Trump's April Fools' Address to the nation

Expectations reached a fever pitch Wednesday, but he neither called for an end to the war nor announced a ground invasion. Bottom line: We're not finished.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

Apr 01, 2026

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-address-iran/

Washington was literally sizzling Wednesday with expectations ahead of President Donald Trump's evening address on Iran. Would he announce a ceasefire? Would he just declare the war over, wash his hands of the mess, and leave the Strait of Hormuz to the Persian Gulf and Europe? What about a full land invasion?

Turns out he did none of that — except maybe the part about the Strait, but we'll get to that in a second.

Trump gave a speech that analyst Dan DePetris noted should have been delivered before launching the attacks on Iran on Feb. 28. He spent much of the approximately 15 minutes building a case for bombing the hell out of Tehran for the last 30 days. "The most violent and thuggish regime on Earth," it "continued their relentless quest for nuclear weapons and rejected every attempt at an agreement." The U.S. had no choice. "We took them out. We took them all out so that no one would really dare stop them. And their race for a nuclear bomb, a nuclear weapon, a nuclear weapon like nobody has ever seen before, they were right at the doorstep." He went on:

"Our objectives are very simple and clear. We are systematically dismantling the regime's ability to threaten America or project power outside of their borders. That means eliminating Iran's Navy, which is now absolutely destroyed, hurting their air force and their missile program at levels never seen before, and annihilating their defense industrial base. We've done all of it. Their Navy is gone, their air force is gone. Their missiles are just about used up or beaten. Taken together. These actions will cripple Iran military, crush their ability to support terrorist proxies and deny them the ability to build a nuclear bomb. Our armed forces have been extraordinary. There's never been anything like it. Militarily, everyone is talking about it, and tonight, I'm pleased to say that these core strategic objectives are nearing completion."

So the war is over right? Wrong. According to Trump the U.S. military has "crushed" Iran, but it's not finished. "Over the next two to three weeks, we're going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong. In the meantime, discussions are ongoing." (As they say on social media, tell us Iran is fighting back without telling us Iran is fighting back.)

Again, Trump erroneously noted that while he didn't want regime change "they're all dead" and the "the new group is less radical and much more reasonable." He said in his "two to three week" timetable, "if during this period of time...If there is no deal, we are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously. We have not hit their oil, even though that's the easiest target of all, because it would not give them even a small chance of survival or rebuilding. But we could hit it and it would be gone. And there's not a thing they could do about it."

Iran can retaliate by hitting oil and energy plants in the region harder, but to mention that would say out loud that the Iranians can still fight and are not playing by our rules. Instead, he said not to worry about the high gasoline prices or the oil shortages; we don't get our oil from the Persian Gulf, and we'll get more from Venezuela anyway. As for all of the other global commerce which includes almost everything in our current supply chains, he was non-committal to opening up the Strait of Hormuz by force. In an auspicious twist, he put it on everyone else to open the Strait.

"So to those countries that can't get fuel, many of which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran. We had to do it ourselves. I have a suggestion. Number one, buy oil from the United States of America. We have plenty. We have so much," he said. "And number two, build up some delayed courage. Should have done it before. Should have done it with us, as we asked, go to the Strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves. Iran has been essentially decimated. The hard part is done, so it should be easy, and in any event, when this conflict is over, the Strait will open up naturally."

Comparing the 30-day war to the length of the Korean War, Iraq, and World War I, Trump reached for a way to scold Americans for getting antsy but it somehow came off as boasting as though he could completely destroy an enemy in a much lesser time. "(The world) just can't believe what they're seeing...the brilliance of the United States military."

What the world is seeing is this "decimated" Iran hitting targets across the Persian Gulf and in Israel consistently, all the way through the speech, according to Al Jazeera news. The price of oil is up, partners across the region are curtailing energy use and anticipating food shortages. This will hit American households no matter what Trump says. The war is not over not because he says so but because Iran has not given Trump the clear victory he wants. Tonight he clearly threatened more escalation, but it was not as defined as an announced land invasion. He all but said the Strait was not worth it.

Nor did he unilaterally "declare victory" to save face. He did not mention Israel once, but one could sense its influence in every line. Trump says he is going to "finish it" and "fast." Unrelenting, unspecified violence. Anyone looking for more than that turned out to be an April Fool.

Israel’s goal in Iran is not just regime change, but complete collapse

For Israel, a failed Iranian state fractured by civil war is preferable to any other outcome. They don’t want to just change the regime in Iran, they want to collapse the state itself.

By Kate McMahon  March 9, 2026 

https://mondoweiss.net/2026/03/israels-objective-in-iran-is-not-merely-regime-change-but-total-societal-collapse/

After decades of disastrous wars in the Middle East, the U.S. may have finally learned one lesson: regime change is exceedingly difficult. Removing a head of state is the easy part; what comes after is not. If the underlying goal is regime change, it’s expected the US will cultivate an alternative leadership overseeing a somewhat functioning state. This is when things go awry – and why few are meaningfully working towards a regime change in Iran.

