On the morning of February 23, 2026, Benjamin Netanyahu called Donald Trump from Jerusalem with intelligence that would change the course of their war on Iran. Senior Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself, were scheduled to gather at a compound in Tehran that Saturday, vulnerable to a single airstrike. Trump was at Mar-a-Lago when the call came through.
Two weeks earlier, Trump and Netanyahu had met in Washington for three hours in a session described by those present as grave and grim, planning a coordinated operation in great detail. Even before the two leaders met, Trump ordered a massive deployment of troops to the Middle East following an uprising in Iran that its leaders drowned in blood. The president was certainly thinking about attacking Iran, but he had not made up his mind about the timing.
Following his telephone conversation with Netanyahu, Trump instructed the CIA to verify Israel’s intelligence. It checked out. Three days later, his envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff called from Geneva. Negotiations with Iran were going nowhere, they claimed. Now it all came together for Trump: the plan, the operational opportunity, the diplomatic deadlock. The result was Operation Epic Fury, a joint American and Israeli surprise strike that killed Khamenei and triggered the war.
However, the clash between Iran and the United States did not start with that phone call, or even with the enriched uranium deep underground at Isfahan. It began eight years earlier, when Washington and Beijing entered a silent existential struggle over the physical architecture of the future. This was a fierce war of position that was buried in dreary trade ministry announcements about minerals most people have never heard of. To understand why American and Israeli aircraft struck Tehran on that Saturday morning, we need to travel not to the Persian Gulf but to the cancer villages of Inner Mongolia.
At the Bayan Obo mining district in Inner Mongolia, 150…
Auteur: Guy Laron
