Three guesses, and the first two don't count.

After months of obeying the authors of the Kabul Bug-Out in trying to defeat Hamas, the Israelis finally decided to conduct their war with the objective of winning it. Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Rafah operation in the spring, with Joe Biden reportedly calling him a "f***ing liar" afterward. A few months of shelling from Lebanon later as well as fruitless dithering from the US State Department with Hezbollah, Israel decided to win that war too.

Now, after Iran fired almost 200 ballistic missiles at Israeli population centers, Netanyahu and his cabinet have decided to win that war as well -- or at least to make sure the mullahs and jihadist tyrants in Tehran understand that they can. Netanyahu has declined to share their plans with Biden's team, and they're running to the media to complain about it:

Israel has so far refused to divulge to the Biden administration details of its plans to retaliate against Tehran, U.S. officials said, even as the White House is urging its closest Middle East ally not to hit Iran’s oil facilities or nuclear sites amid fears of a widening regional war. 

U.S. officials are frustrated that they have been repeatedly caught off guard by Israel’s military actions in Gaza and Lebanon, and are seeking to head off further escalation. Some had hoped the U.S. would learn more about what Israel was contemplating during a planned meeting Wednesday between Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon, but Gallant postponed his trip, the Pentagon said. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blocked Gallant from departing to the U.S. on Tuesday night as Israel continued planning its Iran operation, an Israeli official said. U.S. officials said they don’t yet have either the timing of the strike or what Israel might target. 

President Biden and Netanyahu are planning to speak on the phone Wednesday, according to an Israeli official.

Well, that should be a fun conversation! How did their last conversation go, anyway? Bob Woodward got one version of it in his new book War, one which should embarrass everyone in the Biden administration. It should embarrass Biden too, but he and Kamala Harris still brag about his skill in abandoning Kabul and 14,000 Americans:

According to the excerpts, during an April phone call, Biden asked Netanyahu: “What’s your strategy, man?”

Netanyahu said Israel had to go into Rafah, the Gaza-Egypt border city that the IDF said had become Hamas’s last stronghold in Gaza.

“Bibi, you’ve got no strategy,” responded Biden, according to Woodward, who also wrote that the US president said Netanyahu “doesn’t give a damn” about Hamas and “only about himself.”

Biden's strategy, imposed on Israel for months, was to negotiate with Hamas to get back to the October 6 status quo. Biden wanted that to smooth his prospects for re-election; it was Biden that "doesn't give a damn" about Israel. And how did Biden's predictions of disaster from a Rafah op turn out? About as well as all of Biden's military strategies:

In May, Israeli forces entered Rafah in a limited operation that went more smoothly than the US had predicted, garnering a muted response after months of the White House warning against the move.

Netanyahu learned his lesson well. Biden has no talent at all for strategic thinking, and he's not even good at tactical thinking. Biden's strategic plans -- and those of the Obama administration, whose foreign-policy team runs the current administration -- involved appeasing Iran and allowing them to dominate the region, in order to claim success in American disengagement. That strategy, along with hundreds of billions in wealth transfers to Iran over the last nine years, created the war Israel found itself in on October 7. 

That strategy all but destroyed Israel's deterrence in the region, which has hard-won over the course of several wars launched against it by once-bitter foes. After October 7, the Israelis realized that they couldn't afford to prop up Biden ny longer. And they probably suspected that the Americans were sharing a bit too much with the Iranians in this appeasement strategy, likely through Robert Malley until last summer, unwittingly or otherwise. Now the Biden administration wants to order Israel to scale back through media leaks like this one, since they clearly are not succeeding in intimidating Netanyahu in private. 

The Israelis have bigger issues on their plate than Harris' election prospects, however. And they have actual strategists that focus on survival rather than being handcuffed to the fatal status quo ante.