The examples of such failed endeavors are numerous. The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003; they killed Saddam Hussein in 2006. Twenty years later, the U.S. is still in Iraq. Preemptive declarations of “mission accomplished” contradicted the long complications of nation-building that were yet to come. Today, Iraq is deeply divided with a convoluted political system fractured along ethnic lines – still, it is a functioning state, but it took two and a half decades, billions of dollars, around a million dead, and a wave of terror across the region. Whatever stability Iraq has achieved also owes more to Iraqi political adaptation than to American design.

Meanwhile in Afghanistan, the U.S. spent two decades attempting to replace the Taliban – only to get the Taliban, once again. And in Syria, Washington armed rival factions seeking to topple Bashar al-Assad, stoking ethnic tensions and plunging the country into civil war. At one point, militias armed by the Pentagon were fighting those armed by the CIA.

But Libya provides a different kind of cautionary tale. In 2011, U.S. strikes aided in the killing of Muammar Gaddafi. Yet officials in the Obama administration weren’t particularly concerned with installing a replacement or wanted to become enmeshed in the messy business of nation building, leaving Libyans to deal with the aftermath and subsequent power vacuum alone. In 2010, Libya was one of the wealthiest countries in Africa and enjoyed a high standard of living. Today, it’s a failed state primarily run by violent militias and slave traders, marred by years of civil war.

Presently, the U.S. has assassinated Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei under the pretext of bringing democracy to Iran, or because they will soon have nuclear weapons, a false assertion. What comes next?

Though Washington officials may feign efforts to reinstall the Shah, this attempt is perfunctory at best. The exiled son of Iran’s brutal dictator, overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, is not poised to ride into Tehran on a white horse and set the country right with a monarch’s flair. While he retains a loyal following among the Iranian diaspora in the United States – particularly those from wealthy families who flourished under the violent monarchy – he is deeply unpopular within Iran. Few are seriously entertaining such fantasies that reinstalling a king who has lived in America for four decades will be smooth-sailing.

With the monarchist restoration largely dismissed, attention shifted to the Islamic Republic’s internal line of succession. When discussing a potential successor to Khamanei last week, Trump told a reporter: “The attack was so successful, it knocked out most of the candidates. It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.” In light of Khamanei’s second son being appointed Supreme Leader, Israeli officials have pledged to assassinate him and every subsequent successor. 

American and Israeli strikes on Iran have eliminated viable opposition leaders, including jailed critics of the Islamic Republic. Reportedly, the U.S. is also intentionally targeting leftist activists.

Because ultimately, replacing the Islamic Republic is not the main objective, or even a desirable one. Rather, the goal in Iran is ethnic balkanization and a failed state. They don’t want to change the regime in Iran, they want to collapse the state itself. The purpose of military strikes is to disintegrate the state’s institutions, fueling ethnic tensions and secessionist movements, leaving Iran deeply divided and marred by civil war and sectarian violence — a parallel to 2015 Syria.

Political collapse could intensify separatist pressures among Kurds in the northwest, Baluchis in the southeast, and Azeris in the north, particularly if outside powers sought to weaponize ethnic grievances. Already, the Trump administration has discussedarming separatist groups within Iran, which would mirror the horrific strategy used in Syria and Afghanistan: empowering brutal militias fighting amongst one another. But in this instance without American boots on the ground.

The “Department of War” is thus not concerned with Iraq and Afghanistan syndrome, because they seemingly have no intent on getting entangled in another round of nation-building and forever war. Rather, they intend to destabilize Iran, leave it to the wolves, and withdraw.

This dystopian trajectory clears the way for Israel to eliminate all meaningful military opposition in the region. In Syria, Israel has spent the last year bombing the country’s military infrastructure and obliterating its capacities – despite the new government being a western ally and issuing no threats against Israel. It’s clear Israel will tolerate no one in the region even having the potential to challenge it.

Israel’s security doctrine has long centered on maintaining a “qualitative military edge” – ensuring overwhelming technological and operational superiority over any regional rival. Codified in U.S. law, the principle is clear: no neighboring state should be allowed to develop the capacity to challenge Israeli military dominance. Within that framework, a fragmented state would pose far less of a long-term threat than an independent regional power capable of rebuilding its forces.

It’s evident Netanyahu desires the eradication of any and all regional powers. He has been warning since 1990 that Iran was on the brink of nuclear capability, spending three decades searching for an excuse for the US to intercede on Israel’s behalf and strike Iran. Though weakened, the Axis of Resistance still proves a stubborn obstacle to Israel expanding its borders in pursuit of “Greater Israel” – not just seizing the remaining Palestinian territories, but stretching into Syria and Lebanon. Therefore, the resistance must be eliminated, and the path goes through Iran.

