Conspiracy buffs will subscribe to the theory that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the one who crafted US President Donald Trump’s Sept. 25 speech to the UN general Assembly. Trump announced that he would not permit a regime that threatens Israel’s annihilation to obtain nuclear weapons; he promised tighter sanctions on Iran and demanded that Iran be kicked out of Syria. He also patted himself on the back for recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and didn’t even mention Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories and the settlements it built there.

Indeed, the speech was surely a source of great pride and satisfaction for Netanyahu, who is also Israel’s foreign minister. Netanyahu played a leading role in Trump’s decision earlier this year to withdraw from the world powers’ nuclear agreement with Iran. In his May speech announcing the unilateral move, the president said he had formed his decision after seeing the material Israel had stolen from Iran’s nuclear archives. Trump’s decision to move the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which had been gathering dust in Congress file folders for years, was carried out on Netanyahu’s watch, too. The two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has evaporated and the settlers are once again cheering Netanyahu for this disappearing trick.

This is the picture that Netanyahu and many Israeli media outlets are selling the Israeli public. However, the view from the Middle Eastern gallery is far less rosy. Israel is paying a heavy strategic price for the strong alliance that Netanyahu has forged with Trump against Iran. The US withdrawal from the hard-won deal set off a crisis of trust between the United States and its three closest allies — France, Germany and the United Kingdom. By walking away from the deal, Trump freed Russia from the weight of international sanctions against Iran and turned the two countries (Russia and Iran) into allies divvying up the loot in Syria.

We will never know whether the loopholes in the P5+1 nuclear agreement with Iran would have enabled the Iranians to develop nuclear weapons, as Netanyahu claimed. On the other hand, we do know that the US walkout set off a conventional arms race on Israel’s borders unprecedented since Cold War days. A troubling indication for Israel in this regard is Moscow's decision announced Sept. 24 to supply the Syrians with advanced S-300 anti-aircraft missiles and tracking and jamming equipment against satellite navigation, radar systems and jet fighter communications. On Sept. 22, Lebanon’s Al-Mayadeen TV offered another worrisome indication of trouble when it reported Russia’s intention to seal off the air space over Syria’s territorial waters.