Attacking Iran’s criminals is fair enough, but with the credibility-free Trump and Netanyahu in charge, it’s also a gift to conspiracists. Here’s how to end it reasonably.
Decades ago I met a nice young woman in Romania who did not believe she was an antisemite. But she did believe that the Jews control the world through shadowy methods outlined in some sort of a “map.” She asked for my copy and was shocked I did not have one. I’m not kidding about this, and neither was she.
Presumably Tucker Carlson is not quite this dumb. But he did actually argue this week that Chabad, an ultra-religious Jewish organization that does works both good and bad, was behind the US decision to attack in Iran. He seems to not be kidding either – though to be fair, with media antisemites you never can tell.
There’s a fascinating paradox at the heart of the current Iran war. An intervention to get rid of the Iranian dictatorship is as justified as any ever. You can be against interventions on principle, including against Hitler, even bombing the train tracks to Auschwitz, and that would make you a little weird, but a pacifist is a pacifist. If you’re not, though, you understand that sovereignty has limits. Until now, interesting, Trump seemed to be a sovereignty maximalist; we all develop.
Iran makes a great case for being an exception, certainly after its mullahs massacred many thousands of protestors in January. They’re awful, and have been from the start. Rigging the 1979 referendum that established the Islamic Republic, screaming “Death to America” while taking hostages at the US embassy, forcing women to wear hijabs, hanging homosexuals from cranes, and messing with neighboring Arab countries via jihad-exporting, hatred-spewing, death-bringing corrupt mafia-militias. None of it is acceptable.
If there is one circumstance that compels you to leave evildoers alone, though, that is when they have nuclear weapons – like North Korea. That is precisely why Iran seeks nukes, and that is why they must not have them. Also, they should not have long-range ballistic missiles. It be permitted to keep funding proxies militias around the Middle East.
It is tempting to seek a deal to achieve this, because war is terrible. The deal that has been on the table for years was no nukes in exchange for relief from economic sanctions – which meant billions flowing to the regime to be diverted into the missiles, militias, and domestic repression while enriching regime goons.
That was basically the deal Obama (and the handful of other “powers”) reached in 2015. It was a lousy deal for the Iranian people, who continued to suffer under the boot of the regime, but a pretty good one for Israel. Even so, the cartoonishly devious Netanyahu convinced Trump to walk away from it in 2018, even as the Mossad and CIA were denying his claims that the Iranians were cheating.
They both had their reasons – Bibi thrives off conflict, and for Trump, anything Obama did must be bad – but it was an extremely stupid act. The only justification would have been to move to crippling the regime that very day – but instead it simply enabled it to resume enrichment and continue arming Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, which brought us to this day.
Now, after the massacres of protesters in Iran, after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 invasion of Israel and the regional war it sparked, destroying the regime is a reasonable choice to make. And most Iranians would be supremely thankful if it works – that much is for sure.
But one can hardly imagine a worse pair of messengers, at least in the democratic world, and actually in the history of the democratic world, than Trump and Netanyahu.
Netanyahu, who is an extremely clever man and a brilliant politician, oddly lacks panoramic understanding of complex situations; he is laser-focused on whatever aspect of a situation he sees, and whatever he thinks might benefit him. Mainly, he has become a classic elected authoritarian, who would essentially stop at nothing to stay in power — most Israelis believe a version of this. Netanyahu sometimes tells the truth, is capable of articulating profound truths, and is hugely eloquent when he does, but believing him as a baseline is utterly absurd.
Moving west, it’s fair to say that no intelligent person could possibly take Trump at his word either. An intelligent person might support him for reasons to do with expected policies or outcomes, but believing him, given his record of systematic lying, is inconceivable. It also doesn’t help that Trump does not seem to have a deep grasp of history (though he does have a genius for manipulating people).
So let’s just say that no one is going to trust these guys when they say their motivation is to save the Iranian people, or even the region. In the case of Netanyahu, at least Israel is part of the region and so that might actually be part of the story. With Trump, however, absolutely no one should be surprised to hear him declaring something cringingly vulgar, like that the US needs access to Iranians oil.
After all, that’s what he did with Venezuela, mere hours after abducting the dictator Nicolas Maduro. Kidnapping a foreign leader is an action of the edge of legitimacy, if to be charitable, so you’d think Trump would keep his powder dry. But that would be so Sleepy Joe! Trump wants the oil and wants you to know it. He could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, and so on and so forth.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu probably has about 60 IQ points on Trump, and that is conservative. So it’s hardly inconceivable that he convinced his intellectual inferior to attack Iran. According to multiple reports, Trump moved in that direction after his last meeting with Netanyahu at the White House in February, and then after a call the week before the attack, in which Netanyahu explained how Israeli intel showed they could assassinate much of the Iranian leadership.
It is a short distance from that to conspiracy theorists like Carlson blaming Jews for the war (Carlson’s argument involved some nonsense about rebuilding the ancient Jewish Temple destroyed by the Romans, which some fanatics in Israel actually do want, but never mind).
For centuries, one of the most persistent antisemitic tropes has been the accusation that Jews manipulate powerful states into fighting wars on their behalf. The suggestion that Israel can pull the US into conflict feeds directly into that. Once such perceptions take hold, they can be extremely difficult to reverse.
