The Iranian missiles and drones had not even approached Israeli airspace when Tehran declared the matter concluded. Iran’s retaliation for Israel’s April 1 bombing of an Iranian consular building in Damascus was choreographed to be heavy on symbolism and light on destruction. The point was not revenge but the restoration of Iranian deterrence and evasion of a broader war. But the choreography suffered from one major flaw: A broader war with Iran is exactly what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been seeking for more than two decades.
Early in the war between Israel and Hamas, the Biden administration worried that Israel was set to expand the war into Lebanon. According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. President Joe Biden successfully convinced Netanyahu to shelve plans for a preemptive strike against Hezbollah in Lebanon. But what neither Biden nor the Washington establishment fully appreciated was that Netanyahu has, since the late 1990s, sought to drag the United States into war with Iran.
Netanyahu has an interest in prolonging the ongoing war with Hamas since the moment it ends, his political career is likely to end as well—and a prison sentence may soon follow if his corruption trial proceeds. Likewise, the hard-line Israeli leader also has a long-standing desire to enlarge the conflict to deal with what he perceives to be Israel’s biggest strategic threat: Iran.
A military conflict with Iran that draws in the United States would achieve several Israeli objectives. It would degrade Iran’s nuclear program as well as its conventional military and, by doing so, restore a more favorable regional balance for Israel while also preventing a U.S.-Iran rapprochement that the Israelis view as tantamount to Washington’s abandonment of Israel. A diminished Iran would also weaken Iran’s regional partners from Hezbollah to Iraqi militias to the Houthis in Yemen, all of which depend on Iranian arms and financial largesse.
But a wider war would not further U.S. strategic goals and actively entering another Middle Eastern conflict could seriously harm Biden in an election year. The question, then, is if Washington will use the leverage it has accrued by assisting Israel in shooting down the Iranian drones and missiles to prevent further escalation.
U.S. PRESIDENTS HAVE BY AND LARGE NOT SHARED Netanyahu’s enthusiasm for armed confrontation with Iran. George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and even Donald Trump all pushed back against Israel since they recognized that Iran’s nuclear program could not be irreversibly destroyed militarily and that U.S. interests would not be served by yet another war in the Middle East as it would destabilize the region and undermine the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, a deepened U.S. military commitment to the Middle East would draw resources away from what they viewed as a more pressing strategic matter: the rise of China.
Although Bush adopted a very hawkish public position on Iran, he was far more sanguine in private. When then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert sought U.S. support for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in May 2008, Bush refused to offer it and made it clear that his position would not change for the remainder of his presidency. Bush also refused to offer Israel the bunker-busting bombs it needed to strike Iran’s nuclear sites.
Obama took it one step further and made it clear publicly that the United States was not offering Israel any green light to attack Iran. But more importantly, as Netanyahu increased pressure on Obama to take military action, Obama responded by doubling down on diplomacy with Iran.
By ringing the alarm bells on Iran’s growing nuclear program, Netanyahu had hoped to eliminate Obama’s “kick the can down the road” option and force Washington to strike Iran militarily. But his behavior had the opposite effect. It compelled Obama to take a chance on transformative diplomacy with Iran instead of starting a war. Had Netanyahu not cornered Obama, chances are that he would have left the Iranian nuclear headache for his successor.
Even Trump, who pursued the United States’ most hawkish line on Iran to date and who had no hesitation escalating matters with Tehran when he felt that it served his own personal interests—and who caved to Netanyahu’s pressure to abandon the Iran nuclear deal—nevertheless stopped short of going to war with Iran on behalf of the Israeli prime minister. According to a former senior Trump administration official speaking to Axios, Trump felt that Netanyahu was “willing to fight Iran to the last American soldier.”
But the long-standing refusal of U.S. presidents to allow Netanyahu to draw the United States into war with Iran may now come to a close. Biden’s support for Israel in the past few months is often described as a continuation of a long-standing U.S. policy toward Israel. In reality, it is a break with tradition.
That’s because Biden has refused to press Israel to show restraint in the manner that U.S. presidents such as Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Obama often did. It is also a break from the previous position of firmly rejecting attempts by Israel to drag the United States into war with Iran.
Not only has Biden been more deferential to Netanyahu than any other U.S. president—Bush Sr.’s secretary of state, James Baker, famously barred Netanyahu from even entering the State Department—he has committed himself to two contradictory goals: preventing a regional war while proclaiming ironclad support for Israel in the case of war, even if Israel initiates it.
Israel attacked Iran’s embassy compound in Syria, killing one of the country’s most senior military officials, Mohammad Reza Zahedi—which was treated by Tehran as an attack on Iranian soil and an act of war. After Iran’s retaliation against Israel—during which the U.S. military, along with the British, French, and Jordanians, helped Israel defend against Iranian aerial threats—Biden declared that the United States would not participate in or support offensive military action against Iran by Israel but that it would provide defensive support in case Israel was attacked again. But the distinction between offensive or defensive support becomes meaningless the second a war breaks out.
Biden’s logic has incentivized Netanyahu to attack Iran. He knows that while the United States would not participate in the attack, it will become drawn into the fighting the second Iran responds to Israel’s offensive. Either way, Washington will be pulled into a war in the Middle East that does not serve U.S. interests, that will further drag the United States into rather than out of the region, and that likely will result in Iran weaponizing its nuclear program.
If Biden genuinely wishes to prioritize the prevention of war, he will need to set much stronger and clearer red lines. Biden should clearly state publicly that the United States will not tolerate any further escalation by either side. He should signal to Israel that U.S. military aid going forward can no longer be unconditional. And he should take a page out of the playbook of Bush Sr., who, during the first Gulf War, refused to provide Israel with the IFF codes (“friend or foe” identification to distinguish hostile and friendly aircraft) and thereby prevented Israel from attacking Iraq and unraveling Bush’s anti-Saddam coalition.
By prioritizing the prevention of war, Biden will also not need to actualize his ironclad defense pledge since the war will not break out in the first place.
Netanyahu—desperate to prolong and enlarge the war in order to avoid the prison sentence that likely awaits at the end of his political career—has consistently disregarded soft and private pushback from Biden in the past seven months and may do so again since he has, so far, faced no consequences for his defiance.
This is the inevitable failure of Biden’s bear-hug approach to Israel and his break with previous U.S. presidents’ handling of Israel. But whereas more than 33,000 Palestinians have paid the price for Biden’s first bear hug, the American people—and U.S. soldiers—could end up paying the price of Biden’s second bear hug as Netanyahu may finally get the war that three administrations prior to this one rejected.