Despite strong efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump to dissuade him, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu extended his strikes from Beirut, Lebanon to mainland Iran on the 8th (local time), putting the influence of President Trump to the test. Whether President Trump can prevent a wider war and put peace talks with Iran back on track appears to depend on how much control he can exert over Netanyahu.

Earlier, on the 1st, when Netanyahu ordered a strike on southern Beirut, President Trump phoned him and, mixing in profanity, erupted in anger, saying “Are you out of your mind”. After this became public in the media, he acknowledged, “I was a bit annoyed by the fact that Netanyahu keeps fighting Lebanon.”

After the ‘profanity-laced call’ from President Trump, when Netanyahu scrapped the Beirut strike plan, some predicted that, with Israel holding a general election in October and his approval ratings continuing to slide, Netanyahu would find it hard to run counter to the wishes of President Trump. In Israel, where President Trump currently enjoys high popularity, he has served as a backer for Netanyahu, who faces judicial risks including corruption allegations.

However, despite President Trump urging restraint, Netanyahu not only resumed the Beirut attack that day but also carried out airstrikes on mainland Iran in retaliation for Iran s counteraction. President Trump expressed displeasure, saying “It was an attack without coordination with me,” and warned Israel “Do not retaliate any further,” but this was pointedly ignored.

This appears not unrelated to the fact that, after withdrawing the Beirut attack under pressure from President Trump, Netanyahu faced fierce criticism from the opposition and hard-liners within the coalition that he had “turned Israel into a vassal state of the United States.” The far-right Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli national security minister, posted on X, “Now is the time to say ‘no’ to our friend, President Trump.”

Netanyahu may also have bet that President Trump would ultimately be unable to stop him. With end-of-war talks between the United States and Iran stalled, he may have calculated that, if Israeli attacks reignite fighting, President Trump would in the end recognize that there is no option other than further escalation.

To keep Netanyahu from breaking the ceasefire and derailing end-of-war talks, some argue that President Trump needs to take concrete stepssuch as limiting military support to Israelrather than merely hurling “profanity.” Trita Parsi, founder of the U.S. think tank Quincy Institute, said in an interview with Al Jazeera that the ability of Israel to attack Iran must be fundamentally impeded, pointing to “restricting access to intelligence collected by the United States and the provision of missile defense coverage.”

In fact, in 1982, after Israel heavily bombed Beirut and mass civilian casualties occurred, a furious U.S. President Ronald Reagan called Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and warned, “If you do not stop the bombing immediately, the entire U.S.·Israel relationship could be put at risk.” Concluding that the warning from Reagan could lead to an actual halt in weapons support, Prime Minister Begin stopped the bombardment of Beirut.

Meanwhile, as the interests of the United States and Israel over the war diverge more and more, attention is focusing on how far the rift between President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu can be patched up. Some also assess that President Trump s decision to reveal the fact of the ‘profanity-laced call’ to the media was deliberate.

Michael Jabri Piket, former editor-in-chief of the Qatar Foundation Newsroom, said on Al Arabiya, “No U.S. president has ever succeeded in controlling Prime Minister Netanyahu,” adding, “President Trump appears only now to be starting to realize that he, too, cannot control him.” He then analyzed that, “as the Iran war is taking a turn for the worse, President Trump s camp may have leaked the contents of the call to the media to send U.S. voters the message that ‘this is not the war of Trump, but the war of Netanyahu’.”