Why America fights alongside Israel as China holds back in Iran

Did Israel pull the US into war with Iran? The recent US-Israel military strikes on Iran have revived a familiar debate about Israel’s influence over American Middle East policy. While some argue that Israel effectively acted as a “kingmaker”, the reality is more complex. 

For Israel, confrontation with Iran has long been a central security priority, shaped by years of military rivalry and regional competition. For the US, however, the decision to intervene reflected its own calculations about deterrence and domestic politics, with Washington framing the joint strikes on Iran as a pre-emptive move to deter retaliation and protect US forces in the region. Seen from this perspective, the conflict is less about who “dragged” who into war than about how shifting regional dynamics created the conditions for escalation — with consequences that now reach as far as China’s strategic interests in the Middle East.

From Israel’s perspective, confrontation with Iran is not a sudden development but the continuation of a longstanding strategic priority. For more than two decades, Israeli leaders across the political spectrum have framed Iran’s nuclear ambitions, ballistic missile programme and network of regional proxies as the country’s most serious security threat. This perception has shaped Israeli policy across multiple governments. Military action against Iranian capabilities, whether through covert operations, cyber activity or direct strikes, has therefore often been discussed in Israel as a necessary option should diplomatic and economic pressure fail to restrain Tehran’s strategic ambitions.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been one of the most vocal proponents of this view. Over the past decade, he has repeatedly warned that Iran represents “an existential threat” to Israel and has consistently advocated a tougher international approach. His opposition to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), including his controversial speech to the US Congress challenging the Obama administration’s diplomacy with Tehran, demonstrated his willingness to confront even Israel’s closest ally in order to push for stronger action against Iran. In Netanyahu’s national security thinking, the Iranian challenge has often occupied a higher strategic priority than Gaza, both as a long-term threat and as an issue capable of unifying Israel’s fragmented political landscape.

In this context, last year’s brief 12-day confrontation — Operation “Rising Lion” — can be seen as a prelude to the current campaign, Operation “Lion’s Roaring”. A lion that has awakened does not remain idle; it gathers strength before striking again. Since the post-operation assessment from last June, Israel has strengthened air defence, intelligence integration and strike precision while upgrading interception procedures and key air force capabilities. For Israel, the question has shifted from whether to strike at Iran to when the conditions for such a confrontation would be most favourable.

Domestic political dynamics have also shaped the timing and framing of the conflict. Emphasising the Iranian threat allows Israeli leaders to rally broader national support while shifting attention away from politically divisive issues such as the ongoing Gaza crisis and contentious judicial reforms. With the 2026 Israeli elections approaching, Netanyahu has sought to reinforce his image as a reliable guardian of national security, presenting the confrontation with Iran as a demonstration of strong leadership during a period of regional uncertainty.

The strikes on Iran generated an unusual moment of political consensus within Israel. Despite deep divisions in recent years, opposition leaders, including Yair Lapid, Benny Gantz, and Naftali Bennett, publicly supported the operation, framing it as a necessary response to a longstanding national security threat. Polls by the Israel Democracy Institute showed that about 90% of Jewish Israelis backed the campaign, illustrating how security threats framed in existential terms can temporarily narrow political divisions and generate strong domestic support for military action.

Yet Israel’s strategic motivations alone do not explain how the conflict expanded into a broader US-Israel military campaign. To understand Washington’s involvement, it is necessary to examine how Israel’s policies and actions interacted with American political and strategic calculations.

Israel’s influence is most visible in the way it shapes the strategic framing of the Iran problem within American political discourse. Over many years, Israeli intelligence assessments and diplomatic engagement have helped embed the perception of Iran as a major regional threat within Washington’s policy debates, even if Washington sometimes disagrees. By consistently portraying Iran’s nuclear ambitions, missile capabilities and proxy network as existential dangers, Israeli officials have contributed to shaping the conceptual framework through which American policymakers interpret the Iranian challenge. In moments of crisis, such framing lowers the political threshold for considering military options. 

According to analyses in Foreign Affairs, US and Israeli forces integrated intelligence, divided operational targets and shared risks during the campaign, reflecting a level of military coordination rarely seen between allies. Yet such intimacy in alliance warfare can generate what scholars of alliance politics describe as “entrapment risk”, in which the actions of one ally increase the likelihood that another will be drawn into conflict. 

Even if Israel initially acts alone, Israeli strikes will raise the probability of Iranian retaliation not only against Israeli targets but also against US personnel and installations across the region. When Marco Rubio noted that Washington was aware of Israel’s intentions and anticipated Iranian retaliation, it suggested not coercion but a mutual decision to act, with the US choosing to intervene in order to deter attacks on its own forces and assets.

The close alignment between the US and Israel is not driven solely by strategic considerations. In American political discourse, support for Israel is often framed within the language of “Judeo-Christian values”, a concept that emerged during the Cold War to describe the cultural foundations of Western democracy. 

Over time, this narrative has reinforced the perception of Israel as a civilisational ally and a democratic outpost in the Middle East. Support for Israel has historically been one of the rare areas of bipartisan consensus in Washington, as both Democratic and Republican administrations have maintained strong diplomatic, military and economic backing for Israel. This consensus is reinforced institutionally in Congress, where cross-party initiatives such as the Congressional Israel Allies Caucus promote cooperation and reaffirm US support for Israel during regional crises. 

Although public opinion in the US has become more divided over the traditionally “ironclad” alliance with Israel, including signs of scepticism within parts of Trump’s own MAGA base, such shifts have limited direct influence over short-term military decisions. Trump favours a strongly presidential approach to security policy, concentrating crisis decisions in the White House rather than deferring to Congress or public sentiment.

While disagreements occasionally surfaced over the Gaza war, Trump and Netanyahu shared a common objective of preventing Iran from strengthening its regional position. Regional developments reinforced a perception in Washington that the strategic balance was shifting in Israel’s favour: Israeli operations since October 2023 weakened Hamas and degraded Hezbollah, while instability in Syria further complicated Tehran’s regional posture. Iran’s restrained responses to several Israeli strikes, together with economic pressure and domestic unrest, reinforced the impression that Tehran’s position had weakened. In this context, the strikes can also be interpreted as part of a broader Trump strategy to weaken anti-American forces globally, following the Venezuela episode. 

In this sense, Israel helped shape the menu of strategic options available, while the US ultimately selected from those options based on its own political calculations, force-protection imperatives and concerns about escalation management.

Israeli leaders have repeatedly signalled that they would not accept a situation in which Iran approaches nuclear-threshold status or significantly expands its long-range missile capabilities. