The differences between what Trump and Netanyahu want out of this war are starting to show and complicating how it will end
W
hen the US and Israel launched an attack on Iran to start a war that is now entering its third week, it was the start of something unprecedented; the first joint Israeli-American war. Even though the US has long been a close military ally of Israel, this has never happened before. Unlike last year’s “12-day war” where Israel launched a war that the US joined near the very end with a single set of strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, this Israeli-American war on Iran is deeply coordinated at the operational level between both belligerents day in and day out.
That is precisely why clear, shared objectives between Washington and Tel Aviv will be crucial for the US to exit this war with a political victory and not just the tab for tons of destruction across the region with little significant change. Much of what we have seen so far suggests strongly that that is not the case; Israel and the US have different goals here, if they even really know what their goals are, and because of this no clear endgame can be envisioned even as the costs of the war mount.
From the outset the messaging around the war by Washington has been confused. Days before the war was launched, the president of the United States in his state of the union address touted low gas prices and the little he mentioned about Iran suggested he preferred a negotiated outcome. Once the war began, spiking gas prices shortly thereafter, the administration couldn’t get on the same page about why the US was at war.
