.
To understand the nature of this idea, one must look beneath the surface of Netanyahu's thinking, where he never viewed America as an "equal ally" but rather saw Washington merely as a tool to advance his own delusions. This controlling approach has deep roots. In a television interview in the 1980s, relying on his network of influence, he explicitly stated: "America is not a monolithic block that we must submit to. We have the Senate, we have Congress, and we have a powerful Jewish lobby that acts cohesively. They are aligned with us. So America cannot dictate anything to us; it is we who drive the processes."
He repeated this instrumentalist and contemptuous view of American political rationality years later in a leaked video file from 2001. In this film, Netanyahu reveals to a private gathering of settlers how he has played the White House like putty in his hands. With a mocking smile, he laughs in the faces of Americans and says: "I know what America is. America is easily moved, easily directed in the direction we want. They will not stand in our way."
The peak of Netanyahu's deception in this video is his admission to destroying the Oslo Peace Accords. The Oslo Accords were signed in the 1990s between Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestinian Authority, and Yitzhak Rabin, former prime minister of the Zionist regime (mediated by Bill Clinton, then US president). They were supposed to end occupation based on the "land for peace" formula and lead to the formation of an independent Palestinian state. America was committed to guaranteeing this agreement, and the Clinton administration insisted that Israel must begin withdrawing from Palestinian territories.
But in this leaked video, Netanyahu proudly explains how, as prime minister at the time, through political cunning and self-serving interpretation, he distorted the clauses of the Oslo resolutions to effectively nullify the peace agreement without America noticing.
He explicitly says: "They asked me whether I agreed to the Oslo agreement. I said yes, but on the condition that withdrawal from territories must be carried out in defined military locations. I myself defined those military locations on the map in such a way that practically no land would reach the Palestinians, and the Oslo agreement would be stillborn! I knew the Clinton administration would do nothing because they can be easily managed."
These public and historical confessions reveal that Netanyahu was certain from the very beginning that Americans would in any case pay the price for his crimes, sabotage, and ambitions, and that Washington's sovereignty is nothing but a plaything.
Obama's Rational Resistance to the Tel Aviv Trap
However, the history of US foreign policy shows that the wiser body of Washington's establishment has always resisted this rotten rope to at least not drag America to the bottom of this well and to use Israel in the interest of America's broader regional and international interests. Barack Obama, former US president, in his recent revealing interview with Stephen Colbert in May 2026, with heavy sarcasm directed at Donald Trump and Netanyahu, defended his administration's rational strategy. He revealed that Netanyahu used precisely the same false arguments to drag Trump into the war campaign that he had placed on Obama's table years ago.
Responding to Colbert's question about the 2015 agreement (JCPOA), Obama explicitly said: "We concluded that agreement without firing a single missile. We removed 97 percent of Iran's enriched uranium. There was no need to massacre an entire people, nor were we forced to close the Strait of Hormuz. There was no doubt about the effectiveness of that agreement. Even Israel's own intelligence services and our security institutions confirmed that the agreement worked."
Obama then, challenging the logic of Trump, who had called the JCPOA the "worst deal in history," added: "He only undermined the agreement because I had signed it. Otherwise, no rational and independent person disputed the JCPOA's effectiveness. If your agenda was 'regime change in Iran,' yes, that was not the goal of our agreement."
The former US president's statements show that Obama and US intelligence institutions, relying on precise assessments, knew that Netanyahu's war drumming lacked a strategic exit plan. Thus, by rejecting these delusions, they did not hold American national security hostage to Bibi's political survival. The outcome of today's crisis has progressed to the point where even Israeli media outlets like Haaretz, with the headline "Israel Owes Barack Obama an Apology," admit that not yielding to Netanyahu's gamble was the only way to contain this folly.
Unlike Obama, who spoke from the position of a political rival, the heaviest blow to Trump's foreign doctrine came from within his own most key security institutions. Joe Kent, a senior military official and director of the US National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), resigned in March 2026 in public protest against the initiation of war with Iran. In a revealing interview with Tucker Carlson, he exposed new dimensions of Tel Aviv's imperceptible control over the White House.
