With Israel’s decisive victory over Hamas and Hezbollah, one long cycle of Arab-Israeli wars has come to an end. Another cycle, though, could be beginning. For years, Iran and Israel fought each other through proxy militias; more recently, they have been fighting with barrages of ballistic missiles against each other’s cities and infrastructure. The current ceasefire masks differences that will be challenging to resolve.
In embarking on open conflict with Iran, Israel has effectively aligned itself with the Sunni monarchies of the Arabian Gulf, foremost among them Saudi Arabia. These are countries that have long been engaged in schismatic conflict with both republican and revolutionary Iran, for the fear among the Sunnis has been that Shia Iran would spread its revolutionary creed to the oil-rich and Shia-dominated Arab littoral of the Arabian Gulf.
Thus the 20th-century cycle of wars between Jewish and Arab nationalism has finally been replaced by the 21st-century conflict between an increasingly religiously-infused Zionism on the one side and Shia Islamism on the other. In this conflict Israel is de facto allied with conservative Sunni Muslim states. Over all these convolutions of regional geopolitics looms a larger strategic question: whether Netanyahu has also succeeded in torpedoing Trump’s foreign policy doctrine of “America First”.
The America First doctrine posed a more significant strategic challenge to Israel’s geopolitical position than did any military effort from bungling Islamist militias, decayed Arab nationalist regimes or Iranian clerics. For as long as the US was committed to globalist doctrines of policing international order and defending human rights everywhere, Israel could exercise a powerful grip on US foreign policy on both the ideological and strategic levels.
To put this in ideological terms: as long as the US was committed to defending the victims of human rights abuses against genocide, it had to commit to defending Israel as the state founded by the survivors of genocide. Ever since it held the trial of the Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann in 1961, Israel has based its political legitimacy on the claim that its national existence is Jews’ self-defence against existential threat. This claim is buttressed by the ultimate human rights crime of the past century, the Holocaust. On the strategic level, as long as the US was committed to global policing, Israel could also act as a loyal regional deputy. In this role, Israel punishes terrorists and rogue states on behalf of Washington, thereby ensuring itself a steady supply of US arms and diplomatic support against its regional rivals.
The US has tired of fighting the forever wars, an outcome that is the natural consequence of policing global order. Both the Israeli roles, that of victim-state and regional deputy, are now of less importance to the White House. One of the few consistent themes of Trumpian politics has been its efforts to extricate the US from the Middle East in order to focus on the confrontation with the much greater geopolitical rival of China. But Israel needed the so-called US bunker-busters to reach the deeply-buried Iranian nuclear site at Fordow, and Netanyahu therefore succeeded in luring Trump back into the Middle East with the promise of a quick military raid that would not risk ground troops.
Unsurprisingly, the prospect of return to the Middle East provoked consternation in the ranks of the MAGA coalition. Since the declaration of the US-Iranian cease-fire, Trump has sternly warned Israel — with full caps and profanity in a post on his Truth media platform — not to retaliate against alleged Iranian violation of the cease-fire. Given how much blood and treasure the US has squandered in the Middle East over the last thirty years — to say nothing of the terrifying costs of the forever wars to the peoples of the region itself — it is clear that embroiling itself in another regime-change operation in Iran would be terrible for the US. Less obvious but no less true is the fact that such an outcome would expose Netanyahu’s weakness.
All this effort to keep the US embroiled in the Middle East begs the question of why Israel, with its spectacular feats of arms and almost unbroken string of military victories, needs US protection at all. The Fordow situation was an unusual one. Israel, in general, holds the regional aces. It is widely believed to already possess the ultimate guarantee of security — a nuclear second-strike capability — meaning that the country could threaten any enemy with total destruction were its survival actually in question. In a world of nuclear weapons, there is no greater guarantee of political independence than second-strike capability — the capacity to mount a second nuclear strike against an enemy, even if that enemy were to launch a successful surprise attack against you first. Nuclear deterrence held the peace between the Soviet Communists and capitalist Americans during the first Cold War, and now between mortal strategic enemies India and Pakistan as well as between capitalist China and capitalist America. Why should it now be an insufficient guarantor of Israeli security in the face of an Iranian nuclear bomb?
“Both the Israeli roles, that of victim-state and regional deputy, are now of less importance to the White House.”
One might argue that the ayatollahs that rule Iran are too irrational to be successfully deterred by the threat of nuclear annihilation, so consumed are they with their religious fanaticism and millenarian anti-imperialism. Similar arguments were made about Russian and Chinese communists, also assumed, by dint of the ideological contortions of Marxism, to be beyond reason. Are the ayatollahs less rational, less interested in preserving their own power, than are Maoists and Stalinists? Nor are the theocrats all-powerful. The Iranian state also encompasses its bureaucracy and security apparatus. If the wider Iranian state could not be entrusted to restrain the use of nuclear weapons by mad clerics, what hope is there for nation-building in Iran once the clerics are gone? In any case Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is yet further proof of the necessity of having nuclear weapons. Notwithstanding Tehran’s alliance with Russia, Iranians will have noted that any country without nuclear weapons cannot ultimately guarantee its independence or defend itself against rolling air attacks.
It is for that reason that the Iranian emperor Reza Pahlavi, who was overthrown by the Islamic revolution in 1979, was himself keen on securing nuclear weapons. We can be confident that even if a secular regime were to emerge from the rubble of the Islamic Republic it, too, would see its ultimate security guarantee in having nuclear weapons. Paradoxically, then, Israel’s campaign to supposedly destroy the risk of an Iranian bomb will hasten the spread of nuclear weapons — both in the region and further afield. We can be assured that nuclear proliferation will be one outcome of this new war. This means in turn that all of us, including the Israelis, must learn to live with nuclear deterrence across a variety of states and political regimes.
The greatest paradox of all this is that, in seeking to draw the US back into the region, Israel is undercutting the rationale for its own existence. Before the Holocaust became central to Israel’s political identity, the original purpose of Zionism, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was to secure self-determination and security for the Jews. Netanyahu’s forever wars are clearly failing to create that security: one war simply runs into another. The effort to break up Trump’s America First doctrine suggests that Netanyahu is also fumbling the cause of Jewish self-determination. For if Israel cannot find security in nuclear deterrence and overwhelming military might — the means that suffice for other states — but only in being permanently protected by the US, what hope is there for Jewish independence and self-determination? Israel’s effort to recreate its strategic dependence on the US suggests a state that cannot stand alone — the opposite of the original aspirations of Zionism.
Israel must now confront a new geopolitical reality in which it will ultimately matter less to the US. If the country cannot carve out a new political role independent of the US, then no amount of crushing military victories and spectacular bombing raids will ever be enough to guarantee its independence.
