President Trump’s televised address on the war against Iran Wednesday provided no clear message about how or when he will end the war, leaving Americans to wonder whether the next step is a peace deal or a bombing of Iran back to the Stone Age. Moreover, Trump said not one word about the role of his partner in aggression, Israel, in concluding the war, and this raises some of the greatest uncertainty about when the destruction will end.
Whenever Trump decides to quit this unjustified war, the United States could use its considerable leverage to pressure Israel to go along. But the United States — for decades, through several administrations of both parties — has failed to use this leverage. Trump has been even more deferential to Israel than previous administrations, as manifested during his first term in the multiple gifts he gave to the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Given that record, Trump would be better equipped than most previous presidents to overcome the domestic political considerations that have deterred presidents from pressuring Israel. There would be a Nixon-to-China quality to any such move by Trump. He also might be motivated by the war’s unpopularity among Americans and the open dissatisfaction among many in his own political base about the perceived role of Israel in getting the United States into the war.
Alternatively, Trump — if still hesitant to pressure Israel — might extract the United States unilaterally from the war, thereby deflating much of the domestic opposition to the war, while simply not caring whether Israel continued to attack Iran. Such a laissez-faire posture would be consistent with Trump’s “we broke it, you own it” approach in pressing the European allies and Gulf states to assume responsibility for opening the Strait of Hormuz.
Any such unilateral withdrawal would not involve a negotiated agreement with Iran. The Iranian regime — which has suffered some of its worst blows from Israeli , not American, fire — is unlikely to back away from its demand for a “final and complete cessation of aggression” and rejection of a mere partial or temporary ceasefire.
The prospects for Israel continuing this war regardless of U.S. preferences reflect several longstanding attributes of Israeli policy on Iran.
The Israeli government wants Iran to be too weak to conduct a foreign policy appropriate for a nation of Iran’s size or to compete effectively with Israel for regional influence. It wants Iran to be loathed by, and isolated from, the rest of the world — including the United States. It wants to continue blaming Iran for all the ills of the region, as Netanyahu and his government frequently do , diverting attention from Israel’s own conduct and its malign effects on regional instability.
Given these objectives, Israel’s aims in this war diverge significantly from Trump’s probable war objectives — shifting and uncertain though they may be — and certainly from U.S. interests. Any political change in Tehran that made Iran less loathsome and more cooperative with the United States would be a win for Trump, and for the United States. It would be a loss for Netanyahu’s government.
An Israeli objective in Iran is not so much regime change as regime collapse . Pursuing that objective may imply continuing rather than ending the war. A fracturing of Iran and possible civil war there would be an even bigger mess for the Trump administration to deal with than it has now. But it would be acceptable to the Israeli government and consistent with Israeli objectives. The Israeli determination to keep Iran isolated has meant Israeli opposition to diplomacy with Iran — on almost any subject, with almost any nation, but especially with Israel’s patron, the United States. This determination underlies the Netanyahu government’s strident opposition to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action , the multilateral agreement in 2015 that closed all paths to a possible Iranian nuclear weapon. That opposition was unwarranted if, as many former Israeli security officials who were free to speak their minds pointed out , the goal is to prevent Iran from ever developing such a weapon.
Israel’s opposition to U.S. diplomacy with Iran—already reflected in Israel’s killing of the Iranian leaders best positioned to negotiate an agreement — implies that it will balk at most any war-ending deal the Trump Administration might reach with Tehran. Even if Netanyahu’s government did not try to veto such a deal directly, it could torpedo negotiations by escalating its military operations against Iran. This constitutes another Israeli incentive to continue the war.
If Trump were to pressure the Israelis sufficiently for them not to subvert an impending peace agreement, then another part of Israel’s record comes into play, which is its tendency to violate such agreements whenever it is convenient for Israel to do so. Israel has done this twice in little over a year with ceasefire agreements on Gaza, breaking one such agreement in March of last year and continuing to this day a campaign of lethal assaults in violation of an agreement reached last October.
With the war in Iran, Israel could similarly accede to a U.S.-led agreement that it had no intention of observing. Just as in Gaza, it would have no trouble claiming provocations from the enemy as a reason for breaking a ceasefire. Also as in Gaza, Israeli leaders might even welcome a break from offensive operations for rest and resupply of their forces before resuming the assault. If a U.S. exit from the war did not involve an explicit agreement with Tehran, Israel would not even have to go through the charade of signing on to a ceasefire agreement. Any move during the coming weeks toward peace and security in the Persian Gulf region would be a win for Trump, as well as being consistent with U.S. interests. But this is not a goal of Netanyahu’s government. “The goal instead,” as Mitchell Plitnick accurately describes it, “is to maintain an atmosphere of insecurity so that the strongest country militarily will be able to dominate a region characterized by failed and dysfunctional states alongside friendly autocracies.”
Notwithstanding the strain of continued warfare on Israel’s forces and on a civilian population within range of Iranian and Hezbollah retaliatory strikes, the balance of other pros and cons of continuing the war is different for Israeli political leaders than for the Trump administration. Israeli decisionmakers worry less than the United States must about implications of the war for broader U.S. equities, including the economic effects of turmoil in global energy markets and reduced U.S. readiness to meet security challenges in other regions. Also, the current war is simply more popular among Israelis than among Americans.
The “complete cessation of aggression” that Iran seeks includes Israel’s assault in Lebanon, from which Israel shows no sign of backing down. Israeli operations include not only the bombardment of Beirut but also what is shaping up as an indefinite Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and expulsion of its Shia residents. In Lebanon as elsewhere, aggressive Israeli actions inevitably elicit violent responses from those who are threatened or targeted, which in turn provides Israel with the rationale for still more offensive military operations. Hezbollah — an ally of Iran and the ostensible target of the Israeli assault in Lebanon — owes its rise in the early 1980s to an earlier Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon and Hezbollah’s presenting itself as protector of all Lebanese against the invader. History may be repeating itself in Lebanon today. Unending warfare has become second nature in Israel. Netanyahu has declared that Israel will “live forever by the sword.” Mowing the grass periodic military attacks to cut down any adversary that appears to be recovering strength — is a doctrine that Israel has applied in Gaza and Lebanon and may do so in Iran. Attacks last June and in the current war constitute the first two mowings there. In addition to Israeli strategic doctrine are Netanyahu’s personal and political reasons for keeping a war going.
Trump’s alliance with Netanyahu, which made it easy to start the war against Iran, will make it hard to end the war and to avoid renewals of it. Even where U.S. and Israeli war objectives most seem to coincide — with the degradation of Iran’s military capability to strike back — lie the seeds of more, not less, regional violence in the future, some of which may suck in the United States.
The U.S. ability to remain aloof from regional rivalries often depends on a local balance of power and mutual deterrence between rivals. Upsetting that balance in this instance will lead the regional power — Israel — that has started more wars and thrown its military weight around more than any other Middle Eastern state to feel even freer than before to do more of the same.