Israel didn’t drag the US into war with Iran — they enabled us to fight it smarter and faster

A dangerous lie has taken hold in Washington: that Israel somehow pressured the United States into war with Iran.

It’s wrong. And both President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have said so directly.

When a White House correspondent asked President Trump whether Israel had pulled America into the conflict, he didn’t hesitate. “I might have forced their hand,” he said. “We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first.”

Rubio was equally blunt after a deceptively edited video suggested he believed otherwise: “The president made a decision that negotiations were not going to work… this was a threat that was untenable. The decision was made to strike them.”

Untenable. That word deserves to sit with you for a moment.

Iran has spent years building nuclear weapons, developing long-range ballistic missiles, and encircling Israel with a terror army stretching from Lebanon to Gaza to Yemen. It has fired ballistic missiles directly at Israeli civilians.

No Israeli government — left, right, or center — could ignore that. Jerusalem’s decision to join a combined American-Israeli operation targeting Iran’s missile and nuclear capabilities drew near-universal support across Israel’s political spectrum. This wasn’t Netanyahu’s partisan gamble. It was a national security imperative.

And it was no surprise ambush on America.

When Netanyahu met Trump at Mar-a-Lago last December, reporting indicated the president had already green-lighted an Israeli strike on Iran’s missile infrastructure. When they met again at the White House, that green light held. Washington knew exactly what was coming and decided to lead the war.

The claim that Israel pressured the president of the United States into war is not just factually hollow — it veers dangerously close to the antisemitic fringe narratives about shadowy, unaccountable Jewish power that serious Republicans rightly reject.

But here’s the bigger point that keeps getting buried.

Iran’s missiles and nuclear program and terror are America’s problem.

Those missiles don’t just threaten Israel. They are being fired right now at US forces, American bases, our embassies, and our Gulf Arab allies. Iran is actively developing intercontinental ballistic missiles that could one day reach the American homeland.

This is the same regime that declared war on the United States in 1979 — that has killed and maimed thousands of Americans from Beirut to Baghdad to Kabul, taken Americans hostage, organized assassination and kidnapping plots in America, and armed the terrorist proxies that have American blood on their hands for decades.

Dismantling that regime’s nuclear, missile, and terror infrastructure is not a favor to Israel.

It is core American national security.

Now here’s what Americans should actually understand about the 12-Day War that took place against the regime in Iran in June 2025. 

Israel didn’t ask American pilots to do the heavy lifting. For the first 11 days, Israeli aircraft flew deep into Iranian territory — more than a thousand miles from home — dismantling Iran’s air defenses and striking key military targets. No American fighter jets alongside them. No boots on the ground. No American pilots risking their lives over Iranian skies. Israel did that work itself.

Only once Iran’s defenses were shattered did President Trump act. On day eleven, American B-2 bombers struck Fordow — the deeply buried nuclear facility that had long kept American planners up at night. The result was a devastating blow to Iran’s nuclear program.

Even now, by some estimates, Israel is responsible for roughly half of all strikes against Iranian targets in this conflict. In the entire modern history of American warfare, we have rarely — if ever — had an ally carry that kind of operational weight against a shared enemy.

So let’s retire the wrong question. Stop asking why America helped Israel.

Ask instead: when was the last time an American ally flew a thousand miles to tear down the air defenses of one of America’s most dangerous enemies — before we ever put a single pilot at risk?

I’m an American who is furious that Iran spent decades killing our citizens, maiming our soldiers, and taking our people hostage while Washington too often responded with half-measures and hand-wringing. This time was different.

Israel didn’t drag us into this war. It enabled us to fight it smarter, faster, and at far less cost than we ever could have alone.

That’s not pressure. That’s what real partnership looks like.

Mark Dubowitz is CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. https://www.fdd.org/