The struggle between Iran and Israel isn’t one war. It is three globally significant wars all at once. Israel is waging a war for the Middle East, a war for nuclear nonproliferation, and a war against an axis of aggressors that is testing the international order on several fronts.
Understanding any war requires grasping its stakes. The very high stakes of this war may soon offer President Donald Trump an ugly choice.
First, the Israel-Iran war is a conflict to reshape the Middle East. Since the Islamic revolution in 1979, Iran has been trying to eradicate Israel, expel the US and otherwise remake that region. For 20 years after America’s misbegotten Iraq War, Tehran was going from strength to strength.
Iran used well-armed proxies to harass its enemies and carve out a crescent of influence from the Arabian Peninsula to the Levant. It stockpiled missiles and chased a nuclear capability that would make it invulnerable to a hostile response.
The high-water mark of Iranian power came just after Oct. 7, 2023. One proxy, Hamas, had humiliated Israel with an attack that killed some 1,200 people. Another, Hezbollah in Lebanon, was making the northern part of Israel a wasteland. A third, the Houthis in Yemen, were lighting up the Red Sea. Iran, meanwhile, was using this smokescreen of regional violence to push its nuclear ambitions forward.
Then the momentum shifted, hard.

It was Israel, awakened to existential peril, that has remade the regional power balance: by battering Hamas and Hezbollah, helping topple Tehran’s client-state in Syria, and now raining destruction on Iran itself. The more that war weakens the core of Iranian power — its military, its economy, the foundations of its awful regime — the more it will reset the regional landscape in ways that favor the US.
Second, this is a war to save the nuclear nonproliferation regime, a historic US and global achievement that has been slipping of late. North Korea flouted US warnings and built a nasty nuclear arsenal. Iran’s nuclear drive threatened — and still threatens
-to set off rampant proliferation in the Middle East.
Israel is an odd vindicator, in this regard. A country long rumored to possess nuclear weapons is technically a proliferation outlaw — even as the dictates of survival have made it a proliferation sheriff. Israel attacked the Iraqi nuclear program in 1981 and the Syrian program in 2007; it has been attacking, through overt or covert means, the Iranian program for years.
If Israel can wreck that program or force Tehran to cut a deal under duress, it will slow the spread of nuclear weapons — and even force it, modestly, into reverse.
Third, Israel is taking on the larger axis of aggressors. Iran, North Korea, Russia and China have armed and aided one another in recent years. Iranian drones helped Russia ravage Ukrainian cities; Tehran used Russia’s aerial terror campaign to inform its own attacks on Israel. This tightening of ties between the world’s revisionist states is one of the most daunting facts of contemporary international life.
Israel doesn’t really see a world split between friendly democracies and nasty autocracies, the way many Western states do. It has hardly been a standout in supporting Ukraine. But as the revisionist coalition coheres, its gains and losses are, increasingly, shared. So, by hammering Iran — the only one of that group that still lacks nuclear weapons — Israel challenges the coalition by pressuring its weakest link.
All this underscores why Israel is a valuable ally: It often advances US interests simply by defending its own. Trump may hope that Israel will simply hand him a tremendous victory — that it will shatter Iran’s military, weaken its regime and halt its nuclear program without additional US help.
Perhaps Israel can do this: Its military performance, over the past year, has been brilliant. But what if it can’t?
Israel’s air force can’t keep up the current tempo forever. It probably can’t destroy the deeply buried Fordow enrichment facility without America’s bunker-busting help. If, a few days or weeks from now, Israel’s war looks promising but inconclusive, Trump will have to choose whether to get more deeply into that fight.
In many respects, Trump would hate to do so. Another Middle Eastern war is not what he promised. It could split a MAGA coalition that includes both hawks and neo-isolationists; it could divert resources from the Pacific; it could send oil prices soaring if Tehran strikes back in the Strait of Hormuz.
Yet an American air campaign against Iran’s nuclear program has never been easier, given that Israel has shredded the country’s air defenses. And if the US knocks out the Iranian nuclear program, even for a few years, a man who loves winning could claim to have won big on three crucial fronts.
A president who started his second term by swearing off Middle Eastern wars has already gotten into one of them, against the Houthis. It would be a profound, if hardly inconceivable, irony if the stakes of the Iran-Israel war ultimately led him to join another.

source: aei.org