Operation Epic Fury: How Netanyahu's War Got Handed to Trump — And Blew Up in Everyone's Face

A president who ran on staying out of foreign wars is now defending one that even his own base can't explain.

⚡ Bottom Line

On 28 February 2026, the US and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran — "Operation Epic Fury" — that killed Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and dragged Washington into its biggest Middle East entanglement in a generation. Five months on: the Strait of Hormuz has been shut and reopened, oil markets have whipsawed, a Pakistan-brokered ceasefire has already been tested by renewed Iranian missile fire, Iran's nuclear enrichment program is still standing in its own peace proposal, and Trump's own coalition is tearing itself apart over a war his Secretary of State admitted Israel set in motion. This is how a war sold as decisive turned into a mess nobody in Washington seems able to explain, let alone finish.

How This Started

The strikes came after talks between Washington and Tehran collapsed. Within days, Iran's Supreme Leader was dead, killed in the joint US-Israeli campaign — a scale of escalation few expected even from Trump. The administration framed it as necessary to end Iran's nuclear program for good. Netanyahu, for his part, called it a triumph.

What's harder to explain is how much of the decision-making actually belonged to Israel rather than Washington. Days into the campaign, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in the Capitol that the administration "knew that there was going to be an Israeli action" before it happened — an admission that cut against the White House's own framing of a coordinated, US-led operation. Joe Kent, who resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center in protest, went further in his resignation letter, explicitly naming Israeli influence over US decision-making as his reason for walking out — not general opposition to war, but specifically who was calling the shots.

The Netanyahu Problem

By June, the cracks were showing in public. After an Israeli strike on Beirut's southern suburbs, Iran fired a fresh volley of missiles at northern Israel — the first breach of the ceasefire since it was struck two months earlier, and one that came despite US assurances just days prior that it wouldn't happen.

According to reporting from the Times of Israel, Netanyahu had fighter jets on the runway for a major retaliatory strike when Trump personally called and told him to stand down so Washington could pursue a diplomatic off-ramp instead. Netanyahu complied, but the operation's last-minute cancellation reportedly caused what Israeli media described as considerable confusion inside the military's own high command. Around the same time, Netanyahu was separately pushing Trump to consider a "round two" campaign against Iran, arguing that Tehran would simply rebuild what had been destroyed. Trump, for his part, said he'd rather pursue a deal.

Two allies who once called each other the best friend they'd ever had were, by mid-year, visibly no longer working from the same playbook — one wanting to keep striking, the other trying to find a way out.

The Backfire

The war was supposed to be the kind of quick, decisive win Trump has always liked to claim. Instead it fractured his own coalition. Tucker Carlson called the strikes "absolutely disgusting and evil." Megyn Kelly said no one should have to die for a foreign country. Marjorie Taylor Greene — once one of Trump's most loyal allies in Congress — told Kelly she was furious, pointing to America's mounting debt and rising military casualties, and asked publicly what was going on in Trump's head. Steve Bannon joined the criticism too. Congress moved to vote on bipartisan war powers resolutions aimed at curbing the administration's ability to keep the operation running without their sign-off. Trump's response was to declare that MAGA is whoever agrees with him — telling reporters MAGA is Trump, not Carlson or Kelly. It's a neat trick, but it doesn't change the polling, and it doesn't change that a war launched to project strength instead exposed a genuine split between "America First" non-interventionists and a White House now fighting a war in the Middle East it can't clearly explain the endpoint of.

The economic cost has been just as ugly. Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz in the war's early weeks paralysed roughly a quarter of the world's seaborne oil trade, sending Brent crude and war-risk insurance premiums spiking. When a fragile two-week ceasefire was finally struck in April, oil prices plunged in relief — but even after that relief, prices stayed well above pre-war levels, and independent economic modelling estimated the fighting could cost the global economy over a trillion dollars in a single year if the ceasefire holds, and far more if it doesn't.

And here's the part that should embarrass everyone who called this a decisive victory: Iran's own peace proposal to end the war still includes keeping its uranium enrichment program — the very thing the war was supposedly fought to eliminate. Khamenei is dead. The nuclear program isn't.

Where It Actually Stands

Netanyahu claimed in late March that Israel's war goals were more than half achieved. Nobody — not Trump, not Netanyahu — has ever put a timeline on when the other half gets finished. Five months in, the ceasefire is being held together by Pakistani mediators rather than by anything resembling trust between Washington, Tehran and Jerusalem, and it's already been tested once by renewed missile fire. Oil markets remain jumpy. Trump's coalition remains split. And the two leaders who launched this together are no longer visibly rowing in the same direction.

In Fairness

The administration's defenders make one argument worth taking seriously: that whatever the costs, a nuclear-armed Iran was the far greater danger, and that removing Khamenei and degrading Iran's military infrastructure was worth the price even if it wasn't clean or quick. That's a real position, held by real people in the administration, and it deserves to be weighed rather than dismissed outright. The trouble is that even on the administration's own terms — nuclear disarmament — the result so far is Iran offering to keep enriching uranium anyway. If the war's central justification hasn't been achieved five months and over a trillion dollars later, the case that it was worth it gets harder to make, not easier.

Sources & Further Reading

• Al Jazeera — Does Trump have real leverage over Netanyahu?
• Times of Israel — Netanyahu called off major Iran strike after Trump warning
• NPR — Trump's MAGA base balks at war with Iran
• ABC News — MAGA voices warn Iran backlash will only grow
• Slate — MAGA conservatives getting angrier about the Iran war
• OK! Magazine — MAGA tensions erupt over war in Iran
• Foreign Policy — The Iran war is tearing Trump's coalition apart
• Institute for Economics and Peace — Economic impact of the Iran war
• Hargreaves Lansdown — Oil, gas prices plunge as US, Iran agree ceasefire
• Forbes — How Pakistan brokered the US-Iran ceasefire