The war between Israel and Iran marks the culmination of decades of shadow-boxing between Tehran and Tel Aviv. This is a war that has long worn the mask of deniability, played out in assassinations, cyber operations, and various forms of entanglements from Damascus to the Red Sea. Its rules were unwritten but widely understood: escalation without full rupture. But now it’s unfolding in a surprise Israeli intelligence and military attack, which was met with a subsequent Iranian retaliation against Israeli military installations and strategic infrastructure.

While Israel’s capacity for precise targeting — its assassinations of nuclear scientists, the killing of Iranian commanders, and its strikes on enrichment sites — has rarely been in doubt, its broader strategic horizon remains conspicuously blurred. 

Official Israeli communiqués gesture, with ritual ambiguity, toward the language of victory and denying Iran nuclear capability, but the underlying ambition seems at once more elusive and more grandiose: the execution of a blow so decisive it would not only cripple Iran’s nuclear program, but fracture the Islamic Republic’s political resolve altogether. 

This, however, remains far from realized. Iran’s underground facilities remain intact, and its enrichment program, far from being stalled, appears now to be ideologically and politically emboldened. Hesitations around the acquisition of nuclear weapons will probably undergo a review. Iran, while suffering from a direct blow that crippled its chain of command and placed it on the defensive, was able to recuperate and launch several barrages of ballistic misslies into Israel.

And yet, behind this Israeli choreography of operational tenacity lies a quieter, more subterranean logic. It is not only Iran that Israel seeks to provoke, but the United States. If Israel cannot destroy Natanz or Fordow on its own, it may still succeed in creating the conditions under which Washington feels compelled to act in its stead. This, perhaps, is the real gambit: not a direct confrontation with Iran, but the orchestration of an environment of urgency and provocation that makes American intervention — at a minimum — on the table. In other words, Israel’s military theatrics are a trap for the U.S.

Israel isn’t simply assembling a reactive sequence of military gestures; it’s a calibrated strategy of provocations that create the conditions for American leverage. Israel acts; the United States, while nominally uninvolved, capitalizes on the fallout, and even invokes the specter of its own military involvement as both a deterrent and a bargaining chip. 

The strikes are less about immediate tactical gains than they are about constructing a field of pressure. Their strategic ambiguity is weaponized to test red lines and gauge responses.

In this scheme, Washington appears to maintain a distance, but its fingerprints are never entirely absent. The more Israel escalates, the more the U.S. can posture as the moderating force — while simultaneously tightening the screws on Iran through sanctions, backchannel warnings, or displays of force in the Gulf. 

The result is a strategic double-bind: Iran is meant to feel besieged from multiple directions, but never entirely certain where the next blow might come from. 

Will Trump chicken out?

This, at least, is where the United States and Israel seem momentarily aligned. Yet the fault lines in this coordination are already visible. 

On the one hand, the war hawks in Washington will view this as a strategic opening and an opportunity to decisively weaken Iran and redraw the balance of power in the region. They will pressure Trump to act in this direction. 

On the other hand, a full-scale war with Iran, especially one that spills across borders, would ripple through global markets, disrupting trade, oil production, and critical infrastructure. The allure of military advantage is shadowed by the specter of economic upheaval, which is a gamble that even the most hardened strategists can’t ignore. Yemen’s Ansar Allah has already proven the viability of closing trade routes, and Iran is able to do far more.

But the story of “America First” is also approaching an inflection point. Donald Trump’s rhetoric — premised on the prioritization of domestic problems, national interest, and a transactional nationalism hostile to foreign entanglements — now finds itself strained by the prospect, or reality, of a regional war that bears the unmistakable fingerprints of American complicity. The transition (discursively, at least) from a president who vowed to extricate the U.S. from Middle Eastern quagmires to one under whose watch a potentially epochal confrontation is unfolding exposes the fragile coherence of Trump’s strategic identity.

The language of MAGA — no more “blood for sand,” no more American boys dying in foreign deserts, no more open-ended subsidies for unreliable allies — continues to resonate well beyond Trump’s electoral base. It taps into a deeper exhaustion with imperial overreach and a growing conviction that the dividends of global policing no longer justify its mounting costs. 

And yet, even as this fatigue becomes conventional wisdom, the machinery of militarism persists — outsourced to regional proxies, framed in euphemisms, and increasingly waged out of sight. Nowhere is this more evident than in America’s unwavering support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza — a policy that, despite its genocidal overtones, encounters little serious resistance from the political mainstream.

This is the duality that marks the contemporary American strategic imagination, particularly in its Trumpian register. On one hand, there is a professed realism about the limits of military force and the unsustainable burdens of global responsibility; on the other, there is a persistent ambition to reshape the geopolitical architecture of the Middle East by less direct means.

In this schema, force may be held in reserve, but influence is not. The aspiration is to cultivate a calibrated rivalry among regional powers — Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Egypt. The U.S. seeks to tether them, however uneasily, to the gravitational logic of American centrality. If Pax Americana can no longer be imposed, then a managed dissonance among client states may suffice.

