The Iran War Could Be Catastrophic for the U.S.-Israel Alliance
And that's a good thing.
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 U.S.-Israeli relationship and Israel’s already shaky standing with the American people. For anyone who wants to see the U.S.-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.
