How Ben Played Don to Paint the Fence
By Tom Kagy | 09 Mar, 2026

When you understand a narcissist addicted to headlines, it's child's play to make him do virtually anything to avoid being overshadowed.

Let's clear the air about what just happened. 

Benjamin Netanyahu, a man who has survived more political near-death experiences than a cat has lives, just pulled off one of the slickest diplomatic con jobs in modern history. He got Donald Trump — a guy who ran an entire second presidential campaign on the promise of keeping America out of foreign wars — to greenlight direct US military involvement against Iran. If you're not impressed by the audacity of that, you haven't been paying attention.

To understand how Ben did it, you first have to understand Don.  Trump doesn't process the world through ideology the way his base does. He processes it through attention.  Who's talking about him? Is it good? Is it loud? Is he the biggest figure in the room? 

MAGA's cardinal principle of non-interventionism — the whole "endless wars" thing, the America First doctrine that animated his voters for a decade — isn't really a conviction for Trump. It's a costume he wears when it polls well. Strip away the rallies and the rhetoric and what you find underneath is a man who desperately, pathologically cannot stand being upstaged.

Netanyahu understood this the way a pickpocket understands a crowded subway. The move wasn't to argue strategy with Trump. It wasn't to present a dossier on Iranian nuclear capabilities or debate international law. The move was simpler and meaner than that: make Trump feel like Israel might upstage him in global headlines. 

Reports from people close to both leaders describe a pattern of Netanyahu deliberately framing Israeli operations in ways that made Trump look passive.  Not the indispensable American hegemon. Just a bystander watching a smaller country do the heavy lifting. For a man who once reportedly demanded his name be put on COVID vaccines, the idea of Israel getting full historical credit for reshaping the Middle East while Trump played golf was simply unbearable. 

So Trump folded on non-interventionism.  Not with a formal announcement that he was abandoning a core campaign promise. Just quietly, incrementally, the way a man who doesn't want to admit he changed his mind tends to move. Suddenly US assets were repositioned. Suddenly the rhetoric shifted. Suddenly the "America doesn't want more wars" guy was the "we had no choice" guy.

Netanyahu had enormous strategic incentives to pull the US into this fight, even knowing the costs would be staggering and global.

Israel is a small—tiny, actually—country of nine million surrounded by bigger enemies, fighting a sustained multi-front conflict, with an economy increasingly strained by mobilization.  It has a formidable military, but it's not a superpower. Iran's nuclear program, its ballistic missile arsenal, its network of proxies across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Gaza — neutralizing all of that is simply beyond Israeli capacity. 

You can damage it. You can set it back. But to genuinely destroy the infrastructure of the Islamic Republic's power projection, you need American logistics, American munitions pipelines, American electronic warfare, and most critically, American political cover at the UN and in the broader international community.

Beyond the military math, there's an existential calculation. Israel's leadership has long believed that a nuclear Iran doesn't just threaten Israeli cities — it has the potential to destroy Israel. From Jerusalem's perspective, the price of dragging the US in, even at enormous cost to global oil markets, regional stability, and America's diplomatic standing, is worth paying to prevent that outcome. That's cold logic, but it's existential logic.

The rest of the world gets to pay the tab — higher energy prices, wider regional instability, a further fracturing of whatever remains of the post-WWII international order. And Netanyahu, understanding Don better than Don understands himself, made sure America picked up the check.

That's not diplomacy. That's a hustle, a spectacular, brilliant hustle!