Israel, Iran, and the Trump Doctrine
Brian T. Kennedy, American Mind
President Trump is already engaged in an old war—and he wants to make sure the U.S. wins it.
President Donald Trump, like the American Founders, believes that this republic is constituted to protect the citizenry against all enemies, foreign and domestic. When it comes to foreign affairs, we are not obliged to fight and die for anyone but our fellow citizens. Our social compact is with one another as Americans. Whatever we do militarily and strategically is first and foremost to preserve the freedom and well-being of the American people.
President Trump thinks this is just common sense.
There is a disagreement now over what America’s role should be, if any, in supporting Israel after its preemptive strike on Iran. President Trump has authorized the use of American air defenses to stop Iranian attacks on American assets and citizens: our military bases in the region, our consulate in Tel Aviv, and the Americans living in the surrounding area. This is not an endorsement of the Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities and personnel. It is designed to protect the lives of Americans; the U.S. is well within its right to do so. It should be noted that we do not have an embassy in Iran, and for good reason.
Responses by the American Left to condemn Israel were not unexpected, as the Left has long sympathized with the anti-Western, anti-American hatred propagated by the Islamic world. More surprising is the reaction of some in the America First/MAGA movement, who seem to perceive President Trump’s policy as a betrayal of his promise to keep us out of new wars. Some perspective is required, because two decades of endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have discredited the use of American military power and tarnished the strategic relationship between the United States and Israel.
Let us be clear: the idea that there will be no new wars, however attractive that may sound, misses the point. We are already in a “People’s War” that the Chinese Communist Party declared in May of 2019 when President Trump committed to stop their theft of America’s intellectual property. Communist China is in a strategic alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran, which includes massive contracts for oil—some 16% of China’s current imports. The CCP has been instrumental in both advancing Iran’s nuclear program through scientific cooperation with North Korea, and abetting Iran’s terrorist activities throughout the region, including Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.
President Trump, therefore, has not endorsed the start of a new war. He is engaged in an old war—one that may well be seen, in retrospect, as World War III. He wants to make sure it is won by the United States.
Who is Israel to Us?
America has been friends with Israel since its inception in 1948. This friendship is founded in part upon our shared Judeo-Christian heritage, but mostly it arose pragmatically out of alliances formed during the Cold War. Israel was an outpost of the West—and still is. That doesn’t mean the Israelis are American or that we must die for them.
Separately from these calculations, Israel also evokes strong passions because of its status as the Jewish homeland. Many Americans—especially evangelical Christians—have a spiritual attachment to the Israelis that transcends mere politics. The Biblical teaching that the Jews are God’s chosen people lives in the hearts and minds of millions of Americans, including a substantial portion of the MAGA base. Yet there are other Americans who embrace varying degrees of the anti-Semitism that has been with us from time immemorial.
Nevertheless, the tension between these two groups has been defused throughout most of modern American history by our shared commitment to defy the Communist world. It was the goal of the Communists to break the will of the West to fight, and to strengthen those progressive elements within Western societies—and especially within the United States—that would ally with terrorist organizations such as the Palestinian Liberation Organization against Israel and America. Their purpose was to advance the cause of global Communism against the forces of freedom and Western Christendom, of which Israel is a part.
These bonds between Israel and America will not be broken easily, if ever. This does not mean that America’s strategic decisions do not begin and end with what is good, first and foremost, for America. What it means is that it is not a difficult call to wish the Israelis well in their attempt to permanently degrade Iran’s nuclear capability.
The Case of Iran
Many today suggest that American foreign policy is led by Israel. The U.S. experience with Iran tells a different story. The Islamic Republic of Iran has been at war with the United States for almost half a century. Its enmity for the U.S. was born of our cooperation in the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and the restoration of the Shah of Iran until his fall at the hands of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The overthrow in 1953 was part of a series of Cold War considerations that the United States made with our British allies to check the influence of the Soviet Union in the Middle East and ensure Western access to oil.
