'I Call All The Shots. He Doesn't Call The Shots'

Trump encounters someone who enjoys even more impunity than him. PLUS: Basketball City dreams of its finest hour

Edited by Sam Thielman

I JUST GOT back from San Antonio and I had a whole piece planned about the Knicks, the Finals and New York City. That is going to have to wait until after the paywall, because Israel has defied Donald Trump and bombed Iran. Its attack risks shattering the facade of a ceasefire and calls Trump's bluff on his willingness to resume his already-lost war in earnest. 

Just as importantly, the bombing reveals that Israel's extensive history of impunity and freedom of consequence from its American patron has outpaced even Trump's extensive history of impunity and freedom of consequence. Trump's humiliation in Iran was already plain, but now Israel is compounding it. "I call all the shots," Trump told the Financial Times hours before Israeli warplanes attacked Teheran. "He [Benjamin Netanyahu] doesn't call the shots." Trump, of all people, has no excuse for not anticipating Israel's defiance. Israel is acting exactly as Trump acts. Israel is what MAGA wants the United States to be.

The first substantive piece I wrote after the U.S.-Israel war against Iran began at the end of February was about how Israel's goals for Iran were not Trump's. We are seeing that divergence manifest right now. It's an enormous challenge for Trump. Both MAGA and Israel—and particularly both Trump and Netanyahu—practice the politics of dominance. Their clash was in that sense foretold. Elvis Costello has a song about this kind of thing. 

Israel has never regarded the April ceasefire in Iran—such as it is, given last week's exchanges of missile strikes—as applying to Lebanon. Iran has consistently demanded linkage. Israel has treated the Iran War, to include the formal "ceasefire" of the past two months, as an opportunity to strike deeper into Lebanon, displacing a million people, killing more than 3,600 and wounding more than 11,000. As Israel seized more and more territory in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah—never a party to a ceasefire and able to absorb the 2024 pager detonations that Israel intended as a finishing blow—counterattacked. That led to Israel bombing Beirut yesterday after a highly-publicized "ceasefire" between Israel and Lebanon that the U.S. brokered last week. 

Much about that ceasefire demanded eye-rolling. Not only was Israel continuing its offensive, but Hezbollah was, again, not a party to it, even as the ceasefire declared itself "contingent on a complete cessation of Hizbollah fire and the evacuation of all Hizbollah operatives from the South Litani Sector." (Also there was already a ceasefire declared, albeit the sort that Israel favors, where it acts unbounded and uses the declaration of one as cover for continued military aggression.) Yet the diplomatic fact of the ceasefire's existence made Israel's willingness to bomb Beirut, far to the north of the "South Litani Sector" and more importantly the capital of Lebanon, egregious. 

Looming in the background was the unclear prospect of the beginnings of a broader diplomatic settlement between Iran and the United States. Trump wants that settlement so he can climb down from the disaster he and Netanyahu unleashed on Iran specifically and the global economy broadly. He is also under domestic pressure to end his fiasco. On Wednesday, sufficient Republican defectors in the House of Representatives joined Democrats to finally pass a war-powers resolution. But Israel, as I predicted at the start of the war, is playing spoiler. 

Until now, Netanyahu has reserved his overt defiance for American leaders he wishes to humiliate and marginalize, like Barack Obama and Joe Biden, in order to promote alternatives like Trump, whom he expects will provide him greater freedom of action. Entirely unsurprisingly—unless you're Trump—Netanyahu will not tolerate inhibitions on that freedom of action. Trump loves to tell the tale of the scorpion stinging the frog who takes him across the river, to celebrate taking advantage of suckers, which he holds to be a virtue. Now Trump is the frog. How's that venom taste? 

Iran is doing the smart thing. After attacking Tel Aviv to avenge Beirut, Teheran is now signaling that it will not retaliate.