Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu clashed over whether to resume military strikes against Iran during an overnight phone call that Israel's Channel 12 described as "lengthy and dramatic," according to the Daily Mail. The call laid bare a growing rift between the two leaders over the path forward in a war that has already killed Iran's supreme leader, shut down a critical global oil chokepoint, and failed to produce the regime change that Israel's prime minister once promised.
Netanyahu wants to go back to bombing. Trump wants a deal. And behind that disagreement sits a now-exposed plan, reported by the New York Times, to install former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a post-war leader in Tehran. That plan collapsed on day one of the conflict.
The divide matters because the war's consequences are already hitting American consumers. The Strait of Hormuz, which carries roughly one-fifth of the world's oil, has been shut for months. Gas prices and consumer costs in the United States have climbed as a result. And the man Israel and the United States hoped could stabilize a post-Khamenei Iran, Ahmadinejad, hasn't been seen since an Israeli strike on his Tehran home left him wounded and his bodyguards dead.
The fault line in the Trump-Netanyahu relationship is now sharp and specific. Netanyahu increasingly doubts that further negotiations with Tehran will produce a peace deal. He wants to resume military strikes.
Trump, by contrast, wants to push harder for an agreement requiring Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program before any return to war. The president has framed the war's objectives narrowly: eliminating Tehran's nuclear capabilities, seizing its uranium enrichment stockpile, and dismantling the regime's ballistic missiles.
That framing puts Trump squarely at odds with the broader ambitions Netanyahu laid out in a private February 11 briefing, during which the Israeli leader assured Trump the war could topple Tehran's leadership entirely.
Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine later told the president that Israel had "oversold" that assessment. The word choice is telling.
The New York Times revealed that Israel, with Trump's approval, entered the war with what the paper called an "audacious" plan: free Ahmadinejad from house arrest in Tehran and install him as Iran's new leader after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was eliminated in the opening strikes.
Khamenei was indeed killed at his Tehran compound. A meeting of senior Iranian officials was wiped out in the same wave of attacks. But the succession plan fell apart immediately. An Israeli strike on Ahmadinejad's home, intended to liberate him, instead wounded the former president and destroyed a security outpost near his residence. Members of the Revolutionary Guard Corps who had been both protecting and detaining Ahmadinejad were killed.
Days later, news outlets reported Ahmadinejad had survived, but he has not been seen since. A close associate said Ahmadinejad initially believed the strike was an attempt to free him and that Washington viewed him as capable of leading Iran. But the Times reported he eventually became "disillusioned" with the regime-change plan and cut off communication with Western intelligence.
The irony is considerable. Ahmadinejad, the man who during his 2005-to-2013 presidency called to "wipe Israel off the map," backed Tehran's nuclear program, and violently crushed civilian dissent, was the chosen vessel for a new, supposedly cooperative Iran. The plan's architects modeled it on what happened in Venezuela, where Delcy Rodriguez took power after U.S. forces seized Nicolas Maduro and has since worked closely with the Trump administration.
Iran is not Venezuela. And Ahmadinejad is not Rodriguez.
The New York Times previously reported that Trump's cabinet warned him shortly before launching the war that killing Khamenei would not spark regime change. CIA Director John Ratcliffe called the idea "farcical." Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed it as "bulls***."
Those warnings went unheeded, or at least did not prevent the opening strikes from targeting Khamenei directly. Now, with the supreme leader dead and no viable successor aligned with American interests, the war grinds forward without a clear political endgame.
Some of the Iranian officials killed in the Israeli strikes had been identified by the White House as more willing to negotiate with the United States than the hardline regime. Their deaths further narrowed the already thin roster of potential diplomatic partners in Tehran.
A U.S. official involved in the Iran negotiations told the Daily Mail that the failed Ahmadinejad plan only reinforced the problem.
"The failed plans for Ahmadinejad just further proves that there is no good leader within the current ranks of their government. There is no Delcy Rodriguez in Iran."
While the diplomatic and military questions remain unresolved, the economic damage is already real. The Strait of Hormuz closure has disrupted global oil flows for months. An oil tanker burned after being hit by an Iranian strike at the Khor al-Zubair port near Basra, Iraq, late Wednesday, March 11, a reminder that the war's reach extends well beyond Iranian borders.
American voters watching grocery bills and gas prices climb have a direct stake in whether this conflict ends at the negotiating table or escalates further. That tension, between the cost of continued war and the risk of a bad deal, is exactly what made the Trump-Netanyahu call so contentious.
The political dynamics at home add another layer. As Americans line up for affordable groceries amid rising prices, the administration faces pressure to deliver results that justify the economic disruption the war has caused.
Netanyahu's position is straightforward, if reckless in its implications: diplomacy has failed, so resume strikes. Trump's position is more cautious, force Iran to the table, extract a nuclear deal, and avoid an open-ended military commitment with no political resolution in sight.
The problem is that the war has already eliminated the very people who might have made a deal possible. Khamenei is dead. The senior officials who might have negotiated are dead. Ahmadinejad is wounded, missing, and disillusioned. The Revolutionary Guard Corps, battered but not broken, has no obvious incentive to cooperate with the country that helped kill its leadership.
General Caine's blunt assessment, that Israel "oversold" the war's potential, now looks like the most honest sentence anyone in Washington has uttered about this conflict. Ratcliffe and Rubio saw it coming, too. Their warnings were clear, even profane. They were also ignored.
Trump is right to resist Netanyahu's push for more strikes without a political strategy. But the harder question, who in Tehran is left to negotiate with, has no good answer. The war's architects destroyed the regime without building anything to replace it.
When you kill everyone who might sign a peace deal, don't be surprised when nobody shows up to the table.
