The US-Israeli War Alliance Under Pressure

After the outbreak of the Iran war on February 28, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shared a photo of himself on the phone with US President Donald Trump, a copy of Tim Bouverie’s Allies at War prominently displayed on his desk. The symbolism was deliberate: two wartime leaders defeating a common enemy. But the book, which chronicles how the World War II Allied powers' joint victory masked profound disagreements about how to fight and when to stop, has more relevance than Netanyahu probably intended. Indeed, while the United States and Israel have presented their campaign against Iran as a unified effort, diverging objectives highlight an asymmetry at the alliance's core—one that will determine how, and on whose terms, the war ends.

The Divergence Within the Alliance

Israel’s road to war with Iran—its fourth war since 2023—was long in the making. Netanyahu has spent more than three decades warning that Iran is on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon. He made the case before Congress in 1996 and again in his infamous “bomb diagram” address to the United Nations General Assembly in 2012. He promoted the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a stepping stone to dealing with Tehran. He publicly criticized Barack Obama over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015, blasting it as a “very bad deal”. And since Trump's return to power, Netanyahu has met with the American president seven times, repeatedly steering conversations away from Gaza and toward Iran's ballistic missiles and nuclear ambitions, painting the clerical regime in Tehran as the common enemy that could cement their legacies. 

To describe the war as a seamless expression of a shared goal would, however, be misleading. Beneath the triumphal rhetoric, fissures have been visible from the beginning. At the outset of the campaign, both leaders declared regime change in Tehran to be their objective. But in remarks at the White House on March 2, two days after Israeli airstrikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Trump did not mention overthrowing Iran's government as his top priority. The US goal, he said, was to destroy Iran's missile capabilities and navy, to stop it from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and to end the regime’s support for regional proxies. In phone interviews held in early March, Trump suggested that a Venezuela-style outcome would constitute “the perfect scenario”. Netanyahu, in contrast, has been consistent in articulating his aims, calling on the Iranians to “take to the streets in your millions to finish the job” and “throw off the yoke of tyranny”. Questioned by Reuters about the partners’ objectives, a US official said bluntly, “Regime change is one of theirs”.

For Netanyahu, Iran's nuclear program has been one of the defining focal points of his career and “the single through lineof his foreign policy”; its destruction, and the replacement of the regime with something more tractable to Israel, would fulfill a long-standing promise. It would also shift the narrative away from October 7, turning the gravest security failure in Israeli history into a “region-altering” victory. A successful Iran campaign might also enable Netanyahu’s politicalsurvival. Netanyahu, who is facing a corruption trial, used his first press conference of the war to renew calls for a judicialpardon. Netanyahu’s political allies, meanwhile, have suggested that a successful Iran campaign could lead the prime minister to call for early elections to capitalize on wartime gains and shift attention away from domestic challenges.

For Trump, the political calculus is very different. The president’s repeatedly changing claims about the war’s goals and timelines highlight the lack of ideological commitment to regime change. Since the start of this war, observers have expected that the ambiguity of articulated objectives would allow Trump to declare victory, even in the absence of transformational change inside Iran. As Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth noted in a recent 60 Minutes interview: “It’s President Trump who will set the terms.”

The “America First” Contradiction 

One thing is clear: A prolonged war is not in President Trump’s interest. Trump rose to political prominence on a critique of regime-change adventurism. Back in 2017, he called the Iraq War a disaster. He criticized his predecessors for wasting American blood and treasure in foreign wars. During the first major trip of his second term, he told an audience in Riyadh that “the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built.” In January 2026, Trump’s National Defense Strategy rejected “interventionism, endless wars, regime change, and nation building”. A month later, he announced an operation whose initial stated objective was the overthrow of a government in a country of 90 million people.

The Iranian regime, however, shows few signs of near-term capitulation. The regime has moved quickly to project continuity and stability. It has also responded quickly to US-Israeli attacks, hitting back at Israel, US and allied military bases, and sites across the Gulf Arab states with thousands of advanced ballistic missiles and drones in an effort to raise the psychological and real costs of the war. Meanwhile, it remains unclear whether Iran’s fragmented opposition could capitalize on any real political vacuum—a dynamic that the American and Israeli architects of this campaign appear to have underestimated.  

The politics of the war are already catching up with Trump. Unlike in Israel, the war is unpopular in the US. With Americans increasingly focused on affordability, the war-related surge in commodity costs is likely to accelerate pressure on Washington. That pressure has already begun to shape the conflict. In what was described as the “first significant disagreement” of the Iran war, the US criticized Israeli attacks on Iranian fuel depots. As a Trump advisor put it, “The president doesn’t like the attack. He wants to save the oil. He doesn’t want to burn it. And it reminds people of higher gas prices.” Following Israeli attacks on the South Pars gas field this week, the US president told reporters that he calledNetanyahu to tell him that Israel should not target energy infrastructure: “I told him don’t do that […] But on occasion he’ll do something, and if I don’t like it … and so we’re not doing that anymore.”

An Asymmetric Alliance

The disagreements over Iranian energy targets showed the beginning of a collision in a war Netanyahu needs to win and a war Trump needs to end. Trump, however, does not need Netanyahu to end the war; Netanyahu cannot continue the war without Trump. Israel has reportedly warned the United States that it is running “critically low” on ballistic interceptors, underlining an ongoing military dependency on Washington. Israeli officials privately acknowledge that ultimately it will be Trump, not Netanyahu, who decides when this war ends.  Netanyahu has experienced firsthand what it means when Trump decides a war is over. When Israeli jets were en route to attack additional targets in Iran in June 2025, Trump informed Netanyahu that the fight was over. 

As the political, economic, and military costs of this war continue to mount, Trump will be more inclined to identify an exit. For Netanyahu, this moment will likely come as it did last June: without his input and before his own objectives are met. Ending this war, however, might prove harder than starting it. Iran also gets a vote. The Iranian regime is battered but not broken and, in recent weeks, has come to understand that attritional warfare is an effective endurance strategy. Tehran did not start this war, but this time, it may decide when it ends.

The views expressed herein are those solely of the author(s). GMF as an institution does not take positions.