Foreign Affairs America and Israel’s War to Remake the Middle East The Perils for the Region—and the Alliance Dana Stroul March 4, 2026

 Foreign  Affairs 

America and Israel’s War to Remake the Middle East

The Perils for the Region—and the Alliance

Dana Stroul

March 4, 2026

After a U.S.-Israeli strike, Tehran, Iran, March 2026

Majid Asgaripour / West Asia News Agency / Reuters

DANA STROUL is Director of Research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East from February 2021 to December 2023.

The United States and Israel may have different names for their latest military campaigns in Iran—Epic Fury and Rising Lion—but there is nothing separate about them. They constitute the first truly combined U.S.-Israeli military operation—and it is hard to overstate how groundbreaking the partnership is. Normally, the U.S. military works in broad coalitions, designing the operation, commanding it, and doing most of the fighting. In the U.S.-NATO engagement in Afghanistan that began in 2002, the United States conducted most airstrikes and deployed the bulk of ground forces; the United States conducted the vast majority of the opening salvos during the 2003 “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq. In the mid-2010s, when Washington launched Operation Inherent Resolve to oust the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) from Iraq and Syria, it led the air campaign while training and funding partners on the ground. Indeed, the United States has not fought an adversary in a fully combined manner—dividing targets and working equally within a shared operational construct—since World War II.

With the opening of this new chapter against Iran, the U.S.-Israeli relationship has crossed a threshold. The United States and Israel are equal partners in this war, fusing their intelligence operations, dividing labor, and combining risk. U.S. and Israeli lives are both on the line. Israel and the United States, of course, have long had a special partnership, and the foundation of this joint campaign was built on decades of U.S. financial and military support. But the collaboration was nowhere near as comprehensive even nine months ago, during the June 2025 12-day war.

There is another unusual feature of this partnership: the U.S. and Israeli militaries are fusing their operations even as their publics drift further apart. Israelis have long seen the Iranian regime as an existential threat. They were anticipating a return to war this year and are—at least initially—rallying around the campaign. Americans, meanwhile, were barely prepared by President Donald Trump for war with Iran. Myriad polls in January and February showed that the prospect of a war with Iran was deeply unpopular in the United States, and influential members of each U.S. political party (particularly within Trump’s MAGA coalition) are increasingly questioning the very value of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. A protracted conflict will deepen this skepticism, and Israel’s reliance on the United States to replenish its fast-depleting arsenal will become more visible.

The strikes on Iran are accelerating a bifurcation in the U.S.-Israeli relationship, characterized by ever-deepening closeness between the two countries’ militaries and growing political criticism of the partnership. That may not seem to be such a challenge right now, as generals lead frontline operations in the thick of war. But the close (and valuable) military collaboration cannot last alongside such divergent views of the conflict among the U.S. and Israeli populations. And if U.S. and Israeli leaders do not work to change those views, the military collaboration will become a victim of the political rift.

COME TOGETHER

The decision to unite Israeli and American forces was not an impulsive one recently made by Trump. The preparations for a joint war have been a long time coming. In 2020, Trump directed the Pentagon to move operations related to Israel from the United States European Command to the United States Central Command (CENTCOM), whose area of operation includes the Middle East, reflecting a commitment to the normalization of ties between Israel and its neighbors. This organizational change—along with the increasing recognition in Washington that countering Iranian threats required new approaches—opened the doors to the integration of U.S. and Israeli military capabilities at all levels. 

CENTCOM already had ties to Arab militaries and quickly identified practical ways to facilitate Israel’s inclusion in regional initiatives such as sharing intelligence and radar feeds. U.S. backing for the normalization of Israel’s ties with Middle Eastern countries coincided with rapid advances in defense technology that made it easier, faster, and cheaper to integrate with partners in areas such as air defense. U.S. military leaders also invested in personal relationships with their Israeli counterparts and built trust: before Israel’s move into CENTCOM, CENTCOM’s top leaders had only ever visited Israel twice. General Erik Kurilla, CENTCOM’s commander between 2022 and 2025, visited Israel at least 40 times during his tenure.

U.S.-Israeli military ties continued to deepen under President Joe Biden. The January 2023 U.S.-Israeli military exercise called Juniper Oak remains underappreciated, given its significance as the first “all domain” exercise between the U.S. military and any partner in the Middle East. It brought together air, land, sea, cyber, and space forces, testing how they shared information and fought together against different threats, and assessing how they might fight together in wartime. Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel put this collaboration to the test. In the immediate aftermath of the assault, the United States dramatically increased its military posture in the Middle East; scaled up many kinds of assistance to back Israeli military’s operations; executed its own strikes against Iran’s proxies in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen; and, in April 2024, coordinated a multinational air-defense coalition with Arab and European partners to defeat an Iranian ballistic-missile attack on Israel. In October 2024, during another Iranian attack, Washington shifted toward a more active participation in Israel’s defense, intercepting at least half of Iran’s missiles.

But the Biden administration always conceived of its role as supporting Israel’s defense; it emphasized protecting U.S. forces and de-escalation in order to prevent interstate war. Biden stopped short of implementing policies that involved the United States in offensive strikes with Israel against Iran. This firm position was based on the view that Iran’s retaliation in response to such actions would not only risk American and Israeli lives but also endanger Arab civilians and critical infrastructure across the region.

