Recognizing the divergent interests within the US-Israeli relationship is the first step to ensuring a healthy and realistic partnership.

The conventional wisdom in Washington holds that the United States and Israel share a unified strategic interest in confronting Iran. Politicians on both sides of the aisle recite it like a catechism. The think tanks reinforce it. The defense establishment operationalizes it. But conventional wisdom, particularly in the Middle East, has a remarkable track record of being wrong—and this case is no exception.

Let us be precise about what each party actually wants, because imprecision in foreign policy is not only the cause of intellectual failure but also the expense of blood and treasure.

What Israel wants is the elimination—not the containment, not the negotiated limitation—of Iran’s nuclear program and, increasingly, the weakening or collapse of the Islamic Republic itself. For Israel, this is existential calculus. A nuclear-armed Iran, in the Israeli strategic mind, represents an intolerable threat to its physical survival. Israeli leaders have said this clearly and repeatedly, and there is no reason to doubt their sincerity. They want the United States to fight this war fully, decisively, and at whatever cost is required to finish the job.

What the United States wants—or rather, what American interests dictate, as distinct from what American politicians say—is considerably more modest and considerably more complicated. Washington wants to prevent Iran from acquiring a deliverable nuclear weapon. It wants to preserve the flow of Persian Gulf oil. It wants to avoid another open-ended Middle Eastern military commitment that hollows out its conventional deterrence posture in the Indo-Pacific. It wants to keep the global economy from absorbing an oil-price shock that accelerates its own fragmentation. And it wants, if possible, to get back to the business of managing its rivalry with China—the actual defining challenge of this century.

These are obviously not the same objectives. They overlap in places, but they diverge precisely where the pressure is greatest—the question of how far to go.

The history here is instructive, even if Washington prefers not to consult it. Israel has long operated on the premise that its strategic requirements should, by right of alliance and shared values, become American strategic requirements. This conflation has served Israel well. It has served American interests far more ambiguously.

Think back to the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq War, where the elimination of Saddam Hussein was enthusiastically championed by voices closely aligned with Israeli security priorities. The argument then, as now, was that American power would be wielded to reshape a hostile regional order, producing security dividends that both allies could bank. What followed was a two-decade hemorrhage of American credibility, resources, and strategic attention—and an Iran dramatically strengthened by the removal of its principal Arab rival.

The lesson was available to be learned. It largely wasn’t.

There is also the question of regional ownership. Israel’s neighborhood is, self-evidently, Israel’s primary concern. The Gulf states, the Levant, the nuclear shadow over Jerusalem—these are the coordinates of Israeli strategic thought, as they should be. American interests, by contrast, are global. A military campaign that degrades Iranian capabilities but ignites a regional war, closes the Strait of Hormuz, draws Hezbollah rockets into a generalized conflagration, and requires a greatly expanded and indefinite American garrison in the Gulf might satisfy certain Israeli criteria for success while representing a serious strategic setback for the United States.

The asymmetry matters. Israel, a small state with a focused threat environment, can afford to optimize for one outcome. The United States, as a global power with commitments from the South China Sea to Eastern Europe to its own backyard in the Western Hemisphere, cannot.

None of this is an argument for American indifference to Iranian nuclear ambitions. A nuclear-armed Iran would be genuinely destabilizing, and the United States has legitimate reasons to prevent it. But “preventing Iranian nuclear weapons” and “prosecuting Israeli strategic objectives in the region” are related propositions, not identical ones.

The uncomfortable truth that Washington’s foreign policy establishment reflexively avoids is this: alliances require the honest management of divergent interests, not their ritual denial. Pretending that American and Israeli interests are perfectly aligned doesn’t strengthen the alliance. It distorts American decision-making, insulates Israeli policy from legitimate scrutiny, and ultimately—when the divergence becomes impossible to ignore—produces the kind of strategic confusion that gets people killed.

A serious American foreign policy would say clearly, “We support Israel’s right to defend itself, we share its concern about Iranian nuclear capability, and we will coordinate on a strategy that serves both our interests.” Fulfilling this objective does not mean that the United States should simply hand over the wheel on decisions that carry consequences for American soldiers, American consumers, and America’s position in the world.

That conversation has not happened with sufficient honesty. Until it does, Washington will continue drifting into commitments shaped more by Jerusalem’s threat perception than by any coherent assessment of American national interests. 

About the Author: Leon Hadar

Dr. Leon Hadar is a contributing editor with The National Interest, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) in Philadelphia, and a former research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He has taught international relations, Middle East politics, and communication at American University in Washington, DC, and the University of Maryland, College Park. A columnist and blogger with Haaretz (Israel) and Washington correspondent for The Business Times of Singapore, he is a former United Nations bureau chief for The Jerusalem Post.

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