The war they wanted: Netanyahu and Trump light the fuse in Iran

The Middle East woke up on February 28, 2026, to a new phase of open warfare between Israel, the US, and Iran, the kind of escalation that many officials had warned about in private for months and that many observers have repeatedly described in public as the most dangerous possible outcome of the collapsing regional order.

Israel announced it had launched a pre-emptive strike against Iran, framing the operation as an effort to neutralize what it described as imminent threats tied to Iran’s missile and nuclear programs. Within hours, multiple major outlets were reporting that the US was not simply backing Israel diplomatically but was actively participating in strikes, with Washington describing the campaign in sweeping terms that implied objectives well beyond a narrow, one-night military raid.

If there is one immediate conclusion that can be drawn from the first reports and official statements, it is that diplomacy was not merely failing in the background. It was being overtaken by force at the very moment when some mediators were still describing negotiations as salvageable. In the days leading up to Saturday, there had been indirect talks and reports of serious, extended rounds of discussion. Oman’s foreign minister even suggested that peace was within reach and that diplomacy should be allowed to do its work. Yet Saturday morning’s coordinated strikes, described by Israeli officials as planned for months and coordinated with Washington, point to a different reality, one in which the political leadership in Washington and West Jerusalem had already chosen coercion over compromise and selected a date weeks in advance.

That is why the core political argument many analysts have made for years now returns with renewed force. The central question has not been whether Iran’s policies are confrontational or whether its regional posture alarms its neighbors. The question has been whether the leading Western and Israeli decision-makers truly sought a negotiated framework that would trade limits and inspections for sanctions relief, or whether they viewed any durable agreement with Tehran as strategically undesirable because it would stabilize Iran, normalize parts of its economy, and reduce the justification for continued pressure. The early contours of this campaign, especially the public rhetoric emerging from Washington about giving Iranians a chance to topple their rulers, aligns more closely with a strategy of weakening the Iranian state than with a limited operation designed only to force compliance at the negotiating table.

What is known so far about the military sequence is still incomplete and in flux, but several elements are already consistent across multiple credible reports. Explosions were reported in Tehran and other locations, and Israel said it struck Iran in what it called a preventative move. Israel also took sweeping domestic emergency steps, including the closure of airspace and restrictions affecting daily life, signaling that it anticipated immediate retaliation. Reuters reported that Iran’s supreme leader was moved to a secure location, an extraordinary detail that suggests either fear of decapitation strikes or at minimum a belief inside Iran’s leadership that the operation was aimed at the regime’s command core, not only at launchers and depots.

From Washington, the messaging was even more expansive. The Pentagon named the US strikes Operation Epic Fury, while President Donald Trump described major combat operations and framed the campaign as intended to destroy Iranian missile capabilities and prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, with language that also implied regime-change ambitions. Whatever one thinks of Iran’s intentions, it is notable that at least one prominent report stressed that Iran has long insisted it does not seek a nuclear weapon and that international bodies and US intelligence assessments have been central to the debate over how imminent any weaponization actually is. That gap between asserted threat and contested evidence has always been the space in which preventive war arguments expand, because uncertainty becomes a tool rather than a constraint.

Iran’s response began quickly. Multiple reports described Iranian missile and drone launches toward Israel, with sirens and emergency measures on the Israeli side. This retaliatory phase matters not only for the immediate damage it may cause, but because it signals the strategic logic Tehran is likely to follow if it concludes the US has crossed the threshold from supporter to co-belligerent. In that case, Iran’s deterrence doctrine typically shifts from symbolic retaliation to a wider target set designed to impose costs on American regional posture.

That is exactly what early reporting suggests may already be underway in the Gulf. The Associated Press reported explosions across several countries and said a US Fifth Fleet service center in Bahrain was hit. The Times of Israel’s live reporting cited air-raid sirens in Bahrain and described explosions and smoke in Manama amid claims of Iranian strikes targeting US bases in Gulf states in retaliation for the morning’s attacks. The Washington Post also referenced Iranian warnings that US bases would be treated as legitimate targets if attacked and situated Saturday’s escalation in the context of a major US military buildup in the region. Even allowing for the fog of war, the pattern is clear enough to be alarming. Once American infrastructure in the Gulf becomes an active battlefield rather than a background deterrent, escalation ladders shorten dramatically, because every strike creates pressure for immediate counterstrike.