The 12-day war still adhered to this separation. Israel went in first and cleared an air corridor to facilitate strikes on Iranian military and nuclear targets; then, more than a week later, the United States stepped in with bombs only it possessed, with the sole objective of destroying Iran’s deeply buried nuclear enrichment facilities. Israel’s military accomplishments enabled the United States to temporarily join the war and achieve a shared objective, but the two operations were sequenced clearly and separately.

STRESS FRACTURE

A half decade of deepening—and publicly underappreciated—collaboration between the U.S. and Israeli militaries allowed for a seamlessly coordinated attack this past weekend. The two militaries are demonstrating, in real time, truly joint air defense and strike frameworks, comprehensive deconfliction, and continuous intelligence fusion. The U.S. and Israeli roles in the war reflect nuanced planning, such as the division of targets in the initial days of the campaign before air supremacy was achieved over Iran’s skies. It is also clear that the United States and Israel have shared intelligence on the most sensitive targets. Israel eliminated Iranian leadership while the United States focused on targeting missile-storage facilities and the Iranian navy. With the freedom to fly over Iran, and building on insights gained during the 12-day war, Israel and the United States jointly increased the intensity of their strikes against all elements of Iran’s missile program. The combined campaign features offensive and defensive cyber-operations and coordinated information campaigns to “blind” the Iranian regime and influence Iranian public perceptions.

At the very same time, however, the traditional bipartisan foundation of political support in the United States that sustained the special partnership with Israel is eroding. In late February, for the first time in 25 years, the Gallup World Affairs Survey found that a larger proportion of Americans stated that their sympathies are “more with the Palestinians” than with the Israelis in the Middle East; this reflects a massive drop in U.S. sympathy for Israelis, from 60 percent in 2020 to 36 percent now. An August 2025 Quinnipiac poll found the same level of support for Israelis among Americans—an all-time low since Quinnipiac began surveying U.S. support for Israel in 2001—and that six in ten voters, including nearly half of Republicans, opposed continuing military aid to Israel. Recent polls of young Americans, in particular, find especially low support for a U.S. military partnership with Israel.

And Americans’ experience of this new war differs sharply from Israelis’. According to a late February poll by the Israeli media outlet Channel 12, a large majority of Israelis backed a joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, while in a CNN survey released on Monday, 60 percent of Americans disapproved of the campaign and wanted Trump to seek congressional approval for any further military collaboration. Israelis’ daily lives are now dominated by the sound of air raid sirens while Americans question the war’s necessity. The coming days and weeks may well fracture the MAGA coalition as casualties rise or as Trump—who promised his supporters “no more foreign wars”—fails to end the conflict quickly.

The difference in the U.S. and Israeli views on the current war is likely to deepen the divide between the two countries. Most Israelis believe the 12-day war ended too soon and that the threat from Iran cannot be eliminated as long as the regime of the Islamic Republic persists. This time around, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stressed his interest in creating the conditions for regime change. Trump has intermittently echoed these calls but expressed an openness to working with remnants of the regime, much as he has done with Venezuela after the U.S. military removed President Nicolás Maduro.

LONG DIVISION

Although the events following Hamas’s October 7 attack propelled the U.S. and Israeli militaries toward this peak kinetic moment of combined operations, the narrative around the war could easily result in strategic loss. U.S. and Israeli military leaders are winning according to conventional metrics for assessing military effectiveness. The end of the fighting, however, will not be the end of the war.

Just like last summer, it will end when Trump decides to end it. But the stakes are higher now. Iran is targeting civilian airports, hotels, port infrastructure, and energy installations in the oil-producing Arab states, whose leaders Trump counts as key allies. That endangers not only U.S. troops and civilian populations but also the entire Gulf business model, which is based on a lack of conflict within their territories, and global energy markets. As U.S. casualties rise and Trump confronts the financial implications of Operation Epic Fury, he may seek an off-ramp short of full regime change in Tehran. This will diminish the immediate threat posed by Iran but leave the region in a holding pattern.

Long-term damage to the U.S.-Israeli relationship is the most worrying possibility. Israel is exactly the kind of ally that the United States needs to confront an array of threats as the nature of warfare rapidly changes and creates a pressing need for new technologies and scalable defense industries. Israel is a capable, willing partner with irreplaceable intelligence aptitudes and a thriving defense innovation ecosystem that is already directly benefiting U.S. forces. Moreover, Israel is willing to put its own forces at risk for a shared objective and carry its share of the warfighting burden.

As the United States considers how to best protect its interests across an array of theaters, Israel should be a security partner of choice. But if questions about the value of the partnership continue to mount, that will make it increasingly difficult for U.S. military leaders to turn to Israel for help in times of both crisis and peace. Trump and Netanyahu have shown themselves to be particularly unwilling to reach beyond their bases and engage broad swaths of their societies to build consensus. And because each man is politically vulnerable and facing a critical upcoming election, neither is likely to take up the mantle of leadership needed to put the U.S.-Israeli relationship back on solid footing—or to clearly communicate what kind of Iran strategy would leave the world safer after the guns fall silent. A failure of political leadership may accelerate the breakdown of an effective military collaboration, undermining the deeper partnership that teamwork could have bolstered. That would not just be a bitter irony. It would be a tremendous loss.