The US is Responsible for its Decision to Attack Iran

There is a growing tendency in American politics to attribute Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran to his being misled by Netanyahu. While this may explain his choice, it obscures the structures that enable one person to destabilize global security with minimal domestic or international support. Moreover, narratives emphasizing external influence on Trump misrepresent the U.S.-Israel power balance and exaggerate the influence of pro-Israel organizations on American policy. This allows U.S. leaders to deflect blame for an unpopular war abroad rather than confront the reality that America’s massive military—controlled largely by the presidency and a hawkish foreign policy establishment with limited democratic oversight—created the structural conditions for this conflict.

In the six weeks since the American and Israeli military campaign against Iran began, numerous actors have suggested that Israel drew the United States into the conflict. These voices span the political spectrum—from Bernie Sanders, America’s most prominent progressive politician, to Nick Fuentes, America’s most prominent neo-Nazi, to Marco Rubio, the current Secretary of State. Contributing to the narrative, a leading counter-terrorism official resigned and blamed “Israel and its powerful American lobby” for the war, while an ex-Marine was forcibly removed from a congressional hearing after shouting, “No one wants to fight for Israel.” The New York Times, along with most major news sources, continues to report that U.S. and Israeli war aims are diverging.

However, focusing on Netanyahu’s alleged manipulation of Trump, or on the lobbying efforts of pro-Israel groups, overlooks the fact that US-Iranian tensions span decades and that attempts at reconciliation have failed due to a lack of bipartisan support. Relations between the US and Iran soured after the 1979 revolution and the subsequent hostage crisis. Further deterioration gave rise to numerous crises and sources of mutual recrimination: the Iran-Contra affair, American attacks on Iranian ships and civilian aircraft, Iranian support for groups opposed to the United States and Israel in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Yemen, and mutual accusations of malevolence. The last serious attempt to reduce tensions—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—failed when Trump, backed by a large faction of the Republican Party, withdrew the United States from the deal, and the Biden administration chose not to re-enter or renegotiate the agreement.

Above all, the focus on whether Trump’s decision to go to war was influenced by Netanyahu feeding him misleading information seriously misrepresents the power dynamics at play. Israel depends heavily on the United States to maintain its military and diplomatic position. If the Trump administration had accepted Iranian concessions and made a deal, or made clear to Israel that it would neither take part in, nor offer military or diplomatic support for, any war with Iran, then the Israelis would not have been in a position to launch this war. Instead of using this leverage to pressure Israel not to attack Iran, the United States moved a massive military force into the region. Furthermore, America has a large intelligence community and many regional experts who told Trump that the Israeli leader was misrepresenting the likely outcomes of attacking Iran. The American leadership chose not to listen—just like they made an affirmative choice to launch this war.

Israeli Lobbying – Not Powerful in the Way Many Think

Those highlighting Israeli actions pushing the Americans to invade Iran often point to the strength of the Israel lobby in the United States. This overstates what professional lobbyists and political action committees alone can achieve without public support in an American political system filled with many competing and wealthy interest groups. For comparison, Qatar spends substantial sums lobbying the U.S. Congress and even bought a plane  for Trump’s use. In return, it receives some military protection and arms sales. However, this effort does not give Qatar significant control over American foreign policy, as evidenced by the Saudi blockade or Israeli bombing of the country.

What differentiates the American domestic politics surrounding Israel from those surrounding Qatar is the existence of pro-Israel social constituencies in America. Unlike the paid lobbyists and think tanks lobbying for Qatar, pro-Israel organizations in America can draw upon support from both grassroots activists and wealthy donors to fund and sustain themselves. Because its key base of support are found among various constituencies inside the US, the political action committees and the broader network of civil society organizations advocating for American support to Israel—what Mearsheimer and Walt called the ‘Israel lobby’—is better thought of as American lobbying and organizing for Israel.

Support for Israel in American politics, civil society, and the public is not primarily a Jewish-American phenomenon. Until the 2023 Israel-Hamas war, the majority of American supporters of both major political parties had favorable opinions of Israel and support in Congress was very strong. Furthermore, some of America’s largest pro-Israel organizations are Christian Zionist groups, the largest of which now outnumber the total number of American Jews (many of whom do not identify as Zionists). Even those organizations aiming to channel American Jewish support for Israel—such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—or civil society organizations that support Israel—such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)—increasingly reflect the position of a small number of wealthy donors (some Jewish, some not) rather than broader sentiment among America’s diverse Jewish community. This is important to reiterate, because it makes clear that American Jews are not collectively responsible for American support for Israel.

Finally, pro-Israel organizations are part of an entire ecosystem of organizations and political groups advocating for more American military action abroad. In fact, many of Israel’s strongest supporters—such as Rep. Brian Mast, who famously wore an Israeli military uniform in Congress—are also hawkish on issues such as China and Venezuela. The fact that foreign policy hawks appear to set the Trump administration’s agenda on certain issues is a symptom of both erratic decision-making within the Trump administration and of how detached American foreign policy decision making has become from public participation and opinion.

Blaming Netanyahu to Blame Trump

For Trump and those aligned with him, leaking stories to the press and hinting at how Israel misled them into the conflict is an easy way to offload their own responsibility for the war. Almost all of the Republican leadership either support the war or refuse to oppose it. Now that it’s here, not going well, and is increasingly unpopular, they need someone to blame. Furthermore, for Democrats and Republicans alike, focusing on Israeli actions in causing the war allows them to criticize an unpopular war without implicating anyone in the American state or having to articulate what they would have done differently.

Focusing on purported Israeli influence also carries a significant disadvantage: it reduces the war’s causes to Donald Trump’s personal failings. Indeed, for many American liberals, this appears to be precisely the point. Emphasizing Netanyahu’s influence over Trump highlights the erratic nature of Trump’s foreign policy and his susceptibility to manipulation, while deflecting attention from their own responsibility for America’s militaristic agenda and the political challenge of formulating a clear alternative. Put simply, ‘we allowed the military industrial complex and national security state to get out of control’ seems more politically risky than ‘Netanyahu tricked Trump’.

This also shields other members of the Trump administration and the military leadership, as well as parts of the media and business from responsibility. The unfortunate reality is that a domestic political system exists that appears wholly unable or unwilling to subject foreign policy to the scrutiny of popular opinion or the constraints of public will. It rests atop a military-industrial complex that channels significant resources to key political constituencies domestically, using a large lobbying effort in Congress, influence over significant numbers of jobs in every state, and the powerful narratives of American nationalism to obtain approval for enormous amounts of military spending. Crucially, over recent decades, this apparatus has grown increasingly detached from the public and centralized around the presidency. The fact that Trump seems to believe claims that are contested or demonstrably false—despite clear information from within and outside the national security establishment that a war with Iran would unfold exactly as it has—is a sign of profound dysfunction within the U.S. polity.

A more accurate and productive narrative would hold that U.S. foreign policy is becoming increasingly detached from democratic participation and concentrated in the executive branch and in the person of the president , and that building a global security architecture around such an arrangement is inherently unstable. While this change has been a trend throughout the twentieth century, it now seems to be intensifying. The initial 2003 invasion of Iraq, while equally ill-conceived, began with broad support among the public and within Congress. Today, with Congress being unable to muster political will to exert any meaningful control over foreign policy , presidential support alone is sufficient to kidnap the Venezuelan president, threaten to invade Greenland, bomb Somalia, and launch war on Iran in several months. If Americans are angered that a war has been launched which most of them opposed, they should examine how their own institutions made such an outcome possible.