Trump and Netanyahu: The Alliance That Started a War, the Ceasefire That Is Fracturing, and the Question of What Comes Next

Today's Headline: "He'll Do Whatever I Want Him to Do"

On Wednesday, May 20, 2026, as he boarded Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, President Donald Trump was asked by reporters what he had recently said to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about a potential renewed military strike on Iran. His answer was immediate, casual, and immediately explosive in its implications. "He's fine, he'll do whatever I want him to do," Trump said. He added, for emphasis and context: "He's a very good man, he'll do whatever I want him to do. And he's a great guy. Don't forget he was a wartime prime minister."

In any other geopolitical context, a statement by an American president that a foreign head of government will do "whatever I want" would be diplomatically extraordinary and would generate days of diplomatic fallout. In the context of the Trump-Netanyahu relationship as it has actually operated over the past year and a half, during which the two men together initiated the largest military conflict the Middle East has seen since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the statement barely stretched the boundaries of what has become the most consequential bilateral relationship in global security.

The same day, a separate story broke that Netanyahu had "balked" at a new Iran deal framework during a tense phone call with Trump — a report that created an apparent contradiction with Trump's "whatever I want" claim, and that illustrated with perfect clarity the fundamental tension at the heart of the Trump-Netanyahu alliance: two leaders who are publicly inseparable, privately sometimes operating at cross-purposes, and jointly responsible for a war whose ending neither has yet fully controlled.

How We Got Here: The Road to February 28

The war between the United States, Israel, and Iran did not begin without a long runway. The trajectory that led to Operation Roaring Lion — Israel's name for the joint assault launched on February 28, 2026 — and its American parallel, Operation Epic Fury, is traceable through years of escalating confrontation, two sets of strikes on Iranian nuclear and military infrastructure, a 12-day war in June 2025 that both sides claimed as a victory, and a ceasefire that both sides violated in the months that followed.

The pre-history runs through Netanyahu's decades-long advocacy for military action against Iran's nuclear programme, through the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel and the Gaza war that followed, through the widening regional conflict that drew Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iranian proxy forces more deeply into direct confrontation with Israeli and American forces, and through the return of Donald Trump to the American presidency in January 2025 — an event that Netanyahu had been anticipating, cultivating, and in the judgment of many analysts actively working toward for years.

Netanyahu visited the United States seven times in the first year of Trump's second term, more than any other world leader. The frequency and intensity of those visits reflected a relationship that was not merely diplomatic but ideologically aligned on the central question that had defined Netanyahu's political career: Iran as an existential threat that had to be eliminated, not managed, deterred, or negotiated with in ways that left it intact. At their February 4, 2025 Oval Office meeting, Trump called Netanyahu a "hero," said Israel might not have existed without his leadership, and signalled an alignment on Iran policy that went beyond the usual rhetoric of the US-Israel special relationship.

The sequence that led most directly to February 28 began in June 2025, when Israel launched Operation Rising Lion — a set of strikes targeting Iranian nuclear facilities and military infrastructure. The United States participated specifically in targeting nuclear sites. Iran's response was measured and the conflict ended after 12 days, with both sides claiming they had achieved their objectives. But the ceasefire that followed was never genuinely stable. Iran reconstituted air defence systems, continued advancing ballistic missile production, and maintained its financing and arming of proxy forces on Israel's borders. By late 2025 and early 2026, Israeli intelligence and the IDF were documenting these developments systematically and presenting them as evidence that Operation Rising Lion had not resolved the threat but merely deferred it.

The formal justification for Roaring Lion cited three interlocking developments: Iran's renewed efforts to advance ballistic missile production and conceal elements of its nuclear programme, the reconstitution of air defence systems degraded in June 2025, and Iran's continued support for proxy forces positioned along Israel's borders. "The Iranian regime has not abandoned its plan to destroy Israel," the IDF stated in its opening announcement. Netanyahu reinforced that framing by characterising the new operation not as a new war but as the continuation of an interrupted campaign. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated airstrikes on Tehran and other Iranian cities, targeting military infrastructure, leadership compounds, nuclear facilities, and oil installations. Among the opening strikes' most significant outcomes was the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — an act whose irreversibility placed the conflict immediately in a category beyond any previous American or Israeli military action against Iran.

