The United States, while not directly attacking Iran, bears significant responsibility for the ongoing Israel-Iran war due to its long-term policies and failure to prevent escalation.
Washington and the Israel-Iran War
The roots of today’s conflict can be traced back to the Trump administration’s 2018 decision to unilaterally withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal—an agreement painstakingly negotiated by the Obama administration over several years. In hindsight, had the Trump administration honored the deal, there would have been no need to pursue a new one today, especially under terms widely viewed as unrealistic by Tehran. Notably, Iran neither exited the 2015 agreement nor violated its terms. The US withdrawal was largely driven by the deal’s failure to satisfy Israeli concerns.
When the original agreement was signed in 2015, Joe Biden was serving as vice president. However, upon becoming president, Biden made no significant effort to revive the accord. Instead, his administration prioritized military support to Israel, enabling it to confront and weaken Iranian allies in the region—namely Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Syrian government. This sustained effort to undermine the so-called “axis of resistance” formed by Iran and its partners created the immediate geopolitical context for the outbreak of the current war. However, reports in the mainstream western media continue to falsely associate Israel’s actions to Israeli claims that Tehran was close to building several nuclear weapons.
This is false reasoning primarily because these reports fail to acknowledge that the resurgence of conflict in the Middle East in October 2023 can be traced, in part, to the Abraham Accords—agreements through which several Arab states, including the UAE, normalized relations with Israel without addressing the longstanding Palestinian issue. Following these accords, continued Israeli expansion exacerbated tensions, ultimately leaving Hamas with few alternatives but to escalate hostilities. In the aftermath of Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel—backed consistently by the US—moved systematically to neutralize its key adversaries. In this context, targeting Iran, its last significant rival, appeared to be a strategic and foreseeable progression.
Therefore, the reality of the current war is that, as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu himself claimed in one of his video statements, that he had ordered his military forces to plan a full-scale attack on Iran back in November 2024. Once again, this decision was made when Israel was already involved in a multi front war against Hamas, Hezbollah, and even the al-Assad regime in Syria. (Israel hasn’t launched any noticeable sir strikes in Syria ever since the HTS took power.) Therefore, regardless of what the IAEA report said about Iran reportedly breaking limits of uranium enrichment and/or the Trump administration finding it hard to renegotiate a deal with Iran, the war was bound to happen. The bottom line is that the Trump administration has failed to prevent it, even though a key slogan of Trump’s presidential campaign was that he would not start new wars, directly or indirectly, and that he would end existing conflicts.
Still, ever since Israel began attacking Iran on Friday, June 13, the US has done nothing to prevent the war and/or take a principled stand. Even though President Trump has claimed on several occasions that the conflict can be ended easily, he hasn’t shared any plan and roadmap to accomplish this claim, showing how empty rhetoric neither prevents wars nor can it meaningfully help de-escalate an ongoing crisis.
Trump didn’t visit Israel
When US President Donald Trump recently visited the Middle East—Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar—he didn’t deliberately visit Israel. This choice of countries for his maiden visit was meant to serve as a snub to the Netanyahu administration’s stubborn approach towards Trump’s preferences for talks with Iran. Instead of pressuring Israel into following the US into talks, Israel decided to up the ante—and potentially sabotage diplomatic approaches—by attacking Iran. Washington’s strategy of creating an impression where Israel stood alone or isolated has clearly backfired. Even though the US is not directly attacking Iran, its involvement in the war is conspicuous across several fronts. For example, it has not announced to end its military aid to Israel because of its aggression in the region.
Trump continues to insist on doing a new deal with Iran. If he really wanted to end the crisis, he could have announced, after taking the EU and other stakeholders into account, reviving the JCPOA of 2015. It would have become a lot harder for Israel to attack Iran after the deal’s formal declaration. But there is no intention to do so. Instead, the Trump administration continues to push Iran to come to the negotiating table and accept the deal—which would lead to Iran to ultimately dismantling its entire nuclear program—to end the war. It is quite clear that Iran won’t accept this proposal. It would prefer responding militarily to Israel’s aggression, which is what is happening, leaving the so-called leader of the “free world” in no position to influence the direction of events.
To the extent that the US both caused this war by creating favourable conditions and has failed to control it by doing nothing, it stands more than responsible for plunging the Middle East into a crisis deep enough to engulf the wider region directly in the months to come. Decades of US dominance in the Middle East have only produced wars after wars. It is time for the regional states to realise the folly of deepening their ties with Washington and hoping for a secure future. That doesn’t exist for US allies in the Middle East.
Salman Rafi Sheikh, research analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs
