Iraniana. Israel, Our Ally. Part Three

Victor Davis Hanson

It is hard to figure out why there is a growing American hatred of Israel, our ally against Iran. Does anyone really believe as is alleged that Israel is “pulling the strings” of the Trump administration?

For the moment, forget that helping the only democratic, pro-Western, and most powerful nation in the Middle East is in the U.S. interest, and instead remember the following:

1) The Iranian theocracy was born from the violence of storming our embassy in Tehran and taking American hostages. Its terrorist appendages blew up U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, and our embassies in Beirut, Kenya, and Tanzania. It has taken U.S. sailors hostage, CIA officers hostage, and even American tourists. The arming of terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq with shaped charges during those respective wars, led to the death and maiming of thousands of U.S. soldiers (not the 600 officially quoted by the Pentagon).

2) We are Iran’s “Great Satan,” and it has variously sought to assassinate on U.S. soil President Trump, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and former National Security Advisor John Bolton, and in addition tried to take out the Saudi Ambassador in Washington, D.C.

3) The October 7 massacres of some 1,200 innocent civilians in Israel, among them 46 Americans, were engineered by Iran, which armed and funded Hamas, as well as Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Take away October 7 and Israel would never have bombed Iran. That mass murdering transformed what had been a long cold war with Iran into a kinetic one.

4) For 47 years Iran has threatened to destroy Israel (“one-bomb state”), to overthrow the Gulf Sunni monarchies, and to fund anti-American killers in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. It has attacked ships in the Straits of Hormuz and bragged that it can shut down the global export of oil from the Gulf anytime it wishes. It was formerly a pawn of Russia and then became China’s proxy in the Middle East.

In other words, aside from helping Israel, the U.S, had 47-years-worth of one-sided assaults from Iran that justified a belated response in 2025–26. Given that the Iranians’ near-half-century main goal was to spread radical Shiite fundamentalism throughout the Middle East, backed by soon-to-be Iranian nuclear deterrents, it was also in our interest to neuter Iran, well apart from Israel.

Finally, the U.S. does not have all that many reliable allies. Even Canada has xeroxed the EU model of foreign policy. It has de facto open borders, offers praise for China, claims that the major powers (i.e., the U.S.) do not obey the “rules-based order,” and has refused for years to meet its 2% NATO commitments, while running up huge trade surpluses in its version of our once supposedly North American Free Trade Association.

Our NATO partners like Spain and the UK are now unreliable. None of the NATO big three of Germany, France, and the UK has as many fighter jets as Israel does alone. Were Israel not attacking Iran, our own effort to neuter the theocracy would be far more difficult, given especially Israel’s more effective on-the-ground intelligence and operatives inside Iran.

In the last three weeks alone, we’ve seen the amnesiac Brits distance themselves from their once closest ally (would they have wished Ronald Reagan to have taken his Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s advice to tilt toward Argentina in 1982?). German Chancellor Mertz openly mocked Trump and the U.S. in a recent speech to a German crowd. There is no need to reiterate Spain’s socialist government’s dislike of the U.S.

Unlike some of our NATO partners, Israel has shown itself to be pro-American and appreciative of our help. That is not to say the Trump administration has a blank check in Iran. It instead has a limited time to wrap up the operation, one way or another—due to fissures in the MAGA base, worries about oil prices and the economy, with the midterms just eight months away.