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The President’s ill-considered war has left America hostage to calculations being made in Tel Aviv and Tehran.

On Sunday evening, with Iranian missiles still arcing toward northern Israel, Donald Trump picked up the phone to the Financial Times to explain who was in charge. Benjamin Netanyahu, he said, would have to accept whatever bargain Washington struck with Tehran, because “I call the shots. I call all the shots. He doesn’t call the shots.” He then rang the Israeli prime minister to tell him not to retaliate, and, as is his wont, waited for reality to fall into line with his imagination.

Reality had other plans. Within hours, Israel was striking back against military and fuel sites across western and central Iran, in plain defiance of the man who had just declared himself the sole proprietor of the war. By Monday morning the President of the United States was reduced to posting on social media that both sides should “immediately stop shooting.” The man who called all the shots could not call off a single airstrike.

The boast had an audience: the President was answering his own base. For weeks, Tucker Carlson and others on the populist right have charged that Israel is in charge of American policy, that the war Trump launched in February was Netanyahu’s enterprise run on Washington’s account. But if “I call the shots” was the rebuttal, Sunday night was the refutation. The people the President dismisses as cranks watched the Israeli air force make their case for them.

The humiliation is not in the events of a single bad evening, it is in the design of the thing. Tehran has made a ceasefire in Lebanon a precondition for any deal with Washington. Israel, insisting its Lebanese campaign falls outside the truce, keeps hitting Hezbollah whenever it suits. Each sortie over Beirut blows up the diplomacy elsewhere. The Houthis, never wanting for an excuse, have warned they will go after Israeli ships in the Red Sea. So the timetable for ending Trump’s war is set not in the Oval Office but in an Israeli targeting cell, an Iranian command bunker and a Yemeni hillside — none of which answers to the White House.

Tehran grasps this more clearly than anyone, which is why it is in no rush. As Brett McGurk argues, Trump’s options have narrowed to three: endure the economic pain, concede on Iran’s terms, or fight the wider war he swore to avoid. The Iranian regime is employing the oldest move in its book, which is to hold what the adversary wants — and wait. It is holding the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran now says will reopen only under its own conditions, transit toll included.

(It is also holding American citizens: at least six are detained in Iran.)

With Trump openly signaling his eagerness to end the war, Tehran figures it might as well demand the maximum – reparations, the lifting of sanctions, the unfreezing of assets, retention of nuclear technology, et al. Why not try to get the US to leash Israel, too? No Lebanese can be under any illusion that the Iranian regime sheds real tears over the tragedy unfolding in their country, but Tehran does care about preserving Hezbollah, its catspaw. And Trump’s eagerness to do a deal gives Iran leverage to use for keeping Hezbollah alive.

The IDF’s resumption of attacks in Lebanon, after the briefest of pauses, gave Iran the opportunity to test that leverage — hence its Sunday missile barrage. That led to the astonishing situation where an American President publicly sought to protect the Islamic Republic from retaliation by Israel. In nearly three decades of covering the Middle East, that is a sentence I never could have imagined writing. It would have amused and pleased the Iranian leadership in equal measure.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, is losing his leverage over US policy. Polls show a dramatic erosion of American support for Israel, cutting across party lines. But the prime minister has more immediate and more personal problems: a fraying rightwing coalition just five months ahead what promises to be a difficult election. For all of Trump’s profanities and entreaties, Netanyahu cannot afford to look weak in the face of Iranian aggression. There was no scenario in which he would not have retaliated for the missile strikes.

Trump started this war on the conceit that overwhelming force would make everyone behave. In his desperation to extricate himself from the mess of his own making, he has handed the timing and the terms of ending the war to an enemy that has priorities ahead of peace and an ally whose interests do not align with the President’s. Never mind calling the shots, he has left America a hostage to the calculations of others.