The Cold War, clearly misunderstood by so many young Americans today, was an existential contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States was not engaged in the democracy promotion that came to characterize the discredited and failed efforts of the Global War on Terrorism. During the Cold War the United States and our NATO allies engaged in ruthless competition with the Soviet Union and its allies, such as Communist China, North Korea, and the terrorist movements represented by the PLO in the Middle East and Communist/terrorist groups in Europe such as Baader-Meinhof, Black September, and the Red Brigades. Communist China supported these groups every bit as much as the Soviet Union did. It was a global struggle for primacy. Such is the case in world affairs. Communist China’s current support of Communist groups in the United States such as “No Kings” is a reminder of this.
It was hoped that supporting the Shah of Iran would help create a pro-Western regime that could advance pro-Western interests. This held for a time, until the Shah was overthrown by a mixture of Soviet-backed Communists and radical Islamic clerics led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. The failure of the Shah, Reza Pahlavi, was in part due to his inability to maintain a regime that was authoritarian enough to suppress the Communists and the Islamists. Lacking a strong hand—the Shah, it was said, did not want to turn his guns on his own people, even if it meant his own downfall—Iran was a regime ripe for revolution.
The United States’s strategy during the Cold War was to promote stability in the Middle East through the hegemonic powers of Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. All of these were pro-Western regimes that, whatever animosity may have existed between them, would create a balance of power that benefited the United States and the West. This strategy would collapse over time. The Shah of Iran fell in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Saudi Arabia, an economic power because of its oil exports, would come to support anti-Western Islamic movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood and its more violent offshoots such as Al Qaeda. And Turkey, a member of NATO, has come to see itself as the vanguard of a new Islamic caliphate, and has allied with Islamic forces in the region that might help them achieve this, including Iran. Although President Trump has established good relations with the Saudis and Qataris, this is a work in progress. The remaining power on the side of the West is Israel.
The fall of the Shah in 1979 led to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard seizing the U.S. Embassy and taking hostage 52 diplomats and staff. They were released on January 20, 1981, while President Reagan was being sworn into office. By all definitions, this was a textbook act of war against the United States. And it was an act of war that was never addressed. That the Iranian regime was not punished for their action confirmed in their minds that the war against the United States was just.
Likewise, there was no action taken in April of 1983 when the Iranians, intimate in the art of proxy war, used Hezbollah forces to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 63 people. Nor in October of 1983, when Iran used Hezbollah forces to blow up the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 U.S. service members. Both of these were, again, textbook acts of war that should have been met with decisive action—war if necessary—to establish the principle that American citizens cannot be killed with impunity.
As expected, such attacks did not assuage Iranian grievances regarding the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953. Far from it. The Iranian regime began the practice of having their schoolchildren recite, “Death to America and Death to Israel.” This is dismissed as mere Islamic rhetoric, the fervor of an oppressed people. In reality, it is a signal of a national commitment to wage war against the United States at the time and place of their choosing.
Iran undertook to couple this fervor with a large army, complete with advanced missilery and a developing nuclear weapons program. This was not a covert effort. It was well publicized in order to achieve the political effect of warning regional powers and the West that the Iranian military was lethal and not to be crossed.
During the war in Iraq following September 11, Iran regularly used various Shia forces to kill American soldiers using munitions made in Iran and coordinated by Iranian operatives. That our war in Iraq was misguided and badly executed does not obviate the fact that, once again, textbook acts of war were committed by Iran against the United States. Many on the America First Right today somehow dismiss all this as if it were irrelevant to how we should understand Iranian intentions. But the killing of Americans is wholly unacceptable, whether a war is widely supported or not.
