Israel is nearing the end of a remarkable, half-century-long arc of history in which it first established military dominance over its Arab neighbors and is now asserting the same degree of superiority over Iran, its one remaining regional threat.
Yet despite that astonishing record of martial success, Israel still needs the United States, its chief geopolitical ally, more than ever. Indeed, it’s fair to say that only U.S. President Donald Trump can end this latest war and deliver the strategic stability the region so badly needs.
The only question now is whether Trump will stop the war or widen it.
Only Trump, in other words, can decide whether he wants to discard his entire campaign platform and jump into another Middle Eastern war—possibly by ordering the U.S. military to bomb Iran’s most hardened nuclear facility, Fordow—or whether he decides to stop the Israelis at what they deem the cusp of final success by negotiating a deal with the tottering regime in Tehran.
The problem: Trump doesn’t seem to know yet exactly what he wants to do and is grappling with a deep split within his own Republican Party on the issue. In only the last few days the Trump administration has shifted radically from seeking diplomacy and denying involvement in the Israeli attacks to proclaiming, in Trump’s words, that “we” have “total control of the skies over Iran” and the U.S. and Israel might even “take out” Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
It appears, once again, that Israel has managed to rope a reluctant Washington into a regional conflict—one that could potentially put the 40,000 U.S. troops scattered throughout the region at risk if Trump attacks Iran.
This is nothing new. For decades, despite the steady advances in military technology, training, and intelligence gathering that have helped this tiny nation of fewer than 10 million people gain dominance over its much larger neighbors, Israel has depended critically on its alliance with the United States for much of its success.
This relationship began almost at the beginning of Israel’s existence in 1948, when it chose the right side in the Cold War: the United States. The Arab states, for the most part, became partners and allies of the Soviet Union—culminating in the supply of a large amount of Soviet weaponry to Egypt and Syria in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, including then-advanced systems such as T-62 tanks and SA-9 surface-to-air missiles. And Egypt and Syria came close to winning the war.
But that near-loss for Israel also proved the last time it faced an existential threat from the Arab countries. The 1979 peace treaty with Egypt orchestrated by U.S. President Jimmy Carter at Camp David afforded Israel a long hiatus that allowed it to build up its technological capability in coordination with the U.S. Extensive sharing of know-how ensued. In the interim, the isolated Arab states stagnated, and their militaries remained backward.
“Obviously as the Soviets lost steam and the capacity for military innovation, so went the Arabs. When the Soviets fell, the game was up,” said Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer with broad expertise in the region. “The implosion or pauperization of the most modern, Westernized Arab states—the increasingly brutal tyrannies in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt—just put the nail into the coffin. As Israeli and American technology leapfrogged forward since the end of the Cold War, an impossible gap developed.”
Gerecht added in an email: “The Islamic Republic is now experiencing this gap.” Indeed, nothing has changed the face of the Middle East more than the military and intelligence prowess Israel has demonstrated since the horrific attacks by Hamas, an Iranian ally, on Oct. 7, 2023.
At that moment 620 days ago, Israel suddenly seemed more vulnerable than it had in decades. It wasn’t just that Hamas, once seen as quiescent, inflicted the worst single-day loss of life on Jews since the Holocaust by killing more than 1,200 Israelis and taking more than 200 hostages in its surprise raid across the border. It was also that Iranian-supported Hezbollah threatened devastation from the north and Tehran was moving ahead with its nuclear weapons program.
A year and a half later, the turnabout in fortunes could not be more complete. Through a series of sophisticated military and intelligence operations, Israel not only destroyed the leadership of Hamas, but it also decimated Hezbollah and badly weakened Iran, opening the way to the toppling of Tehran’s ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The replacement of the long-ruling Assad family—members of an ancient Shiite sect called the Alawites—by a Sunni leader named Ahmed al-Sharaa in turn all but ensured that the Shiite Hezbollah had lost its vital overland armament route through Syria.
Hezbollah remains prostrate and silent even in the face of the Israeli attack on Iran. The Iran-backed militias in Iraq, also weakened, have remained quiet as well. In a post on X last Friday, the formerly fiery anti-Israel cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, said it was “most important” that Iraq “remain distant from this war,” despite the use of Iraqi airspace by Israeli jets.
