The Mistake of Believing Israel Is Dictating His War

Since the beginning of the war between the United States and Iran, one interpretation has taken hold among some analysts: Donald Trump was supposedly drawn by Israel into a confrontation that was not initially a priority for the United States. I think this view is incorrect. In addition to underestimating the severity of the conflict between Washington and Tehran, it misinterprets Donald Trump’s character. No one can easily force Donald Trump to go to war against his will. When he strikes, it is because he believes he is serving his own agenda, his own understanding of power, and his own narrative of American history.

In the American strategic imagination, Iran is not just another issue. It is not simply another hostile regime in the Middle East. It is an old wound. 1979 has never truly left the American memory. The hostage crisis in Tehran did not merely humiliate a president; it imprinted on the strategic unconscious of the United States the image of an America challenged, ridiculed, and powerless. This memory finds particularly fertile ground with the American president. He doesn’t reason simply as a foreign policy strategist. He reasons in terms of force, affront, domination, and historical revenge.

This is where many are mistaken. They view Trump through the conventional lens of alliances and conclude that, since Israeli interests converge with the war against Iran, then Israel must have led Washington to this choice. But the causal relationship can be interpreted differently. The President’s fixation on Iran was not caused by Israel; rather, it provided him with a tactical window of opportunity. This is an important distinction. Being dictated to on the subject is not the same as being influenced on the timing. Fundamentally, however, he had already decided on his strategy, which included applying maximum pressure, refusing to normalize relations with the regime, and being determined to limit its military, political, and economic leeway.

His approach to Iran is based on the straightforward belief that diplomacy is insufficient to contain this regime in the long run. According to him, every discussion buys time for the Iranian regime, every compromise helps it survive, and every Western constraint is seen as weakness in Tehran. Therefore, Donald Trump wants to eliminate the Iranian danger rather than manage it. Nuclear weapons, missiles, regional networks, maritime threat capabilities, and the power to blackmail Iran through the straits: for him, Iran is a strategic nexus that must be dismantled, not supported.

But it is also important to understand another dimension of Trumpism: he does not like protracted wars. He does not seek occupation, nor grand pronouncements on democracy, nor endless reconstruction like that of Iraq or Afghanistan. His method is different: strike hard, destabilize the adversary, impose a position of weakness, then emerge proclaiming victory. It’s a logic of coercion, not patient transformation. In this sense, he can desire the collapse of the Iranian regime without wanting to bear the cost of rebuilding the country himself.

That’s why I don’t believe the theory of a “manipulated president.” It’s reassuring for those who refuse to see that America can still have its own project of power in the Middle East. Trump isn’t waging war on Iran to please Israel. He’s doing it because, in his eyes, Tehran embodies three intolerable things: a historical affront, a strategic threat, and a test of credibility for American power.

Israel may have accelerated the moment. But the war itself belongs to the United States of America. And that’s precisely what many still refuse to face.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)