As Danny Citrinowicz, senior researcher at Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies, told the Financial Times this week, summarizing his government’s position on Iran: “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future [or] the stability of Iran.”

From an Israeli perspective, a splintered Iran trapped in civil war is preferable to a new government, however beholden to western interests it may be (See: Syria). Meanwhile, Trump may nominally prefer a regime change to state collapse, but he is unwilling to put forth the resources to achieve it and will eventually disengage when the costs begin to mount.

If the Iranian regime falls, not just figureheads but the state apparatus itself, the inevitable result will be massive destabilization and Libya 2.0, if not worse. This is by design. The U.S. most certainly has no illusions of bringing democracy to Iran, which could potentially be achieved via support for the opposition or reformists organizing within the country, instead of bombing them. But Israel doesn’t want Iran to have a sovereign democracy, it wants incapacitation – clearing the way for its own firepower in the region to go unchecked.

Iran’s security apparatus is deeply entrenched and unlikely to unravel quickly. But if sustained strikes succeed in breaking the state rather than merely weakening its leadership, the consequences would be catastrophic. A country of nearly ninety million people does not fracture quietly. Hundreds of thousands will die, and millions more will be displaced. Because bombs never liberate – they fragment: bodies, countries, societies.

Yes, Iran Is Playing Chess – But Only After Rewriting the Rules of the Game

by Ramzy Baroud | Apr 1, 2026

https://original.antiwar.com/ramzy-baroud/2026/03/31/yes-iran-is-playing-chess-but-only-after-rewriting-the-rules-of-the-game/

The origins of chess are contested, but few dispute that while the game began in India, it was the Sassanian Persian Empire that refined it into a recognizable strategic system. It was Persia that codified its language, symbolism and intellectual framework: the shah (king), the rokh (rook), and shatranj, the modern chess game.

This is not a trivial historical detail. It is, in many ways, a metaphor that has returned with force.

Since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran on February 28, 2026, political discourse – across Western, Israeli and alternative media – has repeatedly invoked the analogy of chess to describe Iran’s conduct.

The comparison is seductive. But it is also incomplete.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu articulated this framing as early as May 2012. Speaking of Iran’s negotiating posture, he said that “it looks as though they see the talks as another opportunity to delay and deceive and buy time… Iran is very good in playing this kind of chess game, and you know sometimes you have to sacrifice a pawn to save the king.”

That statement was not merely rhetorical; it revealed a long-standing Israeli interpretation of Iran as a strategic actor operating within a calculated, long-term framework.

More than a decade later, that framing has resurfaced with renewed urgency. Analysts, policymakers and commentators now routinely describe Iran’s actions as deliberate, layered and patient – defined not by immediate gains, but by positional advantage accumulated over time.

Some observers contrast this with what they perceive as a fundamentally different approach in Washington: one driven by immediacy, spectacle and the politics of rapid outcomes.

But such a contrast, while tempting, risks oversimplification.

Iran’s approach is rooted in historical continuity. It understands the current war not as an isolated confrontation, but as the latest phase in a decade-long process of pressure, containment and confrontation.

In this sense, the battlefield is not defined by days or weeks, but by political cycles measured in years – if not generations.

The objective of its adversaries, however, has remained consistent: Shāh Māt – checkmate – the dismantling of the Iranian state as a coherent political entity.

Yet this is precisely where the central miscalculation emerges.

When the Iranian Revolution overthrew the US-backed Shah in 1979, the collapse of the system was swift and decisive. But it was not the result of external pressure. It was the inevitable outcome of a structurally brittle system.

That system was vertical – organized as a rigid hierarchy with power concentrated at the apex and legitimacy flowing downward. When the apex collapsed, the entire structure disintegrated.

If the people are the piyādeh – the pawns – then in that moment, they did not merely encircle the king; they overturned the entire board.

This experience helped shape a strategic doctrine that would later define US and Israeli military thinking: the belief that removing leadership – what is often termed “decapitation” – can trigger systemic collapse.

This doctrine appeared to succeed in Iraq following the 2003 invasion and the eventual execution of Saddam Hussein. It appeared to succeed in Libya after the killing of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

In Latin America, the same doctrine has shaped US intervention across decades – from the 1954 CIA-backed overthrow of Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz to the 1973 coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende and, most recently, the US kidnapping of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in Caracas in January 2026. In each case, the assumption was the same: remove the leadership, and the system would collapse with it.

But this model has repeatedly failed when applied to movements and societies rooted in popular mobilization rather than elite control.

In Gaza, Lebanon and, crucially, Iran, the assumption that political systems function as fragile pyramids has proven fundamentally flawed.

