Benjamin Netanyahu was waiting in a small, drab office in the administrative area of Ronald Reagan National Airport. It was March 2007, and he was about to fly back to Israel from Washington. But before he left, he wanted to feel out a promising, young senator who was planning to run for president. When Barack Obama received the request for a meeting, he wasn’t sure how to respond. “Why should I meet this guy?” one of his aides remembers Obama asking.Netanyahu was the leader of the Israeli opposition back then, not the prime minister, and in the elections that were held a year earlier, he had led the Likud Party to its worst result in decades. It would have been easy enough for Obama to politely decline the invitation. But his policy advisers convinced him to accept. “When you’re president,” one of them explained, “there’s a good chance you’ll eventually have to work with him.”
As soon as Obama entered the room, a Netanyahu aide felt he was in the presence of someone special. “His movements were sharp, his pace like that of a panther,” the aide later recalled. Obama’s staff wanted to focus the 30-minute meeting on Iran. They sensed that—unlike the Palestinian issue—this was something Netanyahu and Obama could actually agree on. Netanyahu did most of the talking, explaining that Iran’s nuclear program was the world’s greatest danger to peace. Obama didn’t disagree. He let Netanyahu know how seriously he took Israel’s security and mentioned the sanctions legislation against Iran that he was helping to push through the Senate.
Netanyahu was impressed. “I think this guy is going to beat Hillary,” he told his advisers that day. “It was a very good meeting,” his team reported to the Israeli embassy.