It is not controversial among U.S. policymakers that Iran tested its ability to launch a ballistic missile from a ship twice, in the Caspian Sea in the early 2000s. The test missile launched had a non-nuclear warhead that created an explosion in the high atmosphere and simulated an electromagnetic pulse attack. There would be no other reason to test the explosion of a conventional warhead in the high atmosphere. This test was meant to relay to the United States that such an attack—an attack that could destroy the U.S. power grid and ultimately bring death upon hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens—could be executed against America. It beggars belief that anyone could believe Iran’s nuclear program is some kind of political theater rather than a program to wage war. Iran sits on one of the world’s largest reserves of natural gas. They don’t produce nuclear power for any other reason than enriching uranium that they will process for use in nuclear weapons.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in March that “the [Intelligence Community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.” However, she noted an increase in Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, describing it as “at its highest levels and unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
This has been seized on by some as proof positive the Israeli attack was unwarranted. But the Intelligence Community that Director Gabbard leads was inherited from the Biden Administration, which was and is highly politicized and historically not pro-Israel. What confidence can there be that the CIA or the DIA is right about this? These are the same agencies that promoted the idea that President Trump is a Russian agent.
It is not as if the creation or acquisition of a nuclear warhead is an impossible achievement. The Iranians are an extremely resourceful people, with a large military and very capable intelligence services. They have been working closely with the North Koreans for over 40 years on their nuclear weapons program. The aforementioned Scud III missile tested in the Caspian Sea was built on the North Korean Nodong missile design. That Iran could have acquired one or more warheads from North Korea is not inconceivable. Nor is the possibility that Iran acquired two warheads from Pakistan in the 1990s. Iranian scientists, working alongside Chinese and Russian scientists, must be at least as capable as those of the hermit kingdom.
Let it be said of Iran that for a nation that does not have nuclear weapons, it certainly behaves as if it does. What Prime Minister Netanyahu finds himself up against today is an Iran that is emboldened against the West, backed by Communist China, and unafraid to give financial and logistical support to assaults such as the October 7 Hamas attack and the subsequent Houthi attacks on U.S. sea power.
It would appear obvious that Netanyahu will never get a better U.S. president than Donald Trump. Although President Trump wishes for world peace, he understands we are in a conflict between great powers that will determine the future of the world. President Trump has also said unequivocally that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. If you are Netanyahu, you will have three-and-a-half more years of President Trump’s leadership with which to reconstruct the Middle East politically. And the president understands well the asymmetric capabilities of an Iranian nuclear missile, as indicated by their tests in the Caspian Sea. His Golden Dome missile defense system includes an open architecture to account for such possibilities, and he has urged that they be deployed as soon as possible.
Proponents of an immediate attack to finish the Iranian nuclear program point often to Iran’s millenarian version of Shia Islam, which holds that there will be a return of the 12th Imam in the course of an apocalyptic event; it is certain some hold this view. Whether they are in power at this moment in Iran is unclear. Claremont Institute scholar and International Relations professor Angelo Codevilla would often say that the Iranians may be crazy, but they are not stupid. It will be amply clear to many in Tehran that the age of the Mullahs has come to an end.
The Persians may be an ancient people and the possessors of a once great empire, but they were conquered in the 7th century by the Arabs, who imposed Islam upon them. After 1,400 years, regular attendance at Friday Mosque services ranges from a high of 12% to perhaps as low as 1.5%, the lowest in the Middle East. That the Iranians could be liberated from this Islamic Republic and could live at peace with the West would be a highly desirable thing. To bring that about, however, will be the job of the Iranian people.
As we Americans consider what is good for us, we should calculate that a nuclear attack by Iran on Israel seems less likely than an attack on the United States from a ship-launched ballistic missile, or the importation of a nuclear device by terrorists who would wish our destruction. After all, an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel—which may be fatal for Israel—will certainly be met with the nuclear annihilation of Iran. An attack on the U.S. from Iran—the strategic ally of Communist China—may well be hard to trace in the scenario just described. Retribution will not therefore be swift in coming. The need for the Golden Dome missile defense system in the U.S. is ever more clear.
Whatever decision President Trump makes during the next days, weeks, and months will be arrived at with the best intelligence at the time and with his signature resolve to put America first. Let us pray for God’s blessing on his decisions and on these United States.
Brian T. Kennedy is Chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, President of the American Strategy Group, and a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute. Follow him on X at @BrianTKennedy1 and on Gettr and Truth Social at @BrianTKennedy.