These are not systems sustained solely by leadership. They are sustained by social depth. In other words, they are not pyramids – they are networks.

Their resilience lies in their ability to regenerate from within society itself. Leadership can be removed, but the political energy that sustains it cannot be easily extinguished.

Israel has long recognized, at least implicitly, that assassinating Palestinian leaders does not end Palestinian resistance. Yet it has persisted in such tactics, while simultaneously expanding its strategy.

Increasingly, the focus has shifted toward the population itself – raising the cost of resistance by targeting the social fabric that sustains it.

In Gaza, this strategy has reached its most extreme form: the systematic destruction of civilian life and the open pursuit of mass extermination and mass displacement.

In southern Lebanon, a similar logic is evident. Entire communities have been uprooted, towns devastated, and infrastructure erased – not merely as ‘collateral damage’, but as part of a deliberate strategy.

The aim is unmistakable: decapitate the leadership, then erode the people. Yet in Iran, this logic has encountered its most profound limitation.

Both Washington and Tel Aviv appear to have assumed that internal dissatisfaction could be weaponized – that social grievances would override national cohesion in the face of external pressure.

This assumption reflects a deeper misreading – not only of Iranian society, but of how legitimacy itself functions within it.

Iran is not a monolithic system in the way it is often portrayed. Its political life is dynamic, contested and deeply embedded in society. Legitimacy is not imposed from above; it is continuously negotiated within the public sphere – through electoral participation, protests, and other forms of political engagement.

This dynamism produces a system that is far more resilient than it appears from the outside. The removal of a leader, or even multiple leaders, does not signify collapse. Nor does the symbolic destruction of state power.

The system persists because it is not reducible to individuals. It is reproduced through collective political experience.

This is where the chess analogy becomes truly revealing.

Iran’s strategic strength does not lie in protecting a single “king,” but in its ability to reconfigure the board itself.

In this game, continuity is not tied to any one piece. It is embedded in the relationships between them. The rallies, marches and sustained public mobilization that have continued throughout the war are not incidental. They are central.

They represent, in effect, a collective “Shah” – a form of political sovereignty that cannot be eliminated through assassination or decapitation.

Some may argue that Iran is not merely playing chess, but rewriting its rules. That, perhaps, is the most unsettling realization of all.

For if the rules themselves have changed, then the strategy designed to defeat Iran may alr

Donald Trump: A Threat to World Peace

by Michael C. Monson | Mar 31, 2026

https://original.antiwar.com/michael_monson/2026/03/30/donald-trump-a-threat-to-world-peace/

President Trump and his minions assured America that he was a man of peace who would abandon the “failed policy of regime change”. Yet, since taking office in 2025, he has bombed seven countries and threatened several more.

As a man without principles, Trump is an empty vessel into which zealots pour their venom. The xenophobe Stephen Miller dehumanizes immigrants, the mercantilist Peter Navarro extols tariffs, and the indicted war criminal Bibi Netanyahu excoriates Iran.

Netanyahu has met with Trump at least seven times since Trump regained the presidency in 2025. As pointed out by the Times of Israel: “Netanyahu’s last meeting with Trump was a hastily arranged visit on February 11, 2026, which included a three-hour meeting at the White House, uncharacteristically closed to the press. The day after that meeting, the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, the world’s largest warship, departed the Caribbean, where it was supporting US military action in Venezuela, for the Mediterranean.” Secretary of State Rubio first suggested that Israel was the driving force behind the war, and now Trump’s top counter-terrorism expert, Joe Kent, confirms that the war was started “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.

Iran has not initiated an offensive war in 300 years, a fact which apparently failed to register in the mind of President Trump. Trump explicitly stated that “based on what Steve [Witkoff] and Jared [Kushner] and Pete [Hegseth] and others were telling me, Marco [Rubio] is so involved, I thought they were going to attack us”.

Trump and his minions will argue that Iran has attacked us numerous times at the hands of Iraqis, Hezbollah, and Hamas, organizations that Iran has supported. A little over 1,000 Americans have died at their hands, fewer than those who died at the hands of Saudi Arabians on 9/11. More than half a million Iranians died during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988, a war initiated by Iraq but sustained by US support for Iraq, which included critical reconnaissance data, financial aid, and the export of biological and chemical agents usable for weapons of mass destruction.

One thousand dead Americans render Iran a rogue nation. Half a million dead Iranians leaves the US a beneficent one? Just how beneficent is the US?

Iran did not orchestrate a coup to overthrow the elected leader of the US. The US did orchestrate a coup to overthrow the elected leader of Iran in 1953.

Iran did not establish a secret police force used to violently suppress dissent and torture political prisoners in the US. In setting up SAVAK, the American CIA (along with Israel’s Mossad) did so for Iran in 1957.

