The basic fact of the Israel-Iran war is that Israel is much stronger than its opponent. Iran’s retaliatory capabilities are limited, though not trivial. Not long ago, Hezbollah would have been the fiercest of those capabilities—but Israel dealt a crippling blow to Hezbollah months ago, and the ongoing war against Hamas has kept Israel alert to terrorist dangers from Palestine. Iran has launched drones, which have proved to be a significant weapon of 21st-century warfare in Ukraine’s struggle with Russia. Yet earlier Iranian drone campaigns proved largely ineffective against Israel. This time might be different. All recent evidence, however, points to a balance of power tipped decisively in Israel’s favor.
There is no reason for this to be America’s war. Ironically, however, many opponents of US involvement in Middle East wars share a premise with supporters of intervention. The common assumption is that America really can, and should, control events in the region. One side says we must get involved to aid Israel. The other says we must get involved to restrain Israel. The latter camp takes it for granted that President Trump could simply have ordered Benjamin Netanyahu not to attack Iran. And what’s more, President Trump should have issued such an order because Netanyahu’s war will inevitably drag America into the maelstrom. The Iranians will blame us for Israel’s actions no matter what, the story goes, so we should have prevented Israel from launching its campaign.
That line of thought is wrong. This is Israel’s war, and the decision to embark upon it was Israel’s alone. America does not and should not have a veto on other nations’ foreign policy, though there are occasions when our own interests demand that we exert influence over others. In this case, our interest lies in staying out of a conflict that Israel is perfectly capable of winning on its own. To be sure, part of Israel’s rationale for going to war is to forestall a new American agreement with Iran on the latter’s nuclear program. But just as we should not view ourselves as the managers of Israel’s foreign policy, we need not consider ourselves Iran’s keepers, either. Nuclear nonproliferation is an admirable ideal, yet in the long run it is doomed to fail. More dangerous states than Iran already possess nuclear weapons. The Israelis may not see it that way—Iran is their enemy while neither China, North Korea, nor Russia is. We Americans, however, have faced nuclear opponents for more than seven decades. All that time deterrence has worked. It’s even working in the India-Pakistan conflict.
“America does not and should not have a veto on other nations’ foreign policy.”
No Iran deal could remove Tehran’s reasons for wishing to have nuclear weapons. Iranian nuclear aggression against Israel would be met by nuclear retaliation from Israel, which is widely understood to have second-strike capability. Nuclear weapons would, however, be regime insurance for the Islamic Republic, just as they are for North Korea.
The greater danger for Israel is not that Iran will launch a nuclear attack against the Jewish State but that a nuclear Iran will be free to sponsor terrorism without fear of a direct military response from Israel. The choice before Israel is therefore either to stop an Iranian nuclear program before it can develop a weapon or to fight terrorism without being able to fight the source of terrorists’ support directly. Either alternative is never-ending: if Israel kills the men working on Iran’s nuclear program today, it will have to kill their replacements tomorrow, ad infinitum, until finally Iran succeeds or the Iranian regime collapses—but there’s no guarantee a successor regime wouldn’t be just as hostile to Israel. Even if Iran were dismembered, new entities could pose the same threat.
Consider the Roman experience with the empires ancestral to today’s Iran. The Parthian empire was an intransigent enemy of Rome, but when the Parthian regime failed, the danger only increased, as the new Sasanian dynasty reinvigorated the empire. And as Rome over centuries continued to struggle with Persia, a peripheral power, the Arabs, ascended to greatness with a new religion, Islam. The Sasanians and Romans alike, exhausted by their endless (but hardly existential) wars, were prey for the Muslim conquerors fresh in their vigor.
Israel is strong for the same reason republican Rome was strong. It is surrounded by enemies and survival depends on discipline. Iran has weakened over time for an ironic reason: The United States destroyed the existentially threatening neighbor, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, that had compelled Iran to marshal its capabilities. America’s removal of Saddam allowed Iranian influence to expand, but that didn’t mean Iran was readier for war. The regime in Tehran is old, even gerontocratic, and its once-revolutionary institutions are now repositories of inertia. Israel, on the other hand, has continued to experience the pressures that keep a people fit for war.
If history is a guide, Israel would be wise to preserve Iran in its weakness rather than bringing about its renewal through destruction. Pruning Iran’s nuclear efforts is compatible with that goal, but then, so is stepping aside to allow America to work out a deal with Tehran. A war with loftier aims runs the risk of stripping away the sources of Iran’s inertia and freeing whatever remains to rebuild with renewed energy. (That process isn’t necessarily quick, but Israel’s strategic outlook must be far-sighted.)
By getting involved, America would only cause more ferment in the region, while draining our morale and initiative the way the Persian wars sapped Rome. Our task is to renew our sclerotic institutions at home, uprooting the elites who embody inertia and ideological petrification and returning the republic to the vigor of its youth. The wars we’ve fought since 1945 have all, or almost all, been social experiments conducted by the liberal elite, not fights in which survival or freedom was at stake. If we were to join Israel’s war against Iran, it would be another unnecessary and counterproductive project. Our most important battles are at home.