The quick-fix fantasies of the world’s strongmen

President Donald Trump welcomes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., Dec. 29, 2025. (Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times)

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin are drastically different men, but they do have one important thing in common: Each thinks he is the smartest person in any room he enters. Alas, though, because they have all done the dumbest thing you can do as a leader — surround yourself with sycophants — they have all blundered into dead-end wars from which they can extricate themselves today only by eating a banquet of crow.

Watch out. There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless leader faced with a plate of crow: Sometimes his instinct is to double down on a losing strategy instead.

Let’s start with the Israeli prime minister. The tell that Netanyahu has gone off the rails — and taken the leadership of the famed Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad, with him — is reflected in two decisions he made that were flat-out crazy: The first is that Israel could topple the Tehran regime with one big blow from the air, and the second was that it could choose Iran’s new leader.

The Mossad is very good at hunting and killing Israel’s foes, in large part because it is very skilled at recruiting disgruntled citizens in Lebanon, Iran, the West Bank and elsewhere in the Arab world — that is, people who hate their regimes and are willing to work with Israel to topple them. The problem is that these very same agents, motivated either by grievance or money, tend to exaggerate how weak their regime is and how easy bringing it down would be.

They want Israel to do the dirty work for them. The result is that a dupe like Trump, who doesn’t know any history, assumes that because the Mossad is good at assassinating people, it is equally good at predicting what will happen the morning after they are dead.

That explains why, after the White House meeting in February when Netanyahu and the Mossad’s director at the time, David Barnea, essentially argued that if Israel and the United States assassinated Iran’s top leaders, the government would fall and nice people would take over, Trump did not laugh them out of the room. The president apparently assumed that because the Mossad had super assassination powers it also had super analytical powers, and therefore Iran would tumble into his lap the same way Venezuela did when the U.S. removed its president, Nicolás Maduro.

As my colleagues Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in their must-read book, “Regime Change,” CIA director John Ratcliffe used one word to describe Netanyahu’s Iran regime change scenarios: “farcical.” Trump, confident that he knew better, ignored him and others — and has been paying the price ever since.

The even bigger tell that both Netanyahu and his intelligence agency had become drunk with power was another incredible story the Times uncovered: that Mossad had been grooming former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to take over Iran after the government of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was wiped out. As my colleagues reported: “Israel’s decision to build a regime-change plan around Mr. Ahmadinejad is an extraordinary twist in the saga of the country’s relations with the former president, who was known for accelerating Iran’s nuclear program, calling regularly for the destruction of Israel and denying the Holocaust.”

The sheer madness that Israel thought it could install Ahmadinejad — and that the Iranian body politic would not reject him the way a human body rejects an organ implant — is insane. Did Netanyahu and the Mossad really think that proud, nationalistic Iranians, even those who hate the clerics governing them, would say: “Oh, thank you, Bibi, for installing our next leader”? The vanity and overreach in thinking that 7.2 million Israeli Jews could decide who would rule more than 90 million Iranian Muslims is astounding.

Trump and Netanyahu are in good company with Putin, who drank his own Kool-Aid by assuming that Ukrainians were all dying to become part of Mother Russia again and that the democratically elected regime in Kyiv would easily fall.

“Putin’s most fundamental error was believing his own narrative that Ukrainians and Russians were ‘one people’ and that Ukrainian independence was merely an artificial Western construct,” Robbin Laird, a military analyst, noted last year. “This ideological blind spot led him to expect that Russian forces would be welcomed as liberators.”

In a perfect echo of what happened in Iran, Russian intelligence appeared to have relied too heavily “on pro-Russian sources who told Moscow what it wanted to hear,” Laird said, “rather than providing accurate ground truth about Ukrainian sentiment and capabilities.”

Netanyahu, for all his tactical victories over Hamas, Hezbollah and Tehran, has not converted any of it into a new strategic reality for Israel. That would require him to make clear that his military operations in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Iran were meant to make the region safe for an Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Instead, what the whole world sees is Netanyahu trying to make the region safe for an Israeli annexation of Gaza and the West Bank, and his being ready to throw away everything else — normalization with Saudi Arabia, the support of many young Americans, the support of the Democratic Party, the support of Western Europe and the independence of Israel’s judiciary — to get it.

Meanwhile, Trump has weakened and isolated America by lazily choosing to invade Iran with no allies, no international legitimation and no Plan B to eliminate Tehran’s ability to build a weapon of mass destruction. Instead, Trump enabled Iran to discover two incredibly cheap and effective weapons of mass disruption: controlling the Strait of Hormuz and bombing America’s Persian Gulf allies nearly every time Trump bombs Iran.

And Putin — instead of doing the hard work of making Russia a free and open society that Ukrainians actually might be attracted to — has turned what was a weak Russian democracy into a full-blown police state, with a vulnerable petro-economy. Today, Russia is nowhere to be found in the AI revolution. It is as if cars were just invented and Putin said he’d prefer to invest in more horses — and his 19th-century fantasy of a unified Russian Motherland.

What we have today is three leaders all now trying to bomb their way out of a blind alley.

But let us not forget the twisted, cynical, incompetent leaders who have been running Iran since 1979. They, too, are in their own cul-de-sac. Instead of empowering their talented population, Iran’s clerical dictators chose to ensconce themselves in power for 47 years by gunning down opponents, cramming puritanical Islam down the throats of their people and wasting billions of dollars trying to destroy Israel.

Bottom line, eventually all these conflicts will end in negotiations, because none of these leaders can sustain their stupid wars indefinitely. The only question is when they will have to call the waiter over and say: “Young man, could you please bring me a plate of crow.”