Under the dictatorship of the Shah, Iran was a close U.S. ally. There are tantalizing indications that American policymakers are looking to recreate that Cold War-era partnership and kick Israel to the curb.
This seems crazy.
Just a few months ago, the Trump administration and Israel went to war together against Iran, assassinated its Supreme Leader and other top officials and attempted to decimate its military and spark a popular uprising against the government. Against the odds, Iran prevailed by leveraging its control of the Strait of Hormuz—through which 20% of the world’s oil (and thus much of its economy) flows. Iran flipped the script, transforming U.S. bases in the Gulf from encircling threats to convenient targets.
Lest there be any doubt, 92% of Israelis—in a right-wing apartheid state whose Left has been hollowed out and radicalized by Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack—say they believe that Iran has won.
The Islamic Republic has emerged with newfound respect not only from the Sunni Arab street but also its own restive population and its American attackers, as well as stronger economic alliances, the unwinding of sanctions, and hundreds of billions in war reparations. America is desperately suing for peace; demands that Iran give up its nuclear research and medium-range missiles have vanished into the “nuclear dust.”
Arguably the most significant transformation to come out of the 2026 Iran War has been severe damage to the US-Israeli alliance, which dates to 1948. For most of that time, the U.S. extended Israel a blank check. Whatever the Jewish state did—launch wars of aggression against its neighbors, capture territory it never intended to liberate or annex, build secret nuclear weapons, create an apartheid state, kill American sailors, undermine efforts at regional peace—the U.S. poured in arms, cash, intelligence support and U.N. security council vetoes whenever needed, no questions asked.
Like a kid with a permissive parent, Israel repeatedly tested its limits. Finally, they crossed the line.
Not only did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seduce President Trump into a military misadventure that failed overnight, bringing about a humiliating defeat. There is broad consensus in official Washington that Israel was either stupidly naïve or outright lied about the war’s chances of success.
In their book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan describe the extraordinary Iran War sales pitch Bibi delivered to Trump and his top officials at the White House on February 11th: “Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory. Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed within a few weeks; Iran would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz; the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was minimal. Besides, Mossad intelligence indicated that protests inside Iran would begin again and—with the Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion—an intense bombing campaign could create the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime. The Israelis also raised the prospect of Iranian Kurdish fighters crossing the border from Iraq to open a ground front in the northwest, further stretching the regime’s forces and accelerating its collapse.”
All wrong.
Not everyone in the Situation Room was sold on a set of optimistic predictions that quickly proved disastrously mistaken. “Sir,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine told Trump, “this is, in my experience, standard operating procedure for the Israelis. They oversell, and their plans are not always well-developed. They know they need us, and that’s why they’re hard-selling.” Trump overruled Caine.
As the president sees it, Israel dragged him into a losing war. And now they’re sabotaging his efforts to end it.
“As far back as March, when the Trump administration began to explore diplomatic options for ending the war, U.S. officials told Israeli counterparts not to continue killing Iran’s political leadership,” The Washington Post reported. It’s hard to negotiate peace when your ally keeps whacking your enemy’s chief negotiators.
“Washington’s objection to killing Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the country’s parliamentary speaker, was so acute that this spring it took the extraordinary step of asking intermediaries to warn Iran,” the Post continued.
“Everybody hates you now,” Trump shouted at Netanyahu last month. “Everybody hates Israel because of this,” he said, referring to the IDF’s latest invasion of Lebanon. He could just as easily have been thinking about the genocide in Gaza and thuggish IDF-backed settlers in the West Bank.
The U.S. thinks Israel is feckless and ungrateful—vice president and likely 2028 GOP presidential nominee J.D. Vance said so in public. Israel’s support in the U.S. is at a record low and sinking.
We have good reason to start looking for a new Middle East bestie.
Iran would be a far more valuable ally in the region. As we’ve seen, Iran borders and controls the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf. It offers vast strategic depth, access to Central Asia, and leverage over energy pipeline routes. Israel, on the other hand, is tiny and comparatively ill-situated.
Iran has enormous oil and gas reserves, the third largest on earth. As a stable ally, it could be a major, reliable supplier and stabilizer of Gulf energy. Israel has negligible oil or gas. Iran’s 92 million people (Israel has 10 million) and large landmass provide a much bigger consumer market and recruitment pool. Thanks to the U.S.-Israeli disaster, most analysts agree, Iran is now the regional hegemon in the Middle East.
Israel still offers advanced technology, intelligence and military innovation, but it is small, with few natural resources, politically toxic—especially post-Gaza—and keeps trying to manipulate us.
Still, inertia tends to rule (until it doesn’t).
“If Trump were to bring serious pressure on Israel, it would have to be in pursuit of a significant breakthrough that would make him look good,” a skeptical former diplomat, Aaron David Miller, told Al Jazeera. “There’s no issue out there—not Lebanon, Gaza, [or] Israeli-Saudi normalization—that’s close to a breakthrough that would warrant sustained pressure on Israel.”
What about US-Iranian normalization?
That would be huge.
The question then comes down to this: After 47 years of U.S.-imposed sanctions, proxy wars, isolation, assassinations, and two recent sneak attacks during peace talks, could the Iranians ever bring themselves to trust us?
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)
1 Comment. Leave new
Clearly Iran is a better partner for the US than is Israel. Iran ranks #2 globally in proven natural gas reserves and #3 in proven oil reserves. (I’m assuming no one “here” is thinking that Trump’s maximum monumental blunder of attacking Iran a second time during “peace” negotiations … and getting 2x forced into begging for a cease fire … was about “saving the Iranian people.”)
But since up to 20 million Iranians at the recent funeral of their supreme leader, assassinated by the US, were chanting in unison: “Death to the US, death to Israel,” it might be 100 years for the then Iran to begin considering the notion, much less agree to it.
Then, of course, it might take 200 years for the US to finally shed its essential racism so that new Iran could feel as though the proposed parnership was genuine and intended to be mutually beneficial.
Note: the brief history of cozy US/Iran interactions did not include the fact that 1) the “dictatorship of the Shah” was a brutal police state and lasted 26 years until the 1979 Islamic revolution 2) shortly after said revolution Iraq declared war on Iran, some say at the “suggestion” of the US but certainly with its quickly supplied “technological assistance” (i.e. weapons of mass destruction)