How Donald Trump echoed Netanyahu warning by reframing Iran war

jpost.com · Feb 27, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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ByHERB KEINONFEBRUARY 27, 2026 13:57On March 3, 2015, a day before Purim, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood at the podium in the neoclassical, walnut-paneled House Chamber and delivered a speech against an impending nuclear deal with Iran to a special joint session of Congress. Some 58 Democratic senators and congressmen boycotted the speech.On Tuesday night, February 24, a week before Purim, US President Donald Trump stood at that same podium, in that same hall, and delivered an hour-and-47-minute State of the Union address, some three minutes of which were devoted to Iran. A few dozen Democratic representatives also boycotted his speech.But the similarities did not end with the setting, the boycotts, or that Iran was one of the topics. What was striking - and strategically significant - was how both leaders framed the Iranian problem. Eleven years apart, Trump’s words Tuesday night echoed the warnings Netanyahu delivered in 2015. The difference was not in the language; it was in the speaker.“The foremost sponsor of global terrorism could be weeks away from having enough enriched uranium for an entire arsenal of nuclear weapons, and this with full international legitimacy,” Netanyahu warned 11 years ago.Trump said this on Tuesday: “But one thing is certain: I will never allow the world’s number one sponsor of terror, which they are by far, to have a nuclear weapon. Can’t let that happen.”Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers a speech during the funeral of Israeli hostage Ran Gvili, whose remains were finally brought back to Israel on January 26, in the southern town of Meitar on January 28, 2026. (credit: ILIA YEFIMOVICH / AFP via Getty Images)Netanyahu in 2015 cautioned that if Iran’s intercontinental ballistic missile program were excluded from a deal - as Tehran insisted - “Iran could have the means to deliver that nuclear arsenal to the far-reaching corners of the earth, including to every part of the United States.”Three nights ago, Trump declared: “They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.”Strikingly similar rhetoricThe similarity is unmistakable. The Trump administration is now saying - almost verbatim - what Netanyahu said in June during Israel’s airstrikes on Iran: “We will not let the world’s most dangerous regime get the world’s most dangerous weapons.”It is also reiterating what Israel has argued for years - often to skeptical audiences - that Iran’s ambitions are not confined to Israel, the “small Satan,” but extend to the “Great Satan” as well, with ballistic missiles intended to reach far beyond the Middle East.Netanyahu made this broader argument explicitly in 2015. Iran’s regime, he told Congress, “is not merely a Jewish problem, any more than the Nazi regime was merely a Jewish problem. The six million Jews murdered by the Nazis were but a fraction of the 60 million people killed in World War II. So, too, Iran’s regime poses a grave threat not only to Israel but also to the peace of the entire world.”For years, that message struggled to resonate.If the rhetoric now sounds familiar to Israeli ears, that is because it is. What has changed is not Israel’s warning. What has changed is an appreciation in Washington of Iran’s malign designs and destabilizing impact.Part of the disconnect between Israel and the US over Iran during the Obama years stemmed from geography and perception.Both countries wanted to keep Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. But for Israel, the issue was existential and immediate, shaped by proximity to the Islamic Republic and the range of its missiles. For Washington, separated by thousands of miles, there was less urgency. The threat was real, but far away. It did not feel imminent.Israel’s core message - this is your problem as much as ours - often failed to take root in Washington or in European capitals. Trump’s speech suggests that this calculus may be changing. When an American president frames Iran’s nuclear and missile programs as a direct threat to the US - not simply as a regional instability issue, not merely as a concern of an ally but as a danger to American cities and American forces - the equation shifts.The context of shifting US positions on IranThis change matters, and it did not happen in a vacuum. This shift was driven over the past two years by a series of developments that could not be ignored.Iran’s accelerated march toward nuclear threshold status; its obsession with ballistic missile production; its increasingly brazen use of the proxies it has cultivated across the region; the chaos the Houthis created for international shipping - directly affecting American and global economic interests; and the regime’s brutal repression at home, including what Trump noted in his speech was the regime’s recent killing of 32,000 protesters.Taken together, these developments illustrated that Iran was not merely a theoretical threat in Israel’s mind but an active destabilizing force with global consequences.For years, each of these issues was viewed in Washington as troubling but containable. They were also compartmentalized. The nuclear file was treated separately from the ballistic missile file. The missile issue was detached from the proxy network. Human rights abuses were separate from everything else. Each was serious. None, on its own, appeared urgent enough to redefine American policy.Now, however, they have fused into a single, coherent challenge that the Trump administration recognizes now poses a genuine and immediate danger to US interests.Geography used to buffer urgency. Vast expanses of ocean and land that separate the US from Iran create psychological as well as physical distance. But missiles compress distance. So does intelligence about breakout timelines. So do repeated proxy attacks on American forces in the region. When US troops come under fire from Iranian-backed militias - or when Iran threatens to fire on them - the issue no longer feels distant.Trump, in his relatively brief comments on Iran during his State of the Union speech, reflected this urgency. And what is important is that it is being articulated by the American president. The American public is now hearing its president present a possible attack on Iran not as a favor to Israel, but as a matter of American national security. And that distinction is critical.The last thing Israel needs - as the American public grapples with the possibility that US soldiers could be sent into harm’s way - is the perception that such action would be undertaken primarily to defend Israel. That narrative is already being promoted at the political fringes, on both the extreme Left and the far Right.Fringe, right and left, oppose US military action in IranOn the far Left, the virulently anti-Israel Mondoweiss website ran an article on Saturday claiming that “as Donald Trump assembles an overwhelming US military armada in the Middle East, the American media continues to avoid explaining that Israel has regularly tried to instigate the US into a war against Iran for decades.” The article was bluntly titled: “Netanyahu and Israel are provoking the US into attacking Iran - and the media continues to ignore it.”On the far Right, Tucker Carlson struck a similar chord in an interview with Saudi television the same day. “How is it in America’s interest to decapitate the government of Iran on behalf of Israel?” he asked. “Not to rebuild a new Iran, but just to kind of kill the people in charge and hope something better happens. To create chaos in Iran, as we have done at Israel’s behest in so many countries in the region.”Granted, these voices are not driving policy. But arguments on the margins have a way of migrating inward. The danger is not that such claims dominate the debate today, but that they seep gradually into mainstream discourse.That is why Trump’s framing in the State of the Union was significant. By defining Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities as an American threat - explicitly and without reference to Israel - he preemptively undercuts the claim that confrontation with Tehran would be waged “on Israel’s behalf.”From Jerusalem’s vantage point, that shift is not trivial.For decades, Israeli leaders argued that a regime driven by a fanatical ideology seeking regional hegemony and nuclear capability would eventually threaten everyone.Trump is making that danger feel immediate to Americans.How Washington ultimately chooses to remove the threat - through military intervention or some kind of agreement - is what is currently playing out before the world’s anxious eyes and is what was on the negotiation table on Thursday when the two sides met again in Geneva for a third round of talks.But the last two years have clarified something fundamental for America: Iran is not a problem confined to a tiny Jewish state on the Mediterranean. It is a regime whose ambitions, capabilities, and actions reverberate far beyond the Middle East.Trump gave voice to that concern in his State of the Union address. For Jerusalem, hearing Iran defined as a direct American security threat is more than a matter of words. In the showdown with Iran, it could tilt the scales from diplomacy to the use of force.