"He’s a Madman!!"
- Nawaf M. Al Thani
- 40 minutes ago
- 5 min read
The White House Between Quiet Anger and an Inevitable Reckoning.
In Washington, the whispers about Benjamin Netanyahu are no longer whispers—they have become sharper, heavier, more deliberate. The man once treated as an untouchable ally, a constant in the choreography of American politics, has turned into a source of embarrassment for the White House and a liability to its already faltering Middle East policy. Behind closed doors, even the language of diplomacy has fallen away. One senior U.S. official put it bluntly: “He’s a madman. He bombs everything all the time.”
It was more than a casual complaint. It was the kind of raw, unfiltered assessment that signals a deeper shift—not just in tone, but in the very fabric of a relationship. It was a moment of recognition that the problem was no longer tactical or episodic, but fundamental. This was not about one errant missile or one controversial strike. It was about a man who sees the region as a chessboard where only his pieces matter, where every move is about his own survival, and everyone else is expendable.
For years, Netanyahu thrived on this dynamic. He portrayed himself as the irreplaceable partner, the lone actor who could hold the line in a chaotic region. Successive American presidents indulged him, even when privately exasperated. But the myth is fraying. Behind the scripted remarks at press briefings, there is growing unease—an unspoken realization that Netanyahu has become not just difficult, but unpredictable in ways that undermine what little the United States is trying to build.
Gaza today is more than a battlefield. It is a living indictment. There, people die even before death reaches them—starvation claims them silently before the bombs arrive. You see it in the endless queues for bread, in the hollowed faces of children clutching scraps of food, in the eerie quiet that settles over streets waiting for aid that never comes. And when the aid does not come, the missiles do.
One of those missiles struck Gaza’s lone Catholic church—a sanctuary of last resort. A family that had fled famine and fire alike was killed on the altar. No press statement could explain it. No rehearsed talking point could erase the image. This is not a defensive war, despite the slogans repeated by Netanyahu’s spokesmen. It is collective punishment. It is starvation deployed as a weapon, fear as a policy, devastation as political theater. And it is carried out with such cold precision that the world’s silence becomes its own form of complicity.
Beyond Gaza, there is Damascus. There, Washington was painstakingly threading the fragile beginnings of a post-war arrangement. Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former rebel leader turned president, was emerging as the centerpiece of a U.S.-backed plan to stabilize Syria. Sanctions were being quietly eased. Diplomats were shuttling in and out with cautious optimism. Then, without warning, came the strikes—government buildings bombed within sight of the presidential palace. It was a calculated blow, not just to Damascus, but to the credibility of American diplomacy. The message was unmistakable: there would be no room for stability. Not in Gaza. Not in Syria. Not while Netanyahu insists on shaping the region in his own image.
Inside the Trump administration, the frustration is no longer hidden. The president, whose instinct has always been transactional and focused on quick wins, is finding that Netanyahu cannot be folded into that logic. His calculations are narrower, more personal, and ruthlessly indifferent to their cost. Senior officials now speak of him with a mix of disdain and disbelief. He measures everything, they say, against the narrowest of political yardsticks—his own survival. Every strike, every escalation, is not part of a grand strategy but an electoral arithmetic designed to keep him in power. Netanyahu burns bridges, then stands alone on the far shore, declaring there was never any other way to cross.
His most recent visit to Washington was meant to be a show. There were the usual theatrics: the photo ops, the carefully staged dinners, even a dramatic flourish—Netanyahu bringing a letter nominating Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize. But when the visit ended, there was nothing tangible. No ceasefire in Gaza. No hostage deal. Only more blood, more hunger, and a territory slowly dying, its children digging through garbage to survive another day.
In the corridors of American power, a sobering realization is setting in. Gaza is a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding live on every screen, staining not just Israel’s image but America’s. Syria is a fragile puzzle fractured again by airstrikes that seem timed to humiliate U.S. diplomacy. And the man at the center of it all acts as if he is immune to consequence, confident that the United States will, as it always has, look the other way.
But even Washington has limits. There are moments when the burden of one man’s recklessness outweighs the inertia of old alliances. There are whispers now—soft but growing louder—that the “blank check” Netanyahu has enjoyed for decades may no longer be blank. Perhaps this is the start of a recalibration, a quiet but inevitable rewriting of the terms.
For the United States, the question is no longer whether Netanyahu is a reliable partner. That question has already been answered—in the rubble of Gaza’s church, in the hunger of its children, in the smoldering ruins of Damascus’s government buildings. The real question is how much longer America is willing to let its own policies, its own reputation, be hostage to the narrow political survival of one man.
History has a way of catching up with moments like this. The archives of U.S.-Israeli relations hold their share of tensions: Eisenhower pressuring Ben-Gurion to leave Sinai in 1956, George H.W. Bush clashing with Yitzhak Shamir over settlements in 1991. But there is something different about this time. The images from Gaza are too raw, too damning. The diplomatic humiliation in Syria is too obvious. And the domestic mood in Washington—fractured though it may be—may no longer sustain the old habits of indulgence.
In the end, this is about more than Netanyahu. It is about a region trapped between despair and manipulation. It is about a superpower discovering that it is complicit in crises it no longer fully controls. It is about the limits of politics built entirely on expediency.
Trump may not articulate it in the language of history or morality—he rarely does—but even he can feel the weight of this madness. He can see how it undermines what little he has tried to build in the Middle East. And he can sense, perhaps for the first time, that Netanyahu’s chaos does not only consume the region. It risks consuming the alliance itself.
How long can an American president carry the burden of another man’s recklessness? How long can Washington look away while being dragged deeper into crises it neither planned nor wanted?
The signals now coming out of the White House suggest that the patience which once seemed endless is reaching its edge. The “blank check” may not yet have been torn up. But it is no longer in Netanyahu’s pocket. It sits on the table, waiting for a decision. And for the first time in a long time, it is America—not Israel—that is holding the pen.
Nawaf Al-Thani is the Editor-in-Chief of Polistratics. And a former Director of Intelligence Operations in Qatar's Defense Intelligence, as well as the former Defense Attaché to the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
