Netanyahu went to war with Iran while relying on an America that doesn't exist anymore

 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent a large portion of his adolescence in the United States when the country was at the height of its postwar power. The young Bibi graduated in 1967 from Cheltenham High School in suburban Philadelphia (where the students are now trying to remove Netanyahu's picture from the school's alumni hall of fame).

Born in 1949, Netanyahu, in other words, is an archetypical "boomer," and as such, a true believer in the exceptional goodness of the United States and in the omnipotence of its armed forces – unsullied by defeats in Vietnam or later debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The ongoing joint U.S.-Israeli offensive in Iran is the culmination of what Netanyahu, in the first days of the war, said he had "yearned to do for 40 years." And, indeed, since he appeared on the political scene as the telegenic Israeli ambassador to the United Nations in the mid-1980s, his dream of an assault on the Islamic Republic had not waned, even as every U.S. president declined to risk American blood in such an obviously dangerous and potentially catastrophic endeavor.

That is, until Donald J. Trump decided to gamble his legacy on the regime change operation for which the Israeli prime minister had long yearned.

Netanyahu's baseline strategic assumption appears to have been that America's overwhelming military might would prove to be the essential variable – the X factor, if you will – that would all but guarantee success in Iran. But what Netanyahu failed to account for is that the United States of Donald Trump is not the United States of his postwar suburban childhood: that while America is still a superpower, if not still the globe's predominant one, it is also in the throes of debilitating decadence and decline, of which the repeated election of the reality TV mogul is a conspicuous symptom.

Israeli military officials often joke about the differences between the U.S. military's organizational culture and theirs. The Americans prepare detailed Powerpoint presentations sketching out operations step-by-step; the Israelis operate by gut and improvise on the fly. Yet there appears to be little evidence of that meticulous preparation for the current war.

If anything – judging by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's delirious, manic press conferences and the U.S. president's rambling, contradictory ruminations – it is the Americans this time who appear to be proceeding less according to a strategy and more according to, well, vibes.

The apparent lack of planning on the part of the United States evinces a historic level of incompetence, far surpassing what was once considered the legendary stupidity of George W. Bush's administration. The U.S. embarked on an operation that quickly expanded, as was predicted, into a wider regional war, yet it assembled no real regional or international coalition – in stark contrast to the vast net of alliances George H.W. Bush was able to marshal during the first Gulf War to push Saddam Hussein's forces out of Kuwait.'

Instead, Trump spent the months leading up to the Iran war threatening to seize Greenland by force, antagonizing the allies in Europe that his administration has since sought to enlist.

Obvious contingencies were either ignored or brushed away as easily solvable. Despite Iran's past threats to close the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, the Trump administration seemingly did not anticipate the possibility and is so far failing to deal with the energy crisis that now threatens to crater the global economy. Nor does the U.S. appear to have prepared any plan for the scenario in which the decapitation strikes against Iran's leadership would fail to bring down the Islamic Republic's regime beyond "keep bombing and hope for the best."

One way to understand the relationship between the Trump administration's foreign policy and those of its Republican predecessors is that it is a radicalization of tendencies that have long existed on the American right.

The baseline assumption of George W. Bush-era neoconservatism was that the system of international law and norms that U.S. power had underwritten since the end of World War II had come to impede, rather than facilitate, American geopolitical objectives. Bushism aimed to break out of that system while demonstrating that it could still galvanize a "coalition of the willing," united through consent behind American hegemony.

Trumpism – to the extent that it has a coherent logic – not only rejects working through the multilateral institutions that once defined the liberal order. It rejects any form of international cooperation not premised on total U.S. dominance, on submission to American prerogatives. That is the meaning of Trump's "America First" slogan. It is also what imbues the Trump administration's approach to the war with its hubristic, even hallucinatory quality: the belief the entire world can be bent to America's will, at gunpoint if necessary.

For all the talk of how Netanyahu pushed Trump to strike Iran, this war is America's war. Its parameters – the kind of targets that are acceptable, the means permitted to strike them with – even if often in flux, are set by the United States. The war will stop not when Netanyahu wants; it will stop when Trump has had enough, gets spooked by securities markets or loses interest.

While America, a continental empire shielded by oceans on both its sides, will be largely insulated from whatever disastrous state the Middle East will likely be in when the war does end – a wounded but defiant Islamic Republic in Iran; a new precariousness in the Gulf states, their allure punctured by drone strikes and missile impacts; a potential global recession induced by rising oil prices – Israel will not be so lucky.

In the event of the war's failure, Israel will have to live in a region in which it is increasingly seen as a threat to stability, as an expansionist power threatening the sovereignty not just of its neighbors but even those states with which it does not share a border.

Netanyahu hoped to share in the success of a joint U.S.-Israel war in Iran. But he seems not to have imagined that the world's most powerful military might fail to achieve its objectives – nor that Israel will be forced to reckon with the consequences of this failure, to bear responsibility for it, to pay the price, in a way that the United States will not, and never will.

Perhaps the West's last unreconstructed neoconservative, Netanyahu pushed for the war in Iran with the conviction that American power is virtually unlimited. He is learning, all too belatedly, that it is not.