“This is no longer the same Iran, this is no longer the same Middle East, and this is not the same Israel.” When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu uttered these words in March 2026 – during the hubristic high of the first weeks of the U.S.-Israel attack on Iran, when he still had the ear of U.S. President Donald Trump and that the overblown aims of the war, including the fall of the Iranian regime, were held in common between the two allies – he could not have envisaged how his words would be turned inside out less than 100 days later.
