Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

The Iran War Could Be Catastrophic for the US-Israel Alliance. Good.

As Israel’s role in pushing the war with Iran comes into ever sharper focus, it’s up to us to turn outrage into change.

US President Donald Trump welcomes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to his Mar-a-Lago club on December 29, 2025.

It’s never a good idea to expect Donald Trump to stick to one argument. The president is a congenital liar who loses a little more brain function with each passing day. Inventing new rationales for terrible decisions is kind of his whole thing.

But even by that degraded standard, Trump’s ever-shifting justifications for his war on Iran are breathtaking. Every few hours seems to bring a new explanation for why the United States and Israel decided that it was a good time to launch an illegal, unprovoked, open-ended assault on another country. The two countries struck because of some undefined imminent threat! No, wait, it’s because the nuclear program Trump definitely “obliterated” last year was perhaps un-obliterated and needed to be re-obliterated! Sorry, what he really meant was that the Iranians took Americans hostage… in 1979, and it’s time someone did something about it! Hmm, scratch that, it’s to do regime change! Actually, hold that thought…

This nonsense makes Trump look like what he is: a reckless imperialist engaging in an already-spiraling war of choice. It also helps create what he may feel is an encouraging level of confusion about what exactly he wants out of this catastrophe.

There’s just one problem: other people are also talking about why we’re suddenly at war. And a lot of them are giving the same reason: because Israel wanted it. That has the potential to erode both the US-Israeli relationship and Israel’s already-shaky standing with the American people. For anyone who wants to see the US-Israel alliance, with all of its inherent cruelty and oppression, consigned to the dustbin of history, this can only be a good thing.

Before we get to why that is, though, it’s important to understand how this story has unfolded over the past couple of days.

The first thing that really raised eyebrows was Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s explanation of why a war with Iran was happening “now”: “[T]he President made the very wise decision—we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties…”

Translation: Israel had made it plain that it was going to bomb Iran, so the US felt it had no choice but to join in. (In a sign that Rubio wasn’t going rogue, the White House’s official “rapid response” account tweeted a video of his comments.)

Rubio’s words chime with other public statements and with recent reporting. The New York........

© The Nation