(Israel Hayom) Danny Zaken - President Trump made the decision to attack Iran after his meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago in late December 2025, but the foundations for that decision had been laid long beforehand and had nothing to do with Israel or Netanyahu. Conversations with a long list of American, Israeli and regional diplomatic and security officials reveal a clear picture: The man in the White House had a top-tier strategic goal, to topple or decisively weaken the regime in Iran. Moreover, published reports claiming that Netanyahu had "dragged" Trump and the U.S. into war, partly by arguing that the regime could be brought down, are plainly wrong. The conversations I held indicate that some senior Trump administration officials, and Trump himself, were the ones who assessed that the regime could be toppled, while the Israeli team presented a far more cautious assessment on this issue. After the success of the June 2025 operation, at the end of which the U.S. delivered the final blow by bombing the underground nuclear facility at Fordow, the Iranian regime decided to accelerate its nuclear project and missile industry. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei ordered the expansion of massive underground cities with the aim of concealing most of the nuclear facilities there, along with an arsenal of tens of thousands of missiles, making them immune to significant damage from the air. This information reached Israel and the Americans and included the launch of an organized project to manufacture the final stage required for launching a nuclear missile. By the end of 2025, this information became the reason for the meeting between Netanyahu and Trump. During the meetings, War Secretary Pete Hegseth believed that toppling the regime was a realistic possibility through encouraging and assisting internal protest, encouraging and assisting ethnic militias, and an intensive military strike against regime leaders and military facilities. The Israeli assessment was that toppling the regime was a complex and long-term mission. Professor Eitan Shamir, head of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, said, "Trump came to office twice with a consistent worldview, that U.S. power must be visible and credible, that adversaries are more likely to respond to pressure than to diplomacy, and that deals should be made from positions of dominance, not inability. Netanyahu spoke to a president who already had his own reasons to see a nuclear Iran as a problem worthy of a solution. Trump's reasoning was not rooted in Israel's security calculations, but in his own conception of what American leadership should look like." As far back as the 1980s, Trump expressed the view that the Islamic Republic had humiliated the U.S., exploited American weakness, and paid no significant price. During his first term he withdrew from the nuclear agreement and reimposed and escalated sanctions under the "maximum pressure" campaign. To this must be added the Iranian plot to assassinate him. To Trump, this represented a direct attack. When the decision to act against Iran reached the table, Trump was not being asked to confront a distant adversary. He was being given the opportunity to settle a grudge accumulated over almost 40 years.