Iran Was Never Just Israel’s Problem

Some criticism of this war is justified.

If leaders want Americans to support military action against Iran, they must explain clearly why the threat is not merely Israeli, but American. They must define the objectives honestly and explain why the costs are worth bearing.

When they fail to do that, skepticism is not a vice. It is common sense.

But much of the commentary around this war has not been serious skepticism. It has been historical amnesia.

Too many Americans now speak as though Iran were chiefly Israel’s problem, and that the legitimate threat from Tehran was mainly the product of lobbying, hawkish paranoia, or another foreign entanglement sold under false pretenses.

This view appears on parts of the Left and on parts of the Right alike. It is a genuine horseshoe: one side speaks in the language of anti-colonial grievance, the other in the language of “America First” suspicion, but both often arrive at the same lazy conclusion — that Israel is the primary author of the crisis and Iran’s own record is somehow secondary.

That is not realism. It is illiteracy (or anti-Jewish bias) masquerading as restraint.

The Islamic Republic of Iran introduced itself to the United States in 1979 not through diplomacy, but through humiliation and hostage-taking. The seizure of the American embassy in Tehran and the 444-day hostage crisis were not a misunderstanding. They were an opening statement.

From the beginning, the Iranian regime announced that ideological confrontation with America was not incidental to its identity. It was central.

What followed only confirmed this. For decades, the regime paired annihilative rhetoric with action: terrorism, proxy warfare, hostage-taking, intimidation, and subversion across the region and beyond. Iran did not merely talk like a revolutionary power. It behaved like one.

Americans should remember what that looked like in practice. Some of us knew it through Iraq.

I remember the explosively formed penetrators used in catastrophic IED attacks against American forces. Those weapons were not an abstraction. They were part of the same Iranian model of deniable warfare that allowed the regime to bleed its enemies while pretending to stand one step removed from the violence.

Iran is responsible for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq. That’s not an Israeli “talking point” — it’s something that Americans need to hear.

Nor was Iran’s model of violence confined to one battlefield. Its partnership with Hezbollah, and the operatives who helped turn that relationship into a durable instrument of terror, showed that Iran’s strategy was never simply defensive. It was regional, ideological, and expansionist.

The nuclear issue tells the same story of denial colliding with evidence. Iran has insisted for years that its nuclear program is peaceful and civilian. But enrichment at levels far beyond normal civilian requirements tells a different story. Americans do not need a degree in nuclear physics to understand that.

One need not endorse every tactical choice made in this war to recognize that Tehran’s claims about its intentions have repeatedly collided with the evidence.

The missile issue is similar. For years, Iran presented supposed limits on its missile range as though they reflected meaningful restraint. Yet its actual capabilities and behavior have repeatedly revealed a larger reach and a more aggressive intent than its public narratives suggested.

This is why the old Waltz-Sagan political science debate still matters. Kenneth Waltz argued that nuclear weapons can stabilize rivalries because states fear annihilation and therefore behave more cautiously.

Scott Sagan warned that proliferation can make catastrophe more likely through accidents, weak controls, organizational failures, and the conduct of dangerous regimes.

In the Iranian case, Sagan’s warning is plainly the more relevant one.

The problem is not that Iranian leaders are cartoonishly irrational. The problem is that too many Western analysts assume every regime calculates risk, death, survival, and martyrdom in roughly the same way. They do not.

A revolutionary regime that has spent decades pairing annihilative rhetoric with proxy warfare, terror sponsorship, nuclear deceit, and regional coercion should not be analyzed as though it were simply another status quo state with ordinary preferences and ordinary inhibitions.

That is also why the phrase “regime change” should not be treated as morally disqualifying in itself.

Everything depends on the regime in question. When a government has spent nearly half a century brutalizing its own people, threatening its neighbors, sponsoring terrorism, and lying about capabilities that could turn regional war into mass destruction, its removal is not inherently a dark or reckless aspiration.

There is nothing morally sophisticated about treating the survival of such a regime as the default prudent outcome. This is not merely an external menace. It is a regime that terrorizes its own population as well.

At the same time, serious people should say plainly what force can and cannot do. Decapitation strikes and threat-reduction operations are not a political end state. They are, at most, an opening salvo. They can degrade command structures, reduce immediate dangers, and create opportunities that did not previously exist. They cannot by themselves produce legitimacy, restore sovereignty, or build a stable successor order.

That harder phase, if it ever comes, will depend above all on Iranians themselves — on brave people willing to reclaim their country from a regime that has held it hostage for nearly half a century.

This is the point too many critics still miss. Yes, there has been a communications failure. Americans were not told clearly enough, consistently enough, or persuasively enough why Iran is not just Israel’s problem but America’s problem too. And that failure created space for the horseshoe. On the Left and on the Right, anti-Israel fixation has too often displaced sober analysis of the regime itself. The language differs, but the impulse is similar: minimize Iran’s agency, magnify Israel’s, and collapse strategy into slogans.

But the communications failure does not make the danger unreal.

Nor does the war’s messiness. If the war had gone better — if it had produced a cleaner strategic result, a more visible collapse in regime capacity, or even the early signs of a successful internal uprising — some of today’s criticism would undoubtedly be quieter. That much is true. But it does not follow that the underlying threat was invented. It means only that strategic disappointment always gives selective memory more room to operate.

Iran was never just Israel’s problem. It has been an American problem since 1979. It has been a regional problem for decades. And it remains a wider strategic problem wherever revolutionary terror, nuclear deceit, long-range coercion, and genocidal rhetoric are treated as tolerable, so long as they are aimed at someone else first.

This was not only a failure of statecraft. It was a failure of recognition. Too many Americans looked at the crisis and somehow forgot they were dealing with a regime that has spent decades announcing itself through terror, deceit, and exterminationist intent.

David E. Firester, Ph.D., is the Founder and CEO of TRAC Intelligence, LLC, and the author of Failure to Adapt: How Strategic Blindness Undermines Intelligence, Warfare, and Perception (2025).