Iran did not place sanctions or embargoes on the US or encourage other countries to do so. The US has done so to Iran for 47 years.

Iran did not sail warships into American territorial waters. The US has done so to Iran on numerous occasions, from the “Tanker War” of the 1980s through to the present day.

Iran did not shoot down an American civilian airliner flying in a commercial airline corridor. The USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in July 1988, killing 290 people, including 66 children. The US subsequently lied about the USS Vincennes being in Iran’s territorial waters and initially claimed that the Iranian airliner was not in the commercial airline corridor. The US never apologized, and two officers on the Vincennes were subsequently awarded medals.

Iran did not unilaterally withdraw from the nuclear deal with the US. It was President Trump who did so.

Iran did not conduct military exercises within sight of the US. The US has conducted military exercises in the Persian Gulf on multiple occasions.

Iran did not assassinate a major general of the US. President Trump ordered the assassination of the Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020.

Iran did not fly spy drones over US territory. The US has been conducting such flights over Iran for a long period.

Iran did not bomb US territory. The US has bombed Iranian territory in an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025 and again beginning on February 28, 2026.

Iran has not killed innocent American children. In the very first hours of the American preemptive war on Iran, one of the very first strikes was on a girls’ school in southern Iran, which killed an estimated 110 children. When President Trump was asked if the US had bombed the school, he said, “No, in my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran.” He continued: “We think it was done by Iran – because they are very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”

Iran is constantly castigated for its support of proxies. Indeed, in 2020, the US State Department estimated that Iran spent more than $16 billion on support of its proxies in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen between 2012 and 2020. But that support is dwarfed by American support for its proxies. In 2016, the US signed a law pledging $38 billion in military assistance to Israel from fiscal year 2019 to 2028, and Israel is by far the largest recipient of US aid, amounting to $330 billion (adjusted for inflation) from 1946 to 2024, nearly three-quarters of that being military assistance.

If Iran is complicit in the deaths attributed to its proxies, then America is complicit in the deaths attributed to Israel.

Investigative journalist Ronen Bergman, in his book Rise and Kill First, documents Israel as having carried out more targeted assassinations than any other Western nation since WWII. Many of those assassinated have been Iranians. However, that record may soon be eclipsed by American targeted killings in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Iran, Nigeria, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.

The toll of death from American actions in the Mideast is truly staggering. According to the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, US military operations in the Mideast post 9/11 are estimated to have directly killed more than 940,000 and indirectly killed an additional 3.6 to 3.8 million.

Iran is not an imminent threat to the lives of millions; Donald Trump is.

Does the Tail Wag the Dog? How Both Sides Are Missing the Bigger Picture

Binary thinking in the argument over whether the US or Israel is driving the illegal war on Iran obscures far more than it illuminates. The truth is the dog and the tail are wagging each other

by Jonathan Cook | Mar 30, 2026 

https://original.antiwar.com/cook/2026/03/29/does-the-tail-wag-the-dog-how-both-sides-are-missing-the-bigger-picture/

The joint US-Israeli war on Iran has thrust back into the spotlight a divisive debate about whether the dog wags the tail, or the tail wags the dog. Who is in charge of this war: Israel or the United States?

One side believes Israel lured Trump into a trap from which he cannot extricate himself. The tail is wagging the dog.

The other believes that the US, as the world’s sole military super-power, is the one that writes the geo-strategic script. If Israel acts, it is only because it serves Washington’s interests as well. The dog is wagging the tail.

Certainly, the idea that the tail, the client state of Israel, could be wagging the dog, the military juggernaut that is the US, seems, at best, counter-intuitive.

But then again, there is plenty of evidence that suggests advocates for the tail wagging the dog scenario may have a case.

They can point to the fact that Trump launched this war of choice on Iran despite winning the presidency on an “America First” platform in which he promised: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”

His secretary of state, Marco Rubio, openly stated that the administration was rushed into war, finding itself apparently unable to restrain Israel from attacking Iran.

Jonathan Kent, Trump’s top counter-terrorism official, noted in his resignation letter that the administration “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.

Addressing the Israeli parliament last October, Trump appeared to confess to being under the thumb of the Israel lobby. As he praised himself for moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to the illegally occupied city of Jerusalem, he repeatedly pointed to his most influential donor, the Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson, before observing: “I actually asked her once, I said, ‘So, Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more, the United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That means, that might mean, Israel, I must say.”

A video from 2001 shows Benjamin Netanyahu, now Israel’s prime minister, caught secretly on camera, telling a group of settlers: “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in the way.”

Former US President Barack Obama, who ran up against Netanyahu repeatedly as Obama tried and failed to limit the expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements, thought the same. In his 2020 autobiography, he wrote that the Israel lobby insisted that “there should be ‘no daylight’ between the US and Israeli governments, even when Israel took actions that were contrary to US policy.”

