There’s a dark joke quietly circulating among geo political observers: with two men like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, you can’t decide whether good relations or bad relations are more dangerous. After reading Julian Borger’s masterful pice of the Iran war fiasco (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/09/tensions-emerge-bejamin-netanyahu-donald-trump-alliance), I have reached an uneasy conclusion. Good relations are worse. Bad relations are just the hangover.
Let me explain why.
Borger’s piece is a devastating portrait of what happens when two transactional strongmen—both masters of populist grift, both allergic to institutional constraint—bind their fates together. For decades, Netanyahu played a long game: coax, flatter, and manipulate successive US presidents into attacking Iran. Trump, a man who views every relationship as a zero-sum extraction, was the perfect mark. Their “good relations” produced the worst foreign policy disaster since the Iraq War: a 37-day air campaign that failed to collapse the Iranian regime, closed the Strait of Hormuz, triggered a global energy crisis, and left America looking like a paper tiger.
The tragedy is that neither man will admit defeat. Instead, they’re now trapped in an oscillating nightmare—sometimes coordinating almost daily, sometimes publicly rebuking each other, but never truly disentangled. And that oscillation, I’d argue, is the real poison.
The case for “good relations” being worse
Consider what their alignment enabled. Netanyahu fed Trump the fantasy that Iran was “an overripe fruit ready to drop.” He dangled Venezuela’s lightning regime change as proof that war could be “painless, effortless, beautiful.” Trump; already contemptuous of his own intelligence community, bit hard. The result was not just a failed war, but a strategic defeat that will outlast both men’s political careers. Iran now controls the Strait of Hormuz. China and Russia are strengthened. America’s allies are hedging desperately.
Good relations between a con-man and a grifter don’t cancel each other out—they amplify the worst impulses of both. Netanyahu got his war; Trump got to feel like a strongman. The rest of us got $150-a-barrel oil and a crumbling global order.
But bad relations aren’t a solution
When Trump finally realised he’d been sold a lemon, he froze Israel out of ceasefire talks, publicly scolded Netanyahu (“PROHIBITED” in all-caps on social media), and forced a truce that leaves Iranian power intact. On the surface, that seems better. It stopped the bombing.
Yet Borger’s reporting reveals the flaw. Netanyahu knows Trump’s attention span is measured in weeks, not years. He knows that ceasefire or no, he can “mow the grass” later—resume strikes on Iranian proxies or nuclear sites once the president is distracted by China or the election. Bad relations just drive the coordination underground. The mutual dependence remains. The strategic failure is now baked in.
What we’re witnessing is not a clean break. It’s a toxic codependency. One day Trump praises “full coordination.” The next he bans Israel from striking Lebanon. Neither posture is coherent. Neither restores deterrence or trust.
The real lesson: oscillation is the enemy
Stable good relations build disastrous wars. Stable bad relations at least produce predictable distance—allies adjust, adversaries calibrate. But the Trump–Netanyahu relationship offers neither. It lurches from embrace to estrangement and back, leaving US allies in the Gulf, European partners, and even the Israeli security establishment unsure whether Washington is leading, following, or fleeing.
That uncertainty is more corrosive than any single defeat. It tells the world that American power now depends on the mood swings of two aging populists who have, in Borger’s memorable phrase, “screwed each other pretty badly.”
So here is my answer to the question. Good relations are worse because they start catastrophic wars. Bad relations are merely the aftermath. But the truly dangerous state is the one we occupy now: neither together nor apart, just conjoined in failure, unable to admit it, and all too capable of lurching into another disaster when one of them needs a distraction.
The only way out is to stop treating this as a personality problem. It’s a structural one. The United States cannot afford to build its Middle East policy on the back of a prime minister who manipulates US politics for personal survival, nor on a president who mistakes grift for strategy. Until that changes, it doesn’t matter whether Trump and Netanyahu are smiling or snarling at each other. The rest of us will pay the price either way.
Pasifika Talanoa by a traveled ITaukei Fijian 