US Should Not Become a Pawn in Israel’s New War

Israel’s June 13 strike on Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure shattered the limited-deterrence equilibrium that had held between the two adversaries for years. What began as an operation to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb has escalated into a daily exchange of missile salvos, each side convinced that inflicting enough pain will compel the other to capitulate. Into this maelstrom stepped President Trump, who on June 16 ordered via Truth Social that “everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran” — a logistically impossible demand for the city’s 10 million residents.

Days into this war, Trump continues to consider US direct involvement, weighing the benefits of military involvement against the costs of pulling a war-weary American public into a conflict entirely of Israel’s making. Reflecting on the war on social media, Trump observed that Iran’s supreme leader would be an “easy target,” causing Iran to fire back a day later with a pledge to never surrender.

Up until this point, the United States had carefully maintained a position of measured acquiescence — providing defensive support to Israel through intelligence sharing and missile defense coordination while refusing to participate in offensive operations against Iran. However, merely days into the war, the United States appears to have shifted toward a position that would exacerbate the conflict.

As US military reinforcements made their way toward the region, Trump abruptly departed the G7 summit in Canada a day early, ostensibly to deal with “what’s going on in the Middle East” from Washington. His refusal to endorse even a temporary ceasefire at the summit, coupled with his insistence on achieving “a real end” to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, risks enmeshing the United States in yet another war in the Middle East, something that Trump vowed to prevent.

Israel and Iran had twice over the last year traded limited strikes, each time stepping back before full-blown conflict erupted. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bid last week to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities has quickly thrust the countries into a conflict with a fundamentally different character.

The two countries are now in an all-out war, with civilians on both sides caught in the middle. Neither side has demonstrated a will to de-escalate the situation. Breaking this cycle will require outside actors, particularly the United States, to impose guardrails on escalation and create political space for diplomacy to emerge. Israel’s surprise attack on June 13 effectively disrupted Iran’s military command and control, destroyed significant military assets, and, above all, degraded a significant proportion of Iran’s civilian nuclear program — nominally Netanyahu’s initial rationale for going to war. Israel’s deeper goal, however, appears to be creating the conditions for regime change within Iran or, at the least, the weakening of the Iranian state.

Iran’s armed forces, despite Israel’s successful initial attacks, struck back. Israel’s operation has now devolved into a daily exchange of firepower, often directly impacting dense population centers in both countries. Because of Israel’s air superiority and missile defense capabilities, Iran’s long-range ballistic missiles have had limited effectiveness, but they still have caused unprecedented damage to Israel’s economic and population centers.

Each side now apparently operates under the belief that inflicting enough death and destruction will force the other to concede, so both have demonstrated a willingness to absorb levels of damage that once seemed unimaginable. Reporting from Israel suggests that Netanyahu, in his grim calculus prior to initiating this war, was prepared to tolerate up to 4,000 Israeli casualties. In Iran, meanwhile, the country’s leaders probably perceive stakes unlike any since the devastating war with Iraq in the 1980s — a war that entailed societal-scale pain over eight years.

On the nuclear question, Israel continues to face limitations in what it might be able to accomplish with its own military forces. At issue is the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, which is buried under mountainous rock, rendering it impervious to total destruction by anything in the Israeli arsenal. To destroy it, Netanyahu would need US bombers to use multiple large American non-nuclear bunker busters, known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. Iran, however, has repeatedly warned that if the United States enters the war, US forces and bases would come under attack.

While the United States has a core interest in keeping Iran non-nuclear, it should not allow itself to become a pawn in what is a war to ensure regime change in Iran and, failing that, to prolong Netanyahu’s political life. Instead, Washington should pivot to coercive mediation: making any additional military or intelligence support conditional on Israeli restraint. This includes the possibility of opposing further strikes on Iranian leadership or civilian infrastructure, linking continued US military support to Israel’s limitation of its operations to legitimate and immediate threats.

Trump has opposed Israel’s plan to kill Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Israel has complied so far — perhaps in the hope that it will incentivize the United States to hit Fordow and other buried sites in Iran. Trump, meanwhile, continues to see the specter of a deal on the horizon; without Khamenei, he can’t have his deal.

To be sure, Israel’s strikes have reduced Iran’s leverage at the margins. Trump should also recognize that Israel’s attacks have created almost impossible conditions for Iran’s political leadership to accept any deal in the open — especially given the understandable Iranian perception that the United States and Israel have indivisible interests. The easiest way for Trump to challenge this would be to engage Iran privately to seek compromise.

Peace will require compromise; that means abandoning the all-or-nothing logic on Iranian uranium enrichment that tragically kept Washington and Iran from cinching an interim deal in the months leading up to last week’s Israeli attack. One promising approach would be to revive prior discussions about a multinational enrichment consortium, a proposal that was floated prior to Israel’s strikes on Iran, which would limit Iran’s direct access to weapons-grade fissile material while preserving its peaceful nuclear capabilities. Coupled with targeted and phased sanctions exemptions, such a proposal could give Iran a face-saving reason to pause while allowing Trump to celebrate his role as a mediator. Regional states would also welcome this approach.

If the current conflict continues without a negotiated settlement, Iran may calculate that its only protection lies in developing an actual nuclear weapon. Under pressure, Tehran could shift to a posture of even greater opacity, maintaining nuclear ambiguity while racing for breakout capabilities. A military solution cannot prevent this; only verified, diplomatic controls can.

Meanwhile, despite Netanyahu’s cynical calculations about how many civilian casualties can be tolerated, it is quickly becoming clear that Iran’s imperfect ability to retaliate has started to cause economic and societal pain for Israel, as civilians are injured, oil refineries are hit, and buildings are destroyed. The United States should understand that seeking a diplomatic pathway out of this morass of Netanyahu’s creation is not one that abandons Israel but one that actually supports the restoration of the normalcy that Israeli civilians will welcome.

Above all, finding a way to peace will require that the United States fundamentally rejects the illusion being sold by Netanyahu: that sustaining this war will bring about a perfect victory. Even as facilities related to Iran’s nuclear program are destroyed, the country’s knowledge cannot be removed. Targeted assassinations of nuclear scientists may temporarily delay progress, but many of those killed were seasoned experts with proteges dispersed across various institutes. Nor can regime change be brought about from the air alone.

The tragedy of this moment is that even should this war end swiftly, the task of sustained diplomacy in keeping Iran non-nuclear will become nigh-intractable. Creative diplomacy, however, will still provide a greater hope of managing those risks than a war of pain infliction.

Nicole Grajewski is a fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of “Russia and Iran: Partners in Defiance from Syria to Ukraine.”

Source: The Boston Globe