Analysis | TACO time? Israel is bracing itself to fight Iran again — but the decision is Trump’s, by Ben Sales

In a podcast appearance last month, historian Adam Tooze described how the Chinese government assigned a state think tank with the task of tracking US President Donald Trump on a daily basis to understand him — then gave up early in his current term.

Instead, Tooze told the New York Times podcast, the Chinese have resorted to “these really crude, psychologizing rules of thumb about what makes him tick. So far, it’s kind of worked well for them.”

Over the past few weeks, Israel has turned into one big version of that Chinese think tank. The entire country is consumed with one question: Will Trump attack Iran, or won’t he?

It’s a fixed feature on the nightly newscasts. It’s become the prime consideration in planning, or deciding whether to cancel, family vacations. In Tel Aviv, where talking about real estate is a constant, friends banter over whether they have a basement shelter, a reinforced room in their apartment — or contingency plans to abscond to relatives in the suburbs whose house is more accommodating during a potential regional war.

This isn’t the first time such talk has swept across Israel. Predicting whether or not there’s going to be a war is something of a pastime. The difference here is that the question doesn’t turn on our own government, or even on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Instead, the answer depends on the most powerful, and unpredictable, man in the world.

So while other things are going on in the news here — it is, after all, an election year in the aftermath of a war, with the prime minister on trial — the main story in Israel hinges on reading Donald Trump.

That’s even more the case as Netanyahu heads to Washington, DC, for a flash meeting with the US president, and as the American military builds up its forces in the Middle East and sends its envoys to negotiate with the Iranians in Oman.

Israelis already know what Netanyahu will say; he has communicated that he’ll call for curbs on Iran’s ballistic missile program and its support for proxy terror groups. The question is how Trump will react.

Will this be like their February 2025 meeting, in which Trump advocated the permanent removal of Gaza’s population alongside a US takeover of the Strip? Those things haven’t happened, but they did signal that Trump was taking a resolutely pro-Israel position on the matter. And eight months later, a ceasefire came into effect that freed all of the hostages held in Gaza and formally installed Trump at the head of a body overseeing the territory.

Or will this be like the April 2025 meeting, in which Trump, in public, shot down the idea of reducing tariffs on Israel, and surprised listeners by announcing that the US was entering negotiations with Iran?

Or will it be like June, when Trump first pooh-poohed the possibility of conflict, then ordered his military to attack Iranian nuclear facilities at the end of the 12-day Israel-Iran war?

In facing these questions, Israel is far from alone. The whole world, US allies and adversaries alike, is contending with a Trump administration that appears to be in thrall to the whims of its leader. He’s had so many about-faces — on tariffs as well as his threats to annex Greenland — that a new term has entered the political lexicon: TACO, short for Trump Always Chickens Out.

Except that he doesn’t, always. He didn’t “chicken out” when he captured the president of Venezuela in a nighttime raid last month. Nor did he do so when he bombed Iran last year.

But the constant uncertainty is fraying international relations. At the recent conference in Davos, where the world’s political and business elite gathered, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a remarkable address in which he said the world was enduring a “rupture” in which “American hegemony” can no longer be trusted to safeguard the public good.

“We know the old order is not coming back,” he said. “We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just.”

Is that true for Israel? Like Canada, Israel has recently announced steps to be more self-sufficient. Netanyahu declared last year, controversially, that in the face of growing international hostility, the country must become a “super-Sparta,” at least when it comes to arms production. He recently told the Economist that within a decade, he’d like to wean Israel off of American military aid, previously a bedrock of the country’s defense strategy.

It would seem that those steps are a response to Israel’s declining popularity in the US. But at the same time, Netanyahu has thrown his lot in with Trump, far more than he did with former presidents Joe Biden or Barack Obama, both Democrats. And Netanyahu might say that the bet has paid off handsomely.

In Trump’s first term, Israel got a US embassy in Jerusalem, American recognition of Israel’s annexation of the Golan, and the Abraham Accords. So far in Trump’s second term, the returns have been similarly lavish: All of the hostages are back in Israel, and American B-2 bombers struck Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz.

But that’s come at a cost: Trump, not Israel, is calling the shots in Gaza, portending a future in which Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, and maybe nations adversarial to Israel like Turkey and Qatar, wield influence and control. On the future of the West Bank, Israel has also bowed to Trump, who has explicitly ruled out annexation even though it’s exactly what some senior members of Israel’s government want.

Now, Israel appears to be deferring to Trump on what has long been Netanyahu’s top priority: countering Iran. That could work to Israel’s advantage, depending on the goals of a strike, given that American firepower can do a lot more than Israel’s can.

But it also means that Israel’s immediate future and, to an extent, its position in the region have been subcontracted to a US president who has embraced unpredictability. When it comes to Iran, will he or won’t he? Will this be a case of TACO, or Maduro?

Iran, for its part, has not been ambiguous. The regime has made clear, through a billboard and multiple declarations, that it will strike Israel if the US attacks. And the regime, on the heels of its brutal repression of anti-government protests, could also decide to attack first.

For Israelis, the stakes are high: Any American operation will mean the second Iran war in less than eight months. A US decision to hold its fire would also be significant, signaling a retreat from Trump’s repeated threats, and perhaps even a new deal on Tehran’s nuclear program.

For now, all Israelis can do is sit tight and wait for Trump.

-Culled from Times of Israel (ToI)