The First Months of War: Scale, Cost, and the Complications Nobody Fully Anticipated

The war that began on February 28, 2026 was, by every available measure, the largest combat engagement in the Middle East since the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. It was also, in the judgment of multiple analysts and in the implicit admission embedded in its prolonged duration, more difficult, more costly, and less decisively conclusive than either Trump or Netanyahu had publicly suggested it would be.

The scale of destruction visited on Iran was enormous. Oil facilities were struck and burned outside Tehran. Military installations across the country were targeted in successive waves. The assassination of Khamenei was followed by the killing of multiple senior military and political figures. Iran's air defences were systematically degraded. The official death toll from the first weeks exceeded 2,076 Iranians killed, with over 1,300 of those civilians according to international monitoring. The United States lost 13 military personnel. Twenty-six people were killed in Israel by Iranian counterstrikes.

Iran's response was not the collapse that the Roaring Lion planners had anticipated. The regime did not fall. The Iranian government, facing an unprecedented decapitation of its leadership, replaced Ali Khamenei with his son Mojtaba Khamenei and continued operating, if in reduced and disrupted capacity. Rather than producing the decisive military victory and political transformation that Netanyahu had argued for decades the right strike could achieve, the operation entered a grinding phase in which Iran struck back daily — hitting American military bases in the region, targeting Gulf states that hosted US forces, striking commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf, and eventually moving to close the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which approximately 20 percent of the world's oil and natural gas passes.

The Hormuz closure was Iran's most economically devastating response. Global oil prices spiked immediately. Gasoline prices in the United States surged in ways that generated significant domestic political pressure on the Trump administration from its own conservative base, a development that accelerated the administration's search for a ceasefire framework before the economic consequences compounded further. By early April 2026, it was the Hormuz question, more than any calculation about Iranian nuclear capability or regional stability, that was driving the ceasefire timeline.

April 7: The Ceasefire — Its Terms, Its Tensions, and Its Fragility

On April 7, 2026, with Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir serving as the critical intermediary channel between Washington and Tehran, President Trump announced that the United States would delay its planned bombing campaign against Iran for two weeks, subject to Iran agreeing to the complete, immediate, and safe opening of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump said the delay came at the direct request of the Pakistani leaders, who had asked him to "hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran." He had, by his own account, been one hour away from ordering an attack when the Pakistani intervention arrived.

Netanyahu's office released a statement confirming Israeli support for the decision, with the significant qualifier that the ceasefire did not apply to Lebanon — meaning Israeli military operations against Hezbollah would continue regardless of the US-Iran pause. The Israeli Air Force had launched what it described as its "largest attack across Lebanon" on the same day, striking approximately 100 command centres and military infrastructure across Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, and southern Lebanon.

The ceasefire's terms were immediately contested in their practical implementation. Within days of the announcement, Iran moved to assert control over Strait of Hormuz passage in ways that the United States characterised as violations of the spirit and letter of the agreement. Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval units began requiring commercial vessels to coordinate their passage with IRGC authorities, a claim of jurisdictional control over international waters that the United States explicitly rejected. Trump posted on social media that Iran was doing a "very poor job" of allowing oil to flow and that its behaviour was "not the agreement we have." An Israeli intelligence official told Fox News that Iran was demanding fees from ships transiting the waterway and that the strait was "effectively under full Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps control."

On April 13, the United States began a naval blockade of Iranian ports — an escalation that occurred during the ceasefire period itself and that signalled the administration's unwillingness to allow Iran to monetise its Hormuz leverage even while combat operations were paused. By April 23, Trump announced a three-week extension of the ceasefire, saying he saw "a great chance" that Lebanon and Israel might reach a peace deal and indicating continued diplomatic activity.

The Iran Deal Fault Line: Where Trump and Netanyahu Diverge

The most consequential and actively developing dimension of the Trump-Netanyahu relationship in May 2026 is the growing divergence between their positions on what an acceptable Iran agreement would look like — a divergence that the Times of Israel's reporting on May 20 crystallised with unusual clarity.