Any politician who disobeyed “risked being tagged as ‘anti-Israel’ (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election”.

Messy arrangement

But any rigid, binary way of framing the relationship between the US and Israel obscures more than it illuminates.

I addressed this issue in my 2008 book on Israeli foreign policy, titled Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iran, Iraq and the Plan to Remake the Middle East. My conclusion then, as now, was that the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv was better understood in different terms: as the dog and the tail wagging each other.

What does that mean?

Israel is Washington’s most favoured client state. It must, therefore, operate within the “security” parameters for the Middle East laid down by the US.

In fact, part of Israel’s job – the reason it is such an important client state – is because it has, until now, been able to enforce those parameters on others in the region.

But the story is more complicated than that.

At the same time, Israel seeks to maximize its ability to influence those parameters in its own interests, chiefly by shaping military, political and cultural discourse in the United States, through the many levers available to it.

Zionist lobbies, both Jewish and Christian, mobilize large numbers of ordinary people to support whatever Israel claims to be in both its and US interests.

Mega-donors like Adelson use their wealth to cajole and intimidate US politicians.

Think-tanks with murky funding write legislation on Israel’s behalf that US politicians wave through.

Legal organizations, again with opaque funding, weaponize the law to silence and bankrupt.

And media owners, all too often in Israel’s camp, mold the public mood to stigmatize as “antisemitism” anything that opposes Israeli excesses.

This makes for a very messy arrangement.

Disappearing Palestinians

The trouble with the idea that the US simply dictates to Israel – rather than that the two are constantly bargaining over what constitutes their shared interests – becomes apparent the moment we consider the two-and-a-half-year genocide in Gaza.

Israel has long had a fervent desire to disappear the Palestinians, whether through ethnic cleansing or genocide.

It wants the whole of historic Palestine, and the Palestinians are an obstacle to the realization of that goal. Should the opportunity arise, Israel is also keen to secure a Greater Israel that requires grabbing and annexing substantial territory from neighbors, particularly Lebanon and Syria – as it is doing again right now.

After the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, Israel seized on the chance to renew in earnest the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians it began in 1948, at the state’s founding.

It carpet-bombed Gaza, creating a “humanitarian crisis”, to force Egypt to open the floodgates into Sinai, where it hoped to drive the enclave’s population. Cairo refused. As a result, Israel tried to increase the pressure by slaughtering and starving the people of Gaza. In legal terms, that constituted genocide.

But the idea that the US was deeply invested in Israel carrying out a genocide in Gaza, or directed that genocide, or had any particular interest in the genocide taking place, is hard to sustain.

Washington – first under Biden, then under Trump – gave Israel cover to carry out the mass slaughter of the Palestinian population, and armed and financed the genocide. But that is very different from it having a geostrategic interest in the mass slaughter.

Rather, the US is and always has been largely indifferent as to the fate of the Palestinians, so long as they are contained. They can be locked up permanently in occupation prisons. Or ethnically cleansed to Sinai and Jordan. Or given a pretend statelet under a compliant dictator like Mahmoud Abbas. Or exterminated.

The US will bankroll whichever option Israel believes best serves its interests – so long as that “solution” can be sold by pro-Israel lobbies to western publics as a legitimate “response” to Palestinian “terrorism”.

What Israel could get away with changed on 7 October 2023. The US was prepared to approve Israel shifting from a policy of intermittently “mowing the lawn” in Gaza – short wrecking sprees – to the incremental leveling of the whole of Gaza.

In other words, Israel worked all its levers to persuade Washington that it was the right time for it to get away with genocide. It sold to the US the plan that Gaza could now be destroyed.

To present that as Washington’s plan is simply perverse. It was decisively Israel’s plan.

That doesn’t diminish in any way US responsibility for the genocide. It is fully complicit. It paid for the genocide. It armed the genocide. It must own it too.

Israeli attack dog

A similar analysis can be applied to the Iran war.

The US and Israel share the same larger policy towards Iran: they want it contained, weak, unable to exert influence. But they do so for slightly different reasons.

Israel demands to be regional hegemon in the Middle East, an invaluable client state with privileged access to Washington policymakers. Its supremacy and impunity, therefore, depend on Iran – its only plausible rival in the region – being as weak as possible and incapable of forging effective alliances with armed resistance groups such as Hizbullah in Lebanon.

Equally, Washington wants Israel unthreatened, leaving its ally free to project US imperial power into the Middle East.

But it has a more complex set of interests to consider. It needs to ensure that the Arab monarchies remain compliant, and it does so by both wielding a stick – threatening to unleash the attack dog of Israel on them should they disobey – and proffering a carrot – promising to shield them under its security umbrella against Iran so long as they stay loyal.

The ultimate goal is to guarantee unchallenged US control over the flow of oil and thereby the global economy.

