Report: Trump Advisors Want Israel to Attack Iran First to Provoke Iranian Retaliation Against US Assets

According to POLITICO, senior US officials think the 'politics' would be better if Israel started the war

by Dave DeCamp | February 26, 2026

https://news.antiwar.com/2026/02/26/report-trump-advisors-want-israel-to-attack-iran-first-to-provoke-iranian-retaliation-against-us-assets/

Senior advisors to President Trump would prefer if Israel attacks Iran to launch a war against the Islamic Republic rather than having the US lead the opening airstrikes, POLITICO reported on Wednesday.

The thinking is that if Israel starts the war and Iran retaliates against the US, the “politics” would be better for the administration, and it would be easier to justify the war to the American people.

“There’s thinking in and around the administration that the politics are a lot better if the Israelis go first and alone and the Iranians retaliate against us, and give us more reason to take action,” a person familiar with the discussions within the administration told POLITICO.

Polling shows that the idea of a war with Iran is extremely unpopular among Americans and that US voters don’t want to risk American lives to bring about regime change. Support for Israel has also sharply declined in recent years, so a war that Israel leads the US into would also likely have very little support.

Despite the negotiations with Iran, the POLITICO report said that the belief among senior officials is that “we’re going to bomb them,” according to one of the sources, who also acknowledged the risk of major US casualties.

“If we’re talking about a regime-change scale attack, Iran is very likely to retaliate with everything they’ve got. We have a lot of assets in the region, and every one of those is a potential target,” the person said. “And they’re not under the Iron Dome. So there’s a high likelihood of American casualties. And that comes with lots of political risk.”

The Trump administration has failed to make a coherent case to the American people about why they are potentially planning to bomb Iran, as top officials have been pointing to Iran’s nuclear program as a pretext, despite President Trump’s insistence that he “obliterated” the nuclear facilities that were hit with US airstrikes in the June 2025 war.