Trump's evident strategic priority is to achieve a deal that opens the Strait of Hormuz and formalises some version of the ceasefire, producing an outcome he can characterise as a victory on the economic and regional stability questions that have generated the most immediate domestic political pressure. He has stated publicly that he is "in no hurry" to reach an agreement but that opening the strait would happen immediately under any acceptable deal. A source with knowledge of the matter told the Jerusalem Post on Wednesday that there has been progress in talks with Iran on a "memorandum of understanding and principles" that would lay the groundwork for full negotiations — a development suggesting the diplomatic track is more advanced than the public posture of military readiness implies.

Netanyahu's position is more maximalist. His public declarations throughout the war have maintained that Israel's objectives include the destruction of Iran's nuclear programme, the elimination of Iran's ability to threaten Israel through proxies or direct action, and ultimately some form of regime transformation that produces a government in Tehran that does not view Israel's destruction as a strategic objective. A deal that primarily opens the Strait of Hormuz without resolving the nuclear question, without dismantling Iran's missile infrastructure, and without addressing the reconstitution of proxy forces along Israel's borders is, from Netanyahu's perspective, not a deal at all — it is a strategic retreat that leaves Iran intact to rebuild and resume. The report that Netanyahu "balked" at the new deal framework that Trump's team was exploring is, in this context, entirely consistent with the strategic logic Netanyahu has applied to Iran negotiations for thirty years.

The phone call between Trump and Netanyahu on Sunday, May 17 — the day Trump returned from his China trip — illustrated both the intimacy and the tension of the relationship. Netanyahu convened top aides and ministers for a security discussion immediately after. He noted publicly that Xi Jinping had offered to help open the Strait of Hormuz and had pledged not to send military equipment to aid Iran. These were diplomatic signals from China that Netanyahu was threading into the ongoing strategic calculation about whether the ceasefire diplomacy was producing a genuine outcome or merely buying Iran time to reconstitute. And on Wednesday, May 20, after Trump's "he'll do whatever I want" comment, the Axios report citing sources close to both men used the phrase that has now entered the diplomatic lexicon of this war: "Bibi's hair was on fire" during the call over Iran ceasefire talks.

What "He'll Do Whatever I Want" Actually Means

Trump's statement that Netanyahu will do "whatever I want" deserves careful analysis because it operates on multiple levels simultaneously, each of which tells a different part of the Trump-Netanyahu story.

At the most literal level, the statement reflects a genuine power asymmetry that has always characterised the US-Israel relationship in spite of its rhetoric of partnership between equals. Israel depends on the United States for military hardware, diplomatic cover at the United Nations, intelligence sharing, and the kind of direct operational support that Operation Roaring Lion involved at an unprecedented scale. An Israel facing Iran without active American support is, as one analyst quoted by Al Jazeera noted, "not a scenario that they want to be in." Trump is articulating, with his characteristic bluntness, a leverage reality that more diplomatically careful American presidents have always understood but rarely stated openly.

At a second level, the statement is a public signal to Iran that no daylight between the US and Israel should be expected on the question of whether a military option remains on the table. Trump said on Tuesday, May 19, that he had considered ordering a military strike on Iranian power plants and infrastructure and cancelled it "one hour away from execution" at the request of Gulf allies seeking one more chance for diplomacy. His subsequent public confirmation that Netanyahu will comply with whatever decision he makes regarding military action is a communication to Tehran that the pause is conditional and presidential rather than structural or permanent.

At a third level, the statement is about Trump himself and the way he conceptualises his relationships with foreign leaders generally. It is consistent with a broader pattern of Trump describing allied leaders as subordinate to his will rather than as independent agents making their own sovereign decisions — a rhetorical style that generates significant diplomatic friction in most relationships and appears to generate significantly less in his relationship with Netanyahu, whose practical need for Trump's support and whose genuine ideological alignment with Trump on the Iran question makes the framing, if not precisely accurate, at least not entirely wrong.

The apparent contradiction between "he'll do whatever I want" and the simultaneous reporting that Netanyahu "balked" at the Iran deal framework is best understood not as a contradiction but as a description of a negotiation in progress. Netanyahu is pushing back in private on a deal framework he finds insufficient. Trump is publicly asserting that the final decision is his and that Netanyahu will ultimately accept it. Both things can be simultaneously true. The outcome — whether the deal that emerges reflects Trump's more limited Hormuz-and-ceasefire objectives or Netanyahu's more maximalist nuclear-and-regime-change objectives — will reveal which man's characterisation of the relationship was more accurate.

