Netanyahu’s 2018 Tehran gamble: The roots of the US bombing of Iran - opinion

On a cold, dark night in January 2018, Mossad agents broke into a warehouse on the outskirts of Tehran and pulled off one of the most audacious intelligence operations in modern history.

Inside were rows of locked safes filled with Iran’s most guarded nuclear secrets – plans, blueprints, photos, even personnel rosters. The agents cut through massive steel doors with blowtorches heated to 3,600° C, loaded half a ton of documents and CDs into a truck, and slipped back across the border.

However the true significance of the Tehran archive heist wasn’t just in what it uncovered. It was in what Israel chose to do with it.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t keep the intelligence under wraps, as most spy services would, discreetly sharing it with allies. He unveiled it on live television just three months later, in a dramatic presentation aimed less at Iran than at one man: US President Donald J. Trump.

Pulling back a black curtain to reveal rows of folders and discs, Netanyahu’s message was simple: “Iran lied.” The 2015 nuclear deal had been built on a falsehood. Iran had never abandoned its nuclear weapons ambitions – only shelved them while waiting for international pressure to fade.

In May 2018, just three weeks after Netanyahu’s press conference, Trump announced the US withdrawal from the nuclear deal.

At the time, critics derided the move as reckless. They argued it would fracture the P5+1 coalition and allow Iran to accelerate its enrichment unchecked. Others warned that Netanyahu’s gamble – going public with the archive, pushing Trump to act, and daring Iran to escalate – might backfire, even end in war.

Seven years later, with American bombs falling on Iranian soil, those critics may feel validated. But so, too, might Netanyahu and those who believed that confrontation was always inevitable.

In the years since the archive’s reveal, the international approach to Iran has shifted slowly but decisively. For decades, Israel warned that Iran was not merely a regional menace but a nuclear-armed threshold state in waiting. That message was often dismissed as alarmist or politically motivated.

Israel’s shadow war against Iran has long been visible only in glimpses – mysterious explosions, assassinated scientists, cyberattacks on enrichment plants. The Tehran archive was something different: a strategic trigger that reframed the global debate. It offered not only intelligence, but narrative clarity. It enabled Israel to argue – credibly – that Iran had never come clean and never intended to.

For Trump, that was enough. He withdrew from the deal, reimposed sanctions, and embraced a policy of maximum pressure. But even after his departure, the archive’s influence lingered. The Biden administration entered office seeking a return to diplomacy.

Iran’s escalating enrichment, its intransigence at the negotiating table, and its growing regional aggression made that impossible. Through it all, the archive remained in the background: a reminder not only of Iran’s past deception, but of the fragility of negotiated frameworks.

The day after the October 7, 2023, massacre – which we now know was supported and financed by Iran, even if it did not know the exact timing – Netanyahu declared that Israel would change the Middle East. Whether that statement was foresight or rhetoric is unclear. Still, it set in motion a chain of events that eventually led to Israel’s June 13 strike on Iranian territory.

Since October 2023, Israel has crippled Hamas militarily, decapitated the leadership of its most powerful proxy, Hezbollah, and weakened the group to the point that it has not retaliated against Israeli strikes on its Iranian sponsors. Syria was the next domino to fall when the Assad regime collapsed in late 2024. Israel decimated the remnants of the Syrian army, opening an aerial corridor to the Iranian border.

Israel’s operation marked a turning point in what has long been a largely undeclared war. Its doctrine – formed over two decades of clandestine struggle, not just under Netanyahu, but also under other governments led by Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, and Naftali Bennett – holds that deterrence does not stem from diplomatic promises with sunset clauses, but from persistent disruption, visible costs, and unmistakable resolve.

Yet, this doctrine has not been without critics – even within Israel’s security establishment. Many feared that publicizing the archive would politicize intelligence, damage relations with Europe, or lock Israel into confrontation. When Trump withdrew from the deal, others worried that Israel had tethered itself too tightly to a volatile American presidency.

These were not naive concerns. The post-2018 period has been volatile. Iran has expanded enrichment. Regional tensions have spiked. The risk of escalation remains dangerously high.

We cannot yet say whether Netanyahu will go down in history as an Ahab-like figure plunging the region into endless conflict as his critics would argue, or whether we will witness the realization of the vision of an Iran liberated from the grip of its Islamic regime and a Middle East reshaped by commerce, pragmatism, and new alliances.

Nonetheless, Netanyahu’s wager has now shaped the response of not one, but two US administrations. Whether this marks a long-overdue strategic alignment or merely a reactive shift under fire, it nonetheless underscores the extent to which Washington has adopted core elements of Israel’s doctrine: that Iran’s nuclear ambitions cannot be managed indefinitely through diplomacy alone.

The strategic bet Israel placed in 2018 has helped shape today’s reality, very much including American warplanes targeting the heart of Iran’s nuclear program.

With all that said – and with a ceasefire now announced on vague terms by an unpredictable Trump – Israel will need to remain vigilant and prepared to preserve its gains, through a continuation of the shadow war and overt military action when necessary, for as long as the Islamic Republic remains in power.