How Israel ‘Chain-Ganged’ The Trump Administration Into War

After several days of shifting and sometimes contradictory justifications from the Trump administration for why it launched a war against Iran over the weekend, Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday finally gave the real reason: Israel forced us into it.

“It was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone, the U.S. or Israel or anyone, they were going to respond against the United States,” Rubio said. But later he added this: “We knew there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher numbers of those killed. And then we would all be answering questions about why we knew that and didn’t act.”

Later in the day, Speaker Mike Johnson said pretty much the same thing, that, “This was a defensive measure … If Israel fired upon Iran and took action against Iran to take out the missiles, then [Iran] would have immediately retaliated against U.S. personnel and assets.”

These remarks from Rubio and Johnson would seem to confirm recent reporting from the New York Times, which published a lengthy account Monday chronicling how President Trump decided to go to war. The article opens with this line: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel walked into the Oval Office on the morning of Feb. 11, determined to keep the American president on the path to war.” It goes on to explain that amid weeks of U.S.-Israeli planning for war, Trump administration officials had begun negotiating with Tehran over the future of its nuclear program, “and the Israeli leader wanted to make sure that the new diplomatic effort did not undermine the plans.”

Netanyahu, who has been candid about his decades-long desire to draw the United States into a war against Iran, was successful in this effort. The diplomatic talks with Iran faltered and Trump gave the go-ahead to launch strikes that immediately took out Tehran’s entire leadership, effectively bringing about a decapitation of the regime.

Why did it happen? Not necessarily because of our decisions, but because of Israel’s. According to the Times’ reporting, just hours before President Trump’s State of the Union address last Tuesday, Rubio and John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, briefed congressional leaders from the so-called Gang of Eight about ongoing negotiations with Iran and the possibility of strikes if those talks failed. “In the briefing, Mr. Rubio argued that, no matter if Israel or the United States struck first, Iran would respond with a powerful barrage of weapons against U.S. bases and embassies. It was logical then, Mr. Rubio said, that the United States should act in concert with Israel, since America would be dragged in anyway. And Israel, Mr. Rubio said, was determined to act.”

“This logic sat poorly with some Democrats, who thought the Trump administration was letting Mr. Netanyahu dictate American policy — and was making a circular argument that the United States had to attack because its military buildup could prompt Iran to strike.”

This helps explain why President Trump didn’t even try to make a case for war to the American people, or to Congress, ahead of time. It also helps explain why no one could get a straight answer from the administration about why this war was necessary at this particular time. The truth is that there is no good answer because we allowed ourselves to get bullied into war by Israel, which had made a decision to strike Iran knowing that the Iranian response would pull us in.

There’s a term for this in international security studies, when a weaker ally’s vital interests clash with a stronger ally’s preferences or policy, and the weaker ally manages to entrap the stronger ally into commitments that limit its freedom of action. It’s called getting “chain-ganged” into a conflict. Some scholars say that European powers chain-ganged one another into World War One, for example, making it impossible for stronger countries like France and Britain to avoid a general European war.

If what Rubio and Johnson have said is true, and what the New York Times has reported is accurate, then this is exactly what Israel has done to the United States. President Trump was entrapped — chain-ganged — into a war with Iran by Israel, our weaker ally.

And it’s not the first time Israel has tried to force the United States into such a conflict. As Daniel Sobelman explained in a 2018 article for Texas National Security Review, in 2011 and 2012, when Iran was hardening its nuclear program, “Israel repeatedly indicated that it was fast approaching the point when it might take unilateral military action against Iran’s advancing nuclear program, before Iranian capabilities became resilient to an Israeli attack.”

By doing this, then-prime minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak created a war scare, says Sobelman, the purpose of which was to extract a commitment from the United States to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, by military force if necessary. Such a commitment was well beyond what the Obama administration had promised up to that point. “Israel effectively attempted to influence, and even force, the United States to realign according to Israeli interests and strategic constraints, thus producing one of the tensest periods in the history of the two countries’ relationship.”

The outcome of this attempt by Israel to entrap the United States in 2011-12 was a mixed bag. On the one hand, The U.S. caved to Israeli demands by imposing crippling economic sanctions on the Iranian regime, isolating Tehran internationally — something President Obama had been reluctant to do. On the other hand, The Obama administration resisted green-lighting an Israeli strike on Iran and refused to commit the U.S. to military action — and of course it signed the JCPOA, which Israel opposed. In the end, though, Israel did succeed in influencing U.S. policy on Iran somewhat, even if it didn’t manage to entrap the U.S. in a war.

This time around, however, Israel appears to have succeeded in such entrapment, forcing the Trump administration into a war not necessarily of its choosing or timing.

None of this is to say that the U.S. war effort is doomed, or that President Trump won’t be able to pull off a compelling victory or a durable peace. But we should at least be honest about what has happened here, and recognize that Israel has chain-ganged the United States into war with Iran — a war that Trump might not otherwise have undertaken.

This should, at the very least, prompt some reflection on the terms of our security commitments and partnerships going forward. If “America First” is to be something more than an empty slogan, surely it should mean that we steadfastly resist entrapment by weaker allies like Israel, on whose behalf we are now engaged in a massive regime change war in the Middle East.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.