Gaza, Lebanon, and the Parallel Crises Running Alongside the Iran War

The Iran war has not paused the other active dimensions of the Middle East crisis that preceded it. Gaza continues to be a central point of international controversy and internal Israeli political pressure. The ceasefire that Trump had brokered for Gaza — described as a 20-point plan that Netanyahu eventually accepted — has been characterised by most observers as a fragile pause rather than a genuine resolution, with the fundamental questions of the enclave's political future, the status of remaining hostages, and the humanitarian situation for nearly two million Palestinians unaddressed by its terms.

On Wednesday, May 20, Israeli forces boarded the last of the flotilla boats that had been attempting to challenge Israel's blockade of Gaza, the latest action in a pattern of interdictions aimed at maintaining control over what enters and exits the territory. The UN and multiple international bodies continue to document severe humanitarian conditions inside Gaza. The political weight of these conditions in international capitals — including in Washington, where progressive Democratic opposition to US support for Israeli military operations has grown more organised and vocal throughout the war — has not translated into a change in American policy posture, but it has generated domestic political costs for the administration that compound the economic pressures from the Hormuz closure.

In Lebanon, the ceasefire that Trump announced on April 23 and extended through late May has been the subject of separate but connected diplomacy. Netanyahu authorised direct negotiations with Lebanon aimed at disarming Hezbollah and exploring the possibility of normalising relations between the two countries — a development that would, if it produced a genuine agreement, represent one of the most structurally significant outcomes of the entire Roaring Lion campaign. Lebanon's government has been attempting to limit Hezbollah's military activities since the earlier Israel-Hezbollah conflict, and the combination of Israeli military pressure and Trump's diplomatic engagement has created an opening that did not previously exist. Whether the Lebanese government can translate political willingness into actual disarmament of Hezbollah against the organisation's own determination to remain armed is a question whose answer will unfold over months rather than days.

Netanyahu's Domestic Situation: War as Political Context

Any comprehensive account of Netanyahu's current relationship with Trump must include the domestic Israeli political context in which he is operating, because that context shapes his objectives and his flexibility in ways that are inseparable from the diplomatic negotiations occurring at the international level.

Netanyahu's governing coalition was, before the war, facing serious polling deficits. His coalition was projected to win between 49 and 52 Knesset seats in elections scheduled for October 2026, compared to 57 or 58 seats for the opposition. The war with Iran changed the political calculus in ways that leaders under domestic political pressure have historically relied on military conflict to achieve — not simply as a cynical distraction, but as a genuine recalibration of the political landscape around security questions where Netanyahu's credentials and positioning are strongest.

The Knesset voted on May 20 — the same day Trump made his "whatever I want" statement — in a preliminary vote to dissolve the parliament, with 110 members voting in favour. Early elections appeared imminent as of Wednesday. Netanyahu's political survival, which has depended throughout his career on maintaining a coalition between Likud and the more extreme right-wing parties whose leaders include Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, requires him to hold those coalition partners' support on the question of Iran — and both Smotrich and Ben Gvir have been consistently more hawkish on Iran than any deal that merely opens the Strait of Hormuz would satisfy.

The "hair on fire" characterisation of Netanyahu's reaction to the proposed Iran deal framework is thus not simply about Netanyahu's strategic judgment regarding Iran's nuclear threat. It is also about the domestic political consequences of appearing to accept a deal that his far-right coalition partners will immediately characterise as falling short of the war's stated objectives. Netanyahu needs an outcome that he can present as a genuine victory — ideally involving credible restrictions on Iran's nuclear programme and dismantlement of its regional proxy infrastructure — rather than a ceasefire that stabilises the Strait of Hormuz and leaves Iran's fundamental capability intact.

The Global Dimension: China, Russia, Xi's Offer, and Saudi Arabia's Calculations

The Trump-Netanyahu story in May 2026 is not a bilateral story. It sits at the intersection of a global realignment whose contours are actively shifting around the Iran war and its diplomatic aftermath.