In other words, the US has to weigh far more interests in how it deals with Iran than Israel does.

Unlike Israel, Washington has to consider the effects of an attack on Iran on the global economy, to assess any impact on the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and protect against rival powers like China and Russia exploiting strategic missteps.

For those reasons, Washington has traditionally preferred maintaining a degree of stability in the region. Instability is very bad for business, as is being demonstrated only too clearly right now.

Israel, by contrast, regards its struggle against Iran in existential terms. Many in the Israeli cabinet view it as a religious war. They are not interested in simply containing Iran – a decades-old policy they believe has failed. They want Iran and its allies on their knees, or at least in so much chaos that they cannot pose any kind of challenge to Israeli regional hegemony.

That point was highlighted by Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s former national security adviser, this week in an interview with Jon Stewart. He cited recent comments to him by Israel’s former military intelligence lead on Iran, Danny Cintrinowicz, that Netanyahu’s aim is to “just break Iran, cause chaos”. Why? “Because,” says Sullivan, “as far as they’re concerned, a broken Iran is less of a threat to Israel.”

In other words, Israel wants to engineer instability in Iran, which is sure to spread instability across the region.

Weaving mischief

Those two agendas, as should be clear by now, are not easily compatible. Which is why Netanyahu has spent decades working every lever at his disposal in Washington to create an appetite for war.

Had war been self-evidently in US interests, his efforts would have been superfluous.

Instead Israel has had to deploy its lobbies, marshal its donors and recruit sympathetic columnists to slowly shift the public mood to the point where a war was conceivable rather than patently dangerous.

And most importantly of all, Israel nurtured an intimate, ideological alliance with the neocons – hawkish, zealously pro-Israel US officials – who long ago gained a foothold in the inner sanctums of Washington.

Each recent administration has been a cat-fight over whether the neocons or more “moderate” voices would win out. Under George W Bush, the neocons dominated, leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Israel’s short war on Lebanon in 2006, and a failed plan to expand the war to Syria and then Iran. I documented all of this in Israel and the Clash of Civilisations.

Under Obama, the neocons were forced to take more of a back seat, which is why his administration was able to sign a nuclear deal with Iran that held until Trump ripped it up in 2018, during his first term as president. Biden, as with so much else, dithered.

In Trump’s second term, the neocons seem to be firmly back in charge, again weaving their mischief. The result – an illegal war on Iran – is likely to be a strategic catastrophe for the US, and a potential, if short-lived, victory for Israel.

Secret power

So isn’t this the same as saying the tail wags the dog?

No, not least because that assumes the visible realm of US politics – the President, the Congress, the two main political parties – are the sole repositories of power in the system.

Even in this visible sphere, support for Israel has dramatically waned since the Gaza genocide. As the illegal war on Iran grows ever more costly, both in treasure and lives, support for Israel among US voters is going to fall off a cliff.

Israel is for the first time a deeply partisan issue, dividing Democrats and Republicans, as well as a generational divide between the young and old. It is even splitting the MAGA base Trump depends on.

This political polarization will continue to get much worse, ultimately freeing braver figures in US politics to start speaking out in franker terms about Israel’s nefarious role.

But power in the US isn’t just wielded at the formal, visible level. There is a permanent bureaucracy, with an institutional memory, that operates out of sight. We have gained brief glimpses of its covert operations from the work of Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s publishing platform for whistleblowers, and from Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who revealed illegal mass surveillance by the US state of its own citizens.

Both suffered serious consequences for their efforts to bring a little transparency to a profoundly corrupt system of secret power. Assange was locked away in a London high-security prison for many years as the US sought to extradite him on trumped-up “espionage” charges, while Snowden was forced into exile in Russia to evade arrest and long-term incarceration.

That bureaucracy – sometimes referred to as the Deep State, or the military-industrial complex – doesn’t play or fight fair. It doesn’t need to. It operates in the shadows.

Were it to so choose, it could undermine the Israel lobby, and thereby curtail Israel’s influence over the visible realm of US politics.

It could effectively do to the leaders of the lobby – AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, the Zionist Organization of America, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Christians United for Israel, and others – what it did to Assange and Snowden.

It could, for example, influence public discourse to begin questioning whether these groups are really serving US interests or acting as foreign agents. That would, in turn, free up space for the media and legislators to call for tighter restrictions on these groups’ activities, requiring them to register as such.

The permanent bureaucracy is doubtless capable of doing much darker, underhand things too.

The fact that it hasn’t chosen to do any of this yet suggests Israel’s goals are not seen so far to be significantly in conflict with US goals.

But that could be about to change. In fact, the current, all-too-public debates about Israel driving the US into a war against Iran – an idea already seeping into popular consciousness – may be the first salvos in the battle to come.

