Israel’s latest war with Iran can be by no means considered a failure.
Israel has decapitated Iran’s leadership, paralyzed their economic and military capabilities, and has effectively isolated Hezbollah from the Islamic Republic with a separate ceasefire.
This war was not, however, the fantastical “knockout blow” many Israelis had imagined. When Israel does go back to war with Iran, be that this week or next, or six months from now, it is better served doing so without the globally overcommitted and fundamentally disinterested United States, who only complicate the war effort and undercut Israel when negotiating the war’s political result.
US President Donald Trump has produced a relatively straightforward foreign policy doctrine; identify and act aggressively against the BRICS non-dollar trading axis as a significant threat to USD hegemony while leveraging the security threat of BRICS-aligned countries to force US allies to spend more on defense (ie: massively invest in the US-dominated defense industry), as the US itself divests from these same allies and reshores industry domestically.
In other words, Trump is seeking to aggressively and coercively secure USD hegemony in this post-COVID global supply chain crisis period of economic transition.
More than just this global overcommitment, the US fundamentally does not share the Israeli interest of debilitating Iran.
As I wrote in the Times of Israel on March 22, this balancing act has put President Trump and the United States at odds with the European powers.
While neither Washington nor Brussels would like to see BRICS-aligned countries like Iran – or especially Russia – emboldened, the two sides have embroiled themselves in a game of chicken over how exactly these threats will be managed. Europe is not keen on defense spending, which would require dramatic and politically suicidal austerity measures to finance, and is willing to threaten defection to BRICS in order to prevent this eventuality.
This is the game of chicken the US and Europe have played in Ukraine, and have now moved to the Strait of Hormuz; Washington requested European military assistance to secure the source of a plurality of European-consumed oil, but Europe instead demanded an end to the war and threatened to start purchasing oil from Russia.
This is a serious threat. European imports account for over one fifth of global seaborne crude oil. If Europe were to begin purchasing oil from Russia instead of petrodollar states, this would considerably harm the USD status as the global reserve currency, remove the structural line of credit this status provides to the US Treasury, and threaten Washington with a debilitating sovereign debt crisis.
In the end, the great tapestry of American world power had far too many loose ends. In the Strait of Hormuz, against the credible threat of European divestment from USD hegemony, Trump folded.
Beyond its general global overcommitment, the US fundamentally does not share the Israeli interest of debilitating Iran.
An enfeebled Iran would mean a Saudi Arabia and GCC that no longer face a credible existential threat, are therefore no longer dependent on US security guarantees, and therefore have no structural interest to be party to the petrodollar system – the agreement to price and sell oil only in USD which has, since the mid-1970s, grounded the USD status as the global reserve currency.
Iran is not actually a threat to the US global order, but rather the necessary leverage to maintain its financial hegemony and economic empire.
Washington would certainly like to recalibrate this balance, returning to the sweet spot where Iran is still dangerous enough to leverage against the Gulf states but no longer dangerous enough to actually demand US military involvement. To completely neutralize Iran, however, would remove what might be Washington’s greatest asset in securing US global hegemony.
For Washington, Iran is not merely an adversary but a structural component of a broader system of leverage that sustains American economic and strategic dominance.
Israel, by contrast, faces Iran as an immediate and existential security challenge.
These interests overlap only partially, though when the stakes rise high enough they inevitably diverge.
The lesson of this war is therefore not one of defeat, but of clarity: if Israel ultimately intends to neutralize the Iranian threat, it must prepare to do so on its own strategic terms, guided by its own interests and timelines rather than those of a superpower whose priorities lie elsewhere.
