On June 22, 2025, President Trump ordered the US Air Force to deploy a group of B-2 bombers to drop bunker-busting bombs on three nuclear facilities in Iran: the Fordow Uranium Enrichment Plant, the Natanz Nuclear Facility and the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center.
The US attack, which was a one-off, occurred nine days into the war between Jerusalem and Tehran which saw the Israeli Air Force (IAF) achieve air supremacy, striking hundreds of military targets, including IRGC leaders, nuclear facilities, and nuclear scientists throughout Iran – over 1,000 sorties in which the IAF didn’t lose a single plane.
However, even before that one American attack, the Financial Times (FT) began promoting the narrative of an Israeli puppeteer manipulating the commander-in-chief of the most powerful nation on the globe.
On June 20, amidst the debate about what military actions, if any, Trump was going to order, the FT’s US editor Edward Luce published a piece that included the following [emphasis added]:
Trump’s managerial style is usually to encourage squabbling between underlings. That enhances his role as the decider. But it is Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, not Trump or his loyalists, who has been dictating the agenda….
The FT editor used same word in a column after the US attack (“Trump has opened a Pandora’s box”, June 22), which included the following [emphasis added]:
Trump’s brief televised address following the strikes was meant to showcase his command of the situation. In reality, Netanyahu has been dictating events. But even he cannot predict how Iran will respond.
An FT opinion piece by the editorial board also published just after the US attack (“Trump’s step into the dark”, June 22) similarly advanced this theme [emphasis added]:
The Trump administration has allowed Netanyahu, who has long opposed diplomatic efforts with Tehran, to sideline diplomacy and drag Trump into a war he has wanted for a decade.
Today, with the prospect of another US attack on Iran seeming likely, a new opinion piece by the FT editorial board (“Donald Trump’s fateful decision on Iran”, Feb. 26) again promoted the idea that Israel manipulated a reluctant Donald Trump to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities in June. [emphasis added]
The president has repeatedly said he prefers a deal to war, despite Arab allies’ urging for restraint. The only leader who appears supportive of a strike is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who briefly drew the US into Israel’s 12-day war last year to bomb Iran’s main nuclear sites.
In fact, it was the mercurial US president who – having been convinced that Iran wasn’t ready to negotiate a satisfactory nuclear deal – decided to bomb Iranian sites, and it was Trump who exerted influence over Netanyahu during the conflict, by pushing Jerusalem to accept the June 23 ceasefire, and, a day later, demanding that the IAF abort (or significantly scale back) a mission to respond to Iran’s ceasefire violation.
For all the FT’s putative sophistication, it continues to get drawn-in to Tucker Carlson-style narratives evoking the “Israeli tail wagging the US dog” trope.
This post originally appeared at CAMERA UK.