China and Russia issued a joint statement on May 20 condemning the US-Israeli operations against Iran and calling for a "comprehensive ceasefire," with Xi Jinping telling Putin that "further hostilities would be inadvisable." Xi's offer, which Netanyahu mentioned publicly after their Sunday phone call, to help open the Strait of Hormuz is a significant piece of great-power diplomacy: China imports enormous volumes of oil through the strait, and its interest in resolving the closure is commercial and strategic simultaneously. Xi also pledged not to send military equipment to aid Iran — a commitment that, if kept, removes a potential escalatory scenario in which Chinese hardware finds its way into Iranian hands during the conflict. Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Russia was ready to "provide all possible assistance in resolving this conflict."

Saudi Arabia's position has been the most strategically nuanced of the regional powers. The Saudi Foreign Minister praised Trump's decision to pause the planned strikes on Iranian infrastructure in the interest of diplomacy — a signal that the kingdom, which has its own existential concerns about Iranian ambitions in the Gulf and its own interest in Hormuz remaining open, was relieved by the ceasefire while simultaneously remaining wary of a deal that leaves Iran capable of threatening Gulf shipping and energy infrastructure. Saudi Arabia's continued relevance to any permanent resolution of the conflict — its potential role in a post-war regional architecture, and the Abraham Accords-adjacent normalisation process that Trump has been pursuing — makes Riyadh a silent but significant participant in the outcome of the Trump-Netanyahu-Iran diplomatic triangle.

The IRGC's assertion on Wednesday that 26 commercial vessels had passed through the Strait of Hormuz "in coordination" with Iranian naval authorities — essentially claiming the right to supervise international shipping in what Iran is now designating as a "controlled maritime zone" — was the most recent Iranian assertion of continued leverage over the waterway even under the nominal ceasefire. Iran's Persian Gulf Strait Authority simultaneously published a map defining its claimed "controlled maritime zone" from the coast of Iran to the UAE. The United States has not accepted this Iranian jurisdictional claim. Its naval blockade of Iranian ports continues. The gap between the ceasefire's nominal existence and the operational reality of continued Iranian assertion over Hormuz transit defines the most immediate fault line in whatever negotiations are now underway.

The Unanswered Questions That Define the Outcome

As of May 21, 2026, the trajectory of the Trump-Netanyahu relationship and the war it initiated is defined by a set of questions whose answers will determine whether the ceasefire consolidates into something durable or fractures into resumed conflict.

The most immediate is whether the "memorandum of understanding and principles" reported by the Jerusalem Post as being in development with Iran will produce terms that both Trump and Netanyahu can accept. Trump's stated position — open the Strait, extend the ceasefire, no hurry — suggests he is willing to accept a framework that does not fully resolve the nuclear question. Netanyahu's "balking," as reported, suggests he is not. The private negotiation between the two leaders about what their joint bottom line will be is the central diplomatic drama of the moment.

The second is whether Netanyahu's domestic political situation — facing early elections, dependent on far-right coalition partners, and operating in a country that has simultaneously absorbed the costs of war and generated real debate about whether Roaring Lion's objectives were achievable — gives him the room to accept a deal even if Trump presents one. Or whether the political incentives push him toward either a continued military campaign or a maximalist negotiating position that makes deal-closure impossible.

The third is whether Iran's new leadership under Mojtaba Khamenei, operating in a country whose military infrastructure has been severely degraded but whose government has not collapsed, can produce a negotiating posture that moves beyond the current Hormuz leverage play into something that addresses the nuclear questions that are central to both Israel's security calculus and, at least rhetorically, the United States' stated objectives for the war.

Trump said on Wednesday that he was giving the diplomatic track "one shot." That framing — one shot, no hurry, Netanyahu will do whatever I want — is the public posture of an administration that believes it holds the leverage. Whether that belief is accurate, and whether the "one shot" of diplomacy produces a sustainable outcome or merely prolongs a fragile ceasefire until the next escalation, is the defining geopolitical question of this moment. The answer will not come from a single phone call or a single press statement. It will come from the cumulative decisions that two leaders — one publicly declaring the relationship subordinate to his will, one privately pushing back on terms he finds insufficient — make in the weeks ahead about a war they started together and have not yet agreed on how to end.

Sources

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