If the war on Iran turns out to be a catastrophic misstep, as it gives every appearance of being, there will be a price to pay – and leading US politicians are likely to scramble to shift the blame on to Israel. It may be that they are already getting in their excuses.

The all-too-visible freedom Israel has enjoyed in Washington to buy, bully and silence could soon become a central liability. It will not be hard to argue that a system so clearly open to manipulation that the US could be bounced into a self-sabotaging war needs to be remade, to prevent any repeat of such a disaster.

This may be the biggest lesson Washington learns from the war on Iran. That it is time to stop the tail wagging so vigorously.

A month into the conflict, it’s time to press pause on this war: Global Times editorial

By Global Times

Published: Mar 30, 2026

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202603/1357826.shtml

It has now been a full month since the US and Israel launched military strikes against Iran on February 28. Far from achieving their so-called "intended objectives," this conflict, which was initiated by the US and Israel without justification amid negotiations, has instead edged steadily toward the brink of losing control. Although it is uncertain how this conflict will end, its shock to geopolitics and the global order is already profound. What is urgently needed now is to prevent this conflict - one that should never have happened - from sliding into the abyss of complete loss of control.

In just one month, the perilous escalation of the conflict has far exceeded initial expectations. The flames of war have spread from the Persian Gulf to the eastern Mediterranean, and from the Strait of Hormuz to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Beyond Iran and Israel, the territories of Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain have also come under direct military strikes, leaving critical infrastructure and civilian safety severely impacted. The US government initially projected that the war against Iran would last "four to five weeks," and later repeatedly claimed it would "end soon." The facts have proven otherwise: Once modern warfare is initiated, it is difficult to stop it according to the "pre-set trajectory." The US and Israeli attempt at a "swift and decisive victory" have now collapsed, and the consequences of reckless military intervention in the Middle East are becoming increasingly evident.

This war was built from the outset on severe strategic miscalculations and a morality deficit. From the bloody tragedy in the school in Minab to the "black toxic rain" on the streets of Tehran, repeated strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities have triggered global alarm and sharply heightened the risk of radioactive leaks. This conflict has also imposed an energy crisis, supply chain disruptions, and economic uncertainty on the entire world. With the Strait of Hormuz remaining under restricted navigation, international oil prices have surged past $112 per barrel. If the conflict continues to escalate, the risk of a global economic recession will rise significantly, undermining the shared interests of people across all nations.

What is most alarming now is the erosion of limits on targets and the sharp rise in the risk of spillover. The conflict is no longer confined to military objectives; both sides have begun striking key civilian infrastructure, including oil refineries, desalination plants, and power stations - facilities vital to national economies and everyday life. Once this "mutual destruction" mode becomes the norm, it will trigger even more severe humanitarian disasters. The Houthi movement's declaration of entry into the war not only opens a new front but also heightens risks along the Red Sea shipping lane, increasing global oil prices and logistics costs. Meanwhile, the deployment of 3,500 US sailors and marines to the Middle East has sharply increased the likelihood of a ground offensive and the danger of dragging the conflict into a protracted quagmire.

"Enough: end the eternal war" - such slogans appeared in a square in Tel Aviv on March 28, marking one month since the conflict began. On the same day, more than 3,100 related protests were held across the US, with "no more war" emerging as one of the protesters' core demands. Even Joe Kent, director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, reportedly resigned because he could not "in good conscience" support the US war with Iran - a clear sign of the war's lack of public support. 

Following an airstrike on Iran University of Science and Technology, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared that American and Israeli-affiliated universities in the Middle East would be considered "legitimate targets." This serves yet another warning: War is never a solution, and it only breeds more hatred and killing.

Although the current situation is filled with uncertainty, it also contains a potential window for de-escalation. The US, Israel, and Iran are all facing increasingly prominent pressures in their ongoing confrontation, which significantly constrain their strategic space and policy choices. Previously, both the US and Iran had signaled a willingness to negotiate; the key lies in whether all parties can maintain strategic restraint under pressure, gradually restore communication mechanisms through limited de-escalation measures, and create conditions for subsequent political solutions. The conflict is now on the brink of complete loss of control, where every misjudgment and each escalation could lead to irrevocable consequences. Therefore, all parties involved in the conflict should remain calm and rational, abandon confrontational thinking, and not easily let slip the fleeting glimmer of peace.

It has been over a month, and the 168 girls in Minab can no longer grow up. War has no winners, only irreparable harm. From the outset of the conflict, China has made it clear that the urgent priority is to achieve a ceasefire and stop the fighting as soon as possible. This is a war that should never have happened, and it brings no benefits to any party involved. The history of the Middle East repeatedly teaches us that force is not the solution to problems; armed confrontation only adds new hatred and breeds new crises. We once again call for an immediate halt to this conflict, to prevent the situation from escalating further and to avoid the spread of war.