In addition, another kind of dissonance marks Trump’s worldview: not merely strategic, but psychological. For all his rhetoric about restraint and national interest, Trump retains a sovereign fantasy of dominance. He does not merely seek balance but craves submission. The belief that an American president can issue diktats to Putin, Zelensky, or Khamenei — and that they will obey — is less a policy than a symptom of an imperial reflex. It continues to linger even as the structure it depends on has been eroding. In these moments, Trump sets aside the logic of multipolar accommodation.

The current war initiated by Israel against Iran is an exemplar of this dissonance. It reflects not only Israel’s increasingly unilateral strategic posture but also the ambivalence that marks American leadership in the Trump era. Despite his anti-interventionist slogans, Trump was never immune to the gravitational pull of escalation, especially when framed as a test of strength or loyalty. 

Indeed, the term coined by his critics — TACO, “Trump Always Chickens Out” — was circulated among financiers and neoconservatives not simply as mockery, but as diagnosis. It captured the oscillation between bluster and retreat, between the rhetoric of dominance and the impulse to recoil when the cost became tangible. 

Such moments expose the uneasy alloy at the heart of Trump’s foreign policy: a mix of instinctual nationalism, imperial nostalgia, and tactical indecision. The result is a posture that often courts confrontation without preparation, and retreats from entanglement without resolution. If Israel’s strike on Iran was meant to provoke, it also tested the elasticity of Trump’s foreign policy instincts — and the contradictions that arise when strategic ambiguity meets theatrical resolve.

Operational success and possible strategic failure

It is undeniable that Israel, with both tacit and overt backing from its allies, succeeded in delivering a serious blow to Iran. The strikes reached deep into the Islamic Republic’s military and security apparatus, targeting logistical infrastructure and key nodes in the command hierarchy. Reports suggest that segments of Iran’s nuclear programme, alongside broader military installations, were damaged or set back. Civilian casualties, though predictable, were duly reported and then quietly folded into the wider logic of strategic necessity.

The initial reaction in Israel to the perceived operational success followed a familiar ritual — an almost theatrical display of militaristic pride and nationalist euphoria. It was less about strategic calculation and more about reaffirming a hardened, jingoistic identity: Look at us—striking deep in Iran, and assassinating leaders and scientists. Each moment of escalation was repackaged as proof of autonomy and power, even when the reality was far more complex. Beneath the exultation lay a quieter unease: that every act of defiance also illuminated vulnerabilities — strategic, diplomatic, and existential. But this euphoria did not last long as Iran regained its military command and initiated its own military operation, striking deep within Israel with ballistic missiles that targeted Israeli infrastructure within cities, with Israelis waking up to scenes of destruction. 

There is a cruel irony at play. A state that has institutionalized the destruction of homes, memories, and lives in Gaza now cries foul. It flagrantly violates every norm — legal, moral, humanitarian — only to invoke those same norms when violence reaches its own doorstep. Overnight, the architecture of impunity that it has constructed becomes the basis for grievance. 

But much of the world sees through this cynical hypocrisy. The exceptionalism, the selective outrage, the performative grief—all ring hollow to those who have watched a society cheer on genocide in real time. The tears fall flat, resonating only with the hardcore Zionist base, the political and media operatives who have long served as enablers, and the Christian Zionists like America’s ambassador in Israel, Mike Huckabee, who have fused theology with militarism.

Israel awoke to a moment of potential reckoning — but history teaches that its military establishment, and the social and affective structures that uphold it, are largely impervious to reflection. In fact, they are actively hostile to the very notion of reckoning. The idea of limits — whether of force, legitimacy, or consequence — sits uncomfortably within a system built on the presumption of impunity and supremacy. 

For years, Israeli propaganda depicted Iran as an irrational, theocratic menace. But what, then, is Israel, if not a society governed by theological messianism armed with cutting-edge surveillance and military technology? The difference is that it is backed uncritically by both liberal and conservative elites across the West, with extensive institutional support in munitions and diplomatic cover.

And of course, it is a nuclear-armed state engaged in genocidal warfare, yet continues to claim moral clarity. The irony is as bitter as it is revealing: the caricature it projected onto Iran has become a mirror to its own reality.

An old adage warns: You can start a war, but you cannot know how it will end. Israel seems determined to test that truth. 

Israel stakes its strategy on American leverage and the possibility of eventual U.S. involvement. What began as a targeted campaign against Iran’s nuclear program has already begun to morph, in both rhetoric and ambition, into something far riskier: regime change. The goalposts are shifting, the stakes escalating — not only for the region, but for Israeli society itself, which simultaneously craves dominance, fears accountability, and deeply distrusts Netanyahu’s judgment. 

Despite that, the war is still ongoing; other Israeli operations against Iran that could induce further shock and awe are in play, while Iran is now using its various military capabilities to damage the sense of confidence in Israel’s missile shield and air defenses.

While the regional war commands headlines, in Gaza, Israel continues its campaign of annihilation — cutting internet lines, bombarding neighborhoods, and flattening what remains of the Strip. The war may be framed as an open-ended contest of force, will, and strategic calculation, but its consequences are brutally inscribed on Palestinian bodies. The horizon of this broader war — however abstract it may appear in policy circles — is being carved, violently and unforgettably, into the lives of Palestinians in Gaza, and increasingly, in the West Bank as well. This is Israel’s current addiction to possibilities opened by war: eliminating the Palestinians, dragging the U.S. into regional war, and waiting for the messiah to redeem it.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.