How Trump’s Inner Circle Helped Pave the Road to War With Iran

On Feb. 11, 2026, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined President Donald Trump at the White House for a behind-closed-doors meeting.

It had been seven months since Trump declared Iran’s key nuclear facilities “completely and totally obliterated” following U.S. and Israeli strikes.

Now, Netanyahu expressed fresh concerns about Iran — and made a legacy-focused pitch to the second-term American president.

“He said, ‘You get the ayatollahs out, you bring about regime change in Iran, and school books will write about you, history books will write about you,” journalist Vivian Salama says in the above video drawn from The War Cabinet, a new FRONTLINE documentary.

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Documentary

The War Cabinet

May 26, 2026

Netanyahu also issued a warning: Once Israel struck, Iranian missiles would hit American targets in the region, too.

For a president who had repeatedly vowed “no new wars” on the campaign trail, that moment might’ve seemed like a dilemma. But as The War Cabinet explores, Trump and a team of advisors had deployed the U.S. military overseas in one attack after another since his second term began — including in a raid that brought Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro into U.S. custody the previous month — and Trump was riding high.

“The president came to the realization that the head of the snake has to go,” says Alexander Gray, a former Trump National Security Council chief of staff. “And we have to change the way we engage with Iran now, or presidents five decades from now will still be stuck playing whack-a-mole in the Middle East.”

Some members of Trump’s core team weren’t so sure.

Chief among them was Vice President JD Vance, who had served as a U.S. Marine in Iraq — and who reminded Trump that he had risen to power promising not to entangle the country in more conflicts.

But as the above video illuminates, Vance and the rest of Trump’s war cabinet ultimately gave the president their support.

“A lot of people who have been with him through the thick of it look and say, ‘Well, you know, he’s mounted these comebacks that nobody thought were possible. He’s participated and authorized all of these different excursions overseas and come out on top,’ and there’s just kind of a belief that in the end things will work out,” journalist Eric Cortellessa of TIME magazine says of Trump.

“So what you really see in this war cabinet is a group of people who do not want to get on the wrong side of President Trump and who don’t see it as their obligation to stop him,” he adds.

Premiering May 26 on PBS and online, The War Cabinet examines some of the key players in Trump’s expansive use of the U.S. military: Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, longtime aide Stephen Miller, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

The documentary tells the story of how this group, whose members had diverse life stories and worldviews, came together to support the president in his quest to demonstrate the United States’ military might on the international stage — from Yemen, to the waters off Venezuela, to Iran.

With the latter conflict now in its third month and threatening to define Trump’s second term, the documentary is a must-watch look at how the president who promised peace has become a wartime president, and the role of the team of loyalists by his side.

“The people that a president trusts for the most sensitive roles in our national security apparatus — those people put their mark on history,” Gray says.