Confirming precisely the same warnings that Obama had raised years earlier, Kent revealed that US intelligence agencies had no document indicating an immediate threat from Iran, but a cohesive Zionist lobby had channeled intelligence for Trump. He explicitly stated: "There was no intelligence data indicating that Iran was an imminent threat to us. We started this war solely because of direct pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby. A group of Trump's relatives and advisors inclined toward Tel Aviv had effectively cut off Trump's access to the real reports of our own intelligence agencies and were feeding him manipulated information."
The former US counterterrorism director, referring to how Tel Aviv distorted the "America First" doctrine, unveiled an even more bitter reality and added: "The Israelis have a complex, layered approach to influence. They have control over Congress and financial resources. The truth is that Israeli officials had reached this confidence and folly that no matter what insane adventure they embark on and what situation they place America in, we will blindly enter the fray behind them and pay the price. This war is not for us. We are fighting and bleeding for them."
This firsthand testimony from the highest-ranking US counterterrorism official clearly shows how Netanyahu's forty-year mission to distort Washington's will has come to fruition – a complex process in which even the US president, who claims to be an authoritarian, fell into Tel Aviv's channeled intelligence trap without even knowing it. It was this same mechanism of influence and information siege of the White House that paved the way for a major paradigm shift in America's power structure.
Reverse Engineering in the White House: The Strategic Subjugation of Trump
The catastrophic turn occurred when Donald Trump, despite all his claims of authoritarianism, nationalist spirit, and the "America First" slogan, blindly opened the doors of the White House to this forty-year project and effectively became the executor of every clause of Netanyahu's personal mission. According to experts, Trump's actions have turned Netanyahu's old confessions about controlling Washington from a mere claim into an objective reality.
Netanyahu, by presenting the propaganda for leaving the JCPOA in Trump's first term – which CNN today assesses as a devastating legacy and the main cause of the current crisis – and then by dragging him into direct military confrontation in the second term, subjected the White House's decision-making structure to a kind of "reverse engineering." He arranged the powerful lobbies of Congress and Washington's financial circles in such a way that Trump believed the decision for war was his own personal idea, while in reality he was merely playing on a field whose map had been drawn in Tel Aviv forty years earlier.
According to the Carnegie Endowment, Trump, setting aside the traditional assessments of the Pentagon and the CIA, stepped into this quagmire without the slightest conception of "the day after the war." Washington's strategic folly, resulting from the direct control of its foreign policy by Tel Aviv, caused the US Army to face the depletion of its global stockpiles of defensive munitions in less than a few weeks.
According to this think tank, Iran's asymmetric weapons shattered the prestige of expensive Western systems, turned US bases in the region into heaps of ash, and forced US aircraft carriers to retreat hundreds of miles from the shores of the Persian Gulf for their own safety. Trump, who thought he was redefining American power, effectively fell into Netanyahu's 2001 leaked trap, where Bibi mockingly said that America is easily moved and directed.
The consequences of this fall into a well with no rope have now, beyond the military fronts, affected the entire geography and international supply chain. The paralysis of energy market arteries in the Persian Gulf and the maritime logistics crisis have imposed heavy trillion-dollar costs on Washington's allies from Europe to East Asia and are driving the global economy toward an erosive super-recession.
Today, Washington's deadlock has manifested in its most complete form. The Islamic Republic of Iran stands firm, maintaining its strategic and missile capabilities, and the White House, to manage this military and economic debacle, has been forced once again to move toward the same patterns of diplomatic negotiation that Trump once mocked. Trump, who tried to finish the war in three days and achieve his political, nuclear, and security objectives, today cannot bear lengthy negotiations for an agreement and finds himself on precisely the same path that existed in the past regarding the negotiation process with Iran.
The undeniable reality of the history of foreign policy reminds us that the ultimate responsible party for wars and destruction is neither the cunning lobbies nor deceptive foreign advisors, but the final decision-maker in the White House. By yielding to Netanyahu's political survival project, Trump distorted America's national will and placed Washington on a path from which exit will be blocked for decades. On the other hand, he has completely changed regional and international equations at various political, economic, and security levels – an endless war whose heavy price is now being paid by American soldiers on the battlefield and by global markets in the economic arena.
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