There are moments in a presidency of no turning back, decisions made and actions taken that are so consequential and far-reaching, they mark a fundamental turning point. George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, for example, poisoned Bush’s presidency and reshaped the Middle East for the worse in ways that are still reverberating.

The war that Israel just started with Iran may well be another.

For the past few months, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has watched uneasily as peace threatened to break out in the Middle East. Despite having pointlessly killed the agreement that had successfully contained any potential Iranian nuclear ambitions in his first term, Donald Trump now seemed to be spending a significant amount of energy and political capital on negotiations with Tehran to reenter it, negotiations that had made headway and were set to continue this Sunday. Meanwhile, Netanyahu, who had tried to torpedo that deal when it was first signed, appeared to have had a falling out with Trump, sidelining Israel. Maybe there was a chance to avoid war after all.

Then last night, Israel suddenly launched a major attack on Iran, damaging one of its key nuclear facilities and assassinating six nuclear scientists. The attack was sold as a way to stop Iran’s nuclear program, but it was much bigger: Israel also assassinated a spate of top Iranian military commanders, the man leading the negotiations with the Trump administration, and dozens of civilians, including children, in bombings on residential buildings.

To say this is a provocation doesn’t really do it justice. There are many countries that consider the United States a threat, the way that Israel sees Iran. If any of them suddenly started bombing the United States, killed American scientists and children, and assassinated Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other top military brass, all on the basis that they feared that war-hungry Washington politicians might some day attack them, this would be immediately understood as beyond the pale and outrageous. But Netanyahu and Israel do not operate by the constraints of common sense and decency, let alone international law.

For more than thirty years, Netanyahu has been trying to make this happen, bleating over and over again that Iran was set to have a nuclear weapon within a few years. That includes all of this year, during which his “warnings” that the world needed to act immediately to stop the nonexistent bomb grew incessant. Of course, in all those decades, Iran’s nuke never materialized, something that is still the case today as Netanyahu pummels the country: on the eve of the attack, US intelligence had not changed its long-standing assessment that Iran is not actually working toward a nuclear bomb.

Doesn’t matter. The problem for Netanyahu was never the fact that the nuke he kept crying wolf about wasn’t real: a possible Iranian nuclear weapon was just the geopolitical version of Alfred Hitchcock’s MacGuffin, the interchangeable object that didn’t matter other than as a mechanism to move the plot along. For Netanyahu, that plot is a war with Iran that would finally defang a leading regional rival, a war he hopes and expects to be fought by and paid for by the United States.

“America is a thing you can move very easily, move in the right direction,” Netanyahu once said when he didn’t realize he was being recorded. He is on the brink of proving that true in the most dramatic fashion.

Netanyahu is closer than he’s ever been to his life’s goal of having American men and women fight and die against Iran on his behalf — and largely thanks to an “isolationist” US president whose political life was built on railing against Middle Eastern wars and promising to keep Americans out of them.

You can see two paths right now by which this Israeli war becomes a US one. In one, Iranian retaliation against US troops and assets in the region — which Tehran had already explicitly warned could be targets — makes the US political class and maybe even the public rally around direct US retaliation, feeding a spiral that leads to deepening conflict.

The Trump White House vainly tried to prevent this outcome by quickly announcing it wasn’t involved in the strikes. But that was swiftly undone by the president himself, who has now repeatedly gloated about the “excellent” attack, revealed it was done with full US cooperation (“It wasn’t a heads-up. It was, we know what’s going on”), and has intimated several times that Israel wasn’t simply going rogue but exacting punishment on Iran for failing to meet his sixty-day deadline for a deal. It was also undermined by a steady stream of leaks on the Israeli side that this had all been coordinated with the Trump White House, right down to concocting a Trump-Netanyahu fallout for the press to lower Iran’s defenses.

Trump and the Israeli government are playing with US lives with comments like these. Iran and other actors in the region were already inclined to look at this as a joint US-Israeli attack, given that everything Israel does is militarily and politically underwritten by Washington. But these comments remove even the thin layer of plausible deniability that might have led Iranian leadership to leave US targets be.

But it wouldn’t even necessarily take an attack on US personnel or interests to make this another disastrous American war. Large swaths of Washington already view any attack on Israel as tantamount to an attack on the United States itself — even though Israel is not one of the United States’s fifty-one treaty allies, meaning those countries it’s legally obliged to go to war for if it’s attacked. Iranian missiles have already rained down on Israeli cities, the first barrage of what is likely to be many more.

Together with the powerful Israel First lobby that uses campaign donations and lobbying to ensure US support for anything the Israeli government does, a devastating Iranian attack on Israel would likely create irresistible pressure on Trump and almost the entire US political class to directly intervene, sacrificing yet more US lives and money on behalf of a foreign country that has completely lost the plot.

And make no mistake: Israel has lost it. As it starts this war, consider that Israel is also: still bombing neighboring Lebanon in violation of a cease-fire it signed; illegally and violently occupying the territory of its other neighbor Syria; escalating its war on nearby Yemen; and continuing its nearly two-year-long, stomach-churning genocide of mostly children in Gaza. That’s five different wars Israel is now fighting simultaneously. Other than the United States, there is no other country on Earth you can say this about.

If it puzzles you how a tiny country with a population a little larger than New York’s could do this, all you need to do is look at the response to these strikes. Officials across partisan lines in the United States and the wider Western world, whether France, Germany, or the UK, lined up to not just not condemn Israel’s preemptive war — as clear-cut a case of illegal aggression as you can possibly get — but in some cases condemned Iran, the country being attacked. They’ve done so by perversely insisting on Israel’s “right to self-defense,” a right that apparently allows Israel to do everything from starve and burn children alive to, now, launch a preemptive war on the off chance that its target may some day start one first.

This is a new development. The United States and broader West have always supported Israel, but they’ve never been this indulgent of its worst behavior, feeding it weapons and military assistance and giving it political cover as it carries out an orgy of criminality, nor this unwilling to rein it in. Multiple US presidents, from Ronald Reagan to both Bushes, have tugged on the leash and reminded Israel which is the superpower and which is the client state; Trump and Joe Biden, by contrast have both meekly passed Netanyahu the wheel, even as it has rebounded violently on the United States.

The irony is that this will neither stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb, nor lead to peace; it will do the exact opposite. Iranian hard-liners are now pointing to this attack to openly talk about why the country needs to pursue a nuclear bomb in earnest. Meanwhile, as Israel and Iran engage in tit-for-tat attacks, the Houthis governing Yemen are threatening to jump in too and even wage war on the United States if it comes to it, undoing the fragile truce Trump agreed to last month.

The spiral we are watching right now is good for no one: not the people of Israel, the United States, or Iran, not any of the region’s other civilians caught in the middle, not even Trump. It’s good for no one except the right-wing Israeli extremists who have an outsize control over the Israeli government, and an Israeli prime minister who is fighting for his political survival and against possible prison time.

Biden’s inability to stand up to Netanyahu significantly damaged his presidency and any positive legacy he managed to cobble together in the twilight of his life. Like Biden, Trump too seems he’d rather follow Netanyahu into the abyss than have to put his foot down with Israel. It remains to be seen whether events really will spiral into a massive, US-involved regional war, or whether the not-insignificant parts of Trump’s voter base and allies who are dead set against another self-destructive US war will be able to talk some sense into the president. One thing’s for sure though: this is not “America First” by any reasonable definition of that term.