Adam Gallagher
There are many reasons why the Trump administration should refrain from further entangling the United States in Israel’s war on Iran. Iran is a relatively weak country halfway around the world and poses no serious threat to core US interests. If you liked the failed forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you’d love the quagmire of a war in Iran—a country of 90 million people with a significantly stronger military than those two countries.
But Israel appears intent on drawing the United States into this destabilizing war of choice. Because Israel can’t totally eliminate Iran’s nuclear program alone, it has urged the United States to intervene directly.
A joint US-Israeli war in Iran harms American interests and would threaten American lives while draining resources and diverting strategic attention from pressing priorities. Indeed, one of the most crucial reasons why Washington needs to stay out of the war is that it serves as a distraction from more critical strategic challenges. Chief among those is managing tensions with China.
Since the October 7 attacks, the United States has surged ships, personnel, and other materiel to the region to protect Israel and deter Iran and its “Axis of Resistance” allies. In some cases, these military assets have been repositioned from the Indo-Pacific, where they are stationed in large part to deal with potential Chinese threats.
Before the Trump administration reached a ceasefire with Yemen’s Houthis in May, US commanders expressed concern that the military would have to move long-range precision weapons stockpiles from the Indo-Pacific region to the Middle East. The US military expended massive amounts of munitions to fight a militia that couldn’t even take over one of the poorest countries in the world. What kind of resources would it have to marshal—and from where—to prosecute a war against a state like Iran with serious military capabilities?
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