What did Donald Trump do today?

He let Benjamin Netanyahu decide the United States' policy on Iran.

Earlier this month, international monitors have sounded the alarm that Iran was within weeks of assembling enough enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons. This is the culmination of Iran's return to unchecked progress on a bomb since 2018, when Trump abruptly withdrew the United States from a multinational agreement that allowed Iran to operate a nuclear energy program in exchange for unlimited monitoring of its nuclear stockpile.

Last night, Israel launched a drone and missile attack on Iranian nuclear sites and other targets. The State Department immediately and unconditionally disclaimed any involvement in the attack. This rang especially true in light of the fact that American personnel in the Middle East were evacuated only at the last minute.

Then, at 5:56 this morning, Trump went on his private microblogging website and insisted that he had known all about the attack all along and implied that it was all part of his grand strategy—completely contradicting everything his administration had said up to that point.

The explanation appears to be that the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has used Trump's flailing attempts to broker a new "deal" against him. Netanyahu, like Trump, is a convicted criminal in his own country and is using his continued role in government to forestall prosecution—and that is part of why he is deeply opposed to any kind of detente with Iran. But Israel is not militarily capable of taking out Iran's nuclear capabilities by itself. 

Trump had been trying to bring Iran to the bargaining table for a replacement nuclear nonproliferation deal, through the efforts of Steve Witkoff, his chief negotiator. Witkoff is a real estate lawyer with no diplomatic experience other than his concurrent attempts to broker a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia—which has also been a failure. 

In other words, Netanyahu's actions appear to have forced Trump to choose between two options: either support the attack and pretend he'd been in the loop, or admit that he had not been in control of the situation, and that he was not someone his notional ally felt needed to be part of the decision-making process.

The United States is now participating in the defense of Israel against retaliatory attacks from Iran. This means that the United States is now directly involved in a shooting war in the same region that Trump repeatedly promised to bring peace to through his "dealmaking" skills.

Why does this matter?

• American national security is much, much, much more important than making Donald Trump look like he knew what he was doing.