And now, in the last several days, Israel has utterly humiliated the main sponsor of these once-formidable proxy militias, killing off Iran’s military leadership as well as its top nuclear scientists and establishing total air superiority. The message conveyed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Khamenei and his political leadership is clear: We can also kill you off anytime we please.
Netanyahu has also come close to asserting that the swift success of Israeli forces in eclipsing Iran’s military defenses has led his government to believe that regime change should be its new objective—an ambition that only a few months ago would have been unthinkable.
Thus, Israel is, without question, the dominant power in the Middle East at the moment (though it must still reckon with Turkey). But once again, without U.S. support, that may not spell long-term strategic success. Unless Washington steps in, hostilities will fester and Iran will likely retain some capability of going nuclear.
The problem, again, is that Trump appears to be at odds with himself and his political movement over what to do. Rushing home a day early from the G-7 summit in Canada on Monday, Trump dismissed suggestions that he is looking to restart negotiations with Iran and even warned Iranians to evacuate Tehran. But at the same time, he indicated he was open to a broader deal, saying his objective in Iran was “an end, a real end, not a cease-fire.”
According to reports and sources close to the Trump administration, senior Trump officials remain seriously divided over how much to aid the Israelis in their new war. Inside the Pentagon and National Security Council, Central Command chief Gen. Michael E. Kurilla has been pushing hard to assist the Israelis against resistance from the so-called restrainers such as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, who have embraced Trump’s message of withdrawal from foreign conflicts. It is a clash that has brought into relief many of the unresolved conflicts within the Republican Party between the old, hawkish neocon wing—which would love regime change in Tehran—and the new populist neo-isolationists who helped usher Trump into power.
Earlier this week the president himself appeared to mainly want to make another diplomatic deal, and it is no surprise that on May 1 he pushed out his administration’s chief Iran hawk, former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. Trump has repeatedly urged Tehran to take the draconian pact he was offering before hostilities began, which would involve a pledge to cease all uranium enrichment.
But by Tuesday, just prior to a national security meeting at the White House, Trump appeared to shift into a more warlike mode, demanding “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” of Khamenei, as he put it in a Truth Social post. “We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” Trump wrote, suggesting that Washington was now part of the Israel operation. “We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now. … Our patience is wearing thin.”
Trump also told reporters: “They should have done the deal. The cities have been blown to pieces, lost a lot of people. They should have done the deal. I told them do the deal, so I don’t know. I’m not too much in the mood to negotiate.”
What does seem clear is that without U.S. intervention, Israel could find itself mired in an endless conflict with both Palestinians and Iranians—not least because it may well be impossible to guarantee Tehran can’t get a nuclear bomb without U.S. military help. It is generally believed that, apart from a highly risky Israeli commando raid, only a U.S.-made GBU-57A/B “bunker buster” bomb—weighing some 30,000 pounds and transported by an American B-2 bomber—could take out Iran’s Fordow nuclear site buried beneath a mountain.
And Iran is no Iraq or Syria; it is a far more sophisticated, wealthier country that is unlikely to simply surrender. Even if Israel manages to topple Khamenei, a successor government in Tehran may be just as determined—or possibly even more so—to build a nuclear capability.
Meanwhile, Iran is engaged in a risky strategy of targeting Israeli civilians. “Iranian officials are still relying on countervalue targeting of cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa to respond to Israeli strikes and earn a pause in warfighting by drawing blood,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, in a phone interview. “But the more the regime continues to fire its most powerful weapons at Israel, the more likely the window for a diplomatic solution will close for the Israelis.”
And Iran, which is believed to possess chemical weapons, could decide to escalate in a devastating way. “That’s the X factor,” Taleblu said. “Iran could also engage in international terrorism.” None of the U.S.-allied Gulf states—where U.S. troops are stationed—possesses anything like Israel’s missile shield.
Despite risks, some Republicans believe Israel’s new dominance in the Mideast offers a way out of the debate between the neocon hawks and the neo-isolationists in Washington.
“Maybe the best way for America to reduce its overseas commitments if we do want a lighter force posture in the Middle East is to invest heavily in lethal allies,” said former GOP Rep. Mike Gallagher, a highly respected defense expert on Capitol Hill who is now head of defense strategy at Palantir, a major Pentagon contractor. “What a great thing that we have such an incredibly reliant and lethal ally in the form of Israel. And how great would it be if we had a similar situation in the Indo-Pacific?”
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