Something unusual happened in the Oval Office on Tuesday: Donald Trump apparently stopped cracking jokes. Senior Israeli officials who were in the room told reporters the Trump-Netanyahu session on Iran was so serious, so focused, so devoid of the president's usual performative banter, that they felt compelled to flag it as a notable departure from normal. When the clown car goes quiet, pay attention.
Three Ways to End Iran, Pick Your Favorite
According to the New York Post, Trump and Netanyahu spent nearly 90 minutes working through what Israeli officials are calling the 'big three' options for breaking Iran: a diplomatic deal, a tighter economic stranglehold, or an expanded military campaign. No decision was made. Netanyahu, per a senior Israeli official in the room, 'did not tell the president' which path to choose. They were, apparently, just brainstorming.
That framing should give you pause. Two heads of government, one of them controlling the most powerful military on earth and the other currently at war, sat down and workshopped ideas like a pair of MBA students doing a case study on how to collapse a nation-state. The official told reporters the conversation was 'clinical.' That word is doing a lot of work.
The New Idea: Just Turn Iran Off
The most striking thing to come out of the meeting, per the New York Post's reporting, is a proposal that hasn't been tried yet: cutting off all of Iran's land trade routes. Every truck. Every supply line. Total ground-level isolation to complement the existing naval blockade of Iranian ports. The senior Israeli official put it bluntly: 'Suppose you shut up all of Iran's land supplies. Say, you can't bring in a truck. Just shut up their domestic supply lines. It's not been tried.'
The White House, asked about this specific idea, offered the most non-answer in recorded history: 'The Commander-in-Chief has all options at his disposal.' So that's a yes, a maybe, and a 'we'll never confirm anything' all at once. Very helpful.
The official was careful to insist this could be done 'without boots on the ground.' How you enforce a total land blockade of a country the size of Iran without any physical presence is a question that apparently didn't come up, or at least didn't make it into the readout.
The Diplomat They Think They Can Work With
On the diplomatic track, Israeli officials have apparently identified one person inside the Iranian regime they consider worth talking to: Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. A senior official described him as a 'realist' despite his Islamist ideology, and suggested that the real dividing line in Tehran isn't moderates versus hardliners, it's people who understand that the sanctions will eventually destroy them versus people who don't.
The same official was candid about what makes any deal difficult. Americans, the official said, have a 'lack of understanding of the fanaticism' at play in the region. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is still launching strikes on US forces. Getting to a deal that includes denuclearization and reopening the Strait of Hormuz is possible, the official argued, but only if diplomacy is paired with 'very, very strong means.' What those means are, the official declined to specify. Great.
Regime Change, Quietly on the Table
Netanyahu also reportedly brought up ways to 'advance the possibility' of regime collapse in Iran, according to the New York Post. The Israeli prime minister believes the US and Israel could create conditions where 'the Iranian people could take their fate in their own hands.' What that means in practice was not spelled out.
The senior official did acknowledge that previous efforts along these lines had failed, attributing the failures to 'operational failure or decisions that were made.' Which is a very carefully worded way of saying: someone tried something, it didn't work, and we're not going to tell you what it was or who decided to stop it. This is the part of the readout where any responsible journalist has to note that 'regime change' has a rich and deeply ugly history as a US foreign policy tool, and the people selling it have never once been held accountable for how it goes.
No Fire, No Cracks, Just Granite
Reports heading into the meeting had suggested real tensions between Trump and Netanyahu over the direction of the Iran campaign. The Israeli official pushed back hard on that characterization. 'Those who were expected to have fire and brimstone or cracks encountered a wall of granite,' the official said. The nearly 90-minute conversation was called an 'excellent meeting' focused on deliverables and shared operational goals.
Whether that assessment reflects reality or is the standard diplomatic spin you'd expect from a senior official briefing reporters is, as always, impossible to know from the outside. What is clear is that the two governments are publicly presenting a united front at a moment when the options being discussed range from 'squeeze them economically' to 'help the population overthrow their government.' That is not a narrow range of options.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that a 90-minute session between two wartime leaders produced no decisions, just a collegial exchange of interesting new ideas about how to strangle a country of 90 million people. That's the framing Israeli officials chose. Workshopping. Brainstorming. Clinical. As if the 'shut off every truck going into Iran' concept is the kind of thing you float at an offsite and revisit next quarter.
The land blockade idea alone deserves far more scrutiny than it's getting. The US already has a naval blockade of Iranian ports in place. Now the discussion is turning to cutting off ground-level supply routes too, all without putting troops on the ground, somehow. No one in this readout explains the mechanism. No one mentions what happens to food, medicine, or civilian infrastructure when you turn off the import spigot for a country that size. The word 'civilian' does not appear anywhere in the New York Post's coverage of this meeting, which is its own kind of answer.
The regime change section is the one that should keep you up at night. Netanyahu raised it. The official acknowledged previous attempts had failed due to 'operational failures or decisions that were made.' That's a confession wrapped in a euphemism. Someone, at some point, tried to engineer an Iranian uprising and it didn't materialize. We don't know what was tried. We don't know who called it off or why. We just know they're thinking about trying again. History would like a word.
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