But no less an intellectual giant than Marco Rubio seemed to inadvertently feed such notions by suggesting in recent days that the US had to attack Iran because Israel was going to do so “anyway,” and then America would have been a target. “If we stood and waited for that attack to come first, before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casulties,” reasoned the besuited successor to the John Quincy Adams, George Marshall, and Henry Kissinger.
That weirdly suggests American passivity in the face of an Israeli decision that would have endangered Americans. So Trump – who knows when he is made to look like a chump – then contradicted Rubio, claiming that “if anything”, he forced Israel’s hand. Forcing Israel to do something Israel absolutely wants is a stretch even for the world’s most powerful social media influencer, but the real lesson is this: Rubio would be wise to tend to his garden for a while.
So here are the implications of all this, and a game plan for making the best of it — indeed for ending it very well.
Considering the landscape just described, it can be no surprise that a Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted at the start of the conflict found only 27 percent of Americans supported the US action, while 43 percent opposed it. Other surveys show six in ten Americans against the military intervention.
Basically, therefore, the Iran war is strategically sound yet politically unsupported — an unstable foundation for a gamble that could reshape the Middle East.
It would be wise for Trump to do everything possible to both shorten the war — for every days brings the possibility of disaster — and also to make it decisive. The Iranians need to understand that absolutely no effort will be spared, no matter the political fallout in the US, to get them to change their behavior, regardless of what they call their regime. It is game over for the nukes, the missiles, and the militias, period. Trump should also insist on eliminating the vetting by clerics of presidential candidates, and for the restoration of real power to the Iranian parliament. That is enough.
In exchange, the world’s offer should be should:
- Offer total amnesty to the regime’s remaining thugs
- Let them keep their plunder (the Iranians can deal with that)
- An end to all sanctions
- Any peace treaty they want
- A free trade zone with the Gulf nations
- No bullshit about controlling their oil
This will present the Iranians with the prospect of a very attractive future — an absolute U-turn after years of arguing with the world. Basically, the Iranian leadership needs to understand that popular support for this is almost total. And as for the Americans, the only way this makes sense is to understand in for a penny, in for a pound.
And that creates danger for Israel, which needs the support of an American public that is rapidly drifting away.
For decades, the country’s greatest strategic asset has not been its military technology or intelligence capabilities — spectacular as these are — but rather the political, diplomatic and military backing of the United States. That relationship has not been merely transactional. It was supposed to rest on shared values and deep public support across the American political spectrum.
If that support erodes or disappears, Israel’s strategic environment will fundamentally change. To be blunt: it will not be able to arm its military. This creates a paradox. A campaign that has so far demonstrated extraordinary value for the Jewish state also stands a risk of fundamentally weakening it.
Indeed, the conflict has showcased the depth of the current US–Israel alliance to a stunning degree. To many observers, and critically to Israel’s enemies, the operation has underscored not only Israel’s capabilities but also the reality that it stands alongside the world’s most powerful state.
The strikes have projected deep into Iranian territory, revealed astonishing intelligence penetration, and destroyed or degraded key threats. Israel’s enemies across the region have already been weakened by previous rounds of fighting since Oct. 7, and the current operation has reinforced the impression that Israel can reach its adversaries wherever they operate.
Moreover, Iran’s regime has managed to isolate itself to the point where most Arab countries are in effect on the side of Israel and the US. That projection — of an unbreakable and strong alliance – may ultimately be the most important strategic element of this war.
But therein lies the rub.
The political foundations of American support for Israel are eroding, which means the very element that currently strengthens Israel’s deterrence — American participation — may also be the one most at risk.
The opposition to the war in America is unusual. Most wars begin with a “rally around the flag” moment when public support surges. Even conflicts that later became controversial — from Afghanistan to Iraq — initially enjoyed majority backing.
This one did not — in part because the case for it has not been made clearly to the public. That error is compounded by years of polarization in American politics; declining trust in institutions and leadership; and the record of Trump, who has spent years spreading conspiracy theories and demonstrating a remarkable indifference to factual truth. When a president with that record launches a war, at least half the country assumes the worst. Even if the strategic logic is sound, the credibility deficit remains.
If Americans come to believe that Israel caused a costly war that they did not support in the first place, the backlash could be severe.
Even people who reject antisemitism outright can absorb a softer version of the same idea: that American interests are being subordinated to Israeli ones. In a political environment already marked by growing skepticism toward Israel, that perception risks deepening the erosion of support that has been underway for years.
A future Democratic president, facing a base that appears to have abandoned Israel, may feel far less obligation to defend it diplomatically or militarily. Even a Republican successor could prove unreliable if the party continues its drift toward isolationism.
That likelihood is compounded by studies showing that a large part of the U.S. Jewish community itself no longer backs Zionism. That process is driven by Israel’s own policies, including the West Bank occupation and the deadly brutality of the war in Gaza.
So the very war that is showcasing the best the US-Israel alliance has to offer is also at risk of fundamentally damaging that partnership. Particularly if Netanyahu — the rightful object of much American ire — manipulates the Iran campaign into an electoral victory this year, the alliance’s greatest success could also be its undoing.