Saturday’s violence is also inseparable from the memory of last year’s short but intense conflict. Multiple outlets explicitly linked the current crisis to the 12-day war in June 2025 between Israel and Iran, a confrontation that ended without a comprehensive political settlement and therefore functioned less as closure than as rehearsal. If that earlier episode taught regional actors anything, it was that a rapid exchange of missiles and airstrikes can be contained for a time, but at the price of normalizing direct state-to-state attacks that used to be conducted mostly through proxies. When that taboo is broken, the next round tends to be faster, broader, and less governable.

This is why the region has, in a single morning, moved several steps closer to a catastrophic, full-scale war whose boundaries would be difficult to control. It is not only the Israel-Iran dyad that is burning. It is the incorporation of US forces into active operations and the likely extension of Iranian retaliation to American assets and partners around the Gulf that creates the risk of multi-front spillover, including on sea lanes, energy infrastructure, and the internal stability of states that host US bases.

Against this background, the political interpretation the user is urging is not merely rhetorical, but it must be handled carefully and honestly. One can argue, based on the timing and the publicly reported pre-planning, that the leadership in Washington and West Jerusalem did not prioritize reaching a negotiated accommodation with Tehran, because the operation appears to have been prepared while talks were still in motion, and because the declared aims now extend into the terrain of regime transformation. One can also argue, with equal seriousness, that the language of democracy is often deployed as a moral cover for strategic goals, while the operational reality of air and missile campaigns tends to weaken state capacity, expand insecurity, and kill civilians even when precision is claimed. But it would be irresponsible to present as proven fact an inner motive that cannot be directly documented. What can be said with confidence is that Saturday’s actions are consistent with a maximal-pressure approach aimed at degrading Iran’s capabilities and destabilizing its leadership calculus, rather than building a stable, verifiable bargain that both sides can live with.

Where does this go next? Predicting the next moves is genuinely difficult right now, because the trajectory depends on decisions that may be made hour by hour, not on a fixed script. Still, several scenarios are already visible.

An optimistic scenario assumes that the current US-Israeli operation remains limited, lasting only a few days, and that Iran’s retaliation remains calibrated, severe enough to claim deterrence but not so extensive that it forces Washington into an expanded war plan. In this reading, back-channel diplomacy would restart quickly, perhaps through Oman or other intermediaries, and after a burst of strikes the region would sink into a tense pause, similar in shape if not in detail to the lull that followed the June 2025 fighting. The argument for this scenario is straightforward. Every party has reasons to fear uncontrolled escalation, and the economic and domestic political costs of a prolonged war would be enormous for all sides, including energy shock risks and the danger of widening unrest.

But the darker scenarios are easier to outline, because they match the logic of what has already been signaled publicly. One negative pathway is a deliberately comprehensive campaign against Iran, not limited to missiles but expanding into sustained air operations, covert sabotage, and targeted raids, combined with information operations intended to fracture elite cohesion and encourage internal revolt. Some reporting on Saturday highlighted sources characterizing the intent as decapitation of the Iranian regime, and other coverage described rhetoric urging Iranians to overthrow their government. If this becomes the dominant strategy, the stated endpoint will not be a revised nuclear agreement, but a reordering of the Iranian state itself. The potential outcome in that case is not democracy delivered from above, but structural collapse, factionalization, and the long-term possibility of Iran entering a failed-state condition, with centrifugal pressures in a country that is large, diverse, and heavily sanctioned even in peacetime.

Another negative pathway is a grinding, widening war in which Iran absorbs initial blows, preserves its political center, and then shifts to attritional retaliation across the region, targeting US facilities and partners in the Gulf and unleashing heavier strikes on Israel. Early indications that Gulf states are already feeling the shock underscore how quickly this could spill over. In this scenario, the conflict ceases to be a discrete episode and becomes a regional war that reroutes trade, militarizes maritime corridors, and pulls multiple actors into open confrontation, whether by choice or by necessity.

Between these poles sits a muddled middle scenario, and in many ways, it may be the most realistic. It is the scenario of partial escalation and partial restraint, in which both sides keep striking but also keep searching for exits, alternating between punishment and signaling. That kind of conflict is unstable in its own way, because it depends on constant calibration, and calibration is exactly what becomes hardest when casualties mount, misinformation spreads, and domestic audiences demand revenge.

What should be emphasized, above all, is that Saturday’s events have lowered the threshold for disaster. The region has moved closer to the point where a single misread radar track, a single mass-casualty strike, or a single attack on a critical chokepoint could force leaders into decisions they did not plan to make this morning. The immediate facts will continue to evolve, and some early claims will inevitably prove exaggerated or wrong. But the strategic direction is unmistakable. A direct US-Israeli attack on Iran followed by Iranian retaliation toward Israel and strikes on US-linked infrastructure in the Gulf is the architecture of a wider war, even if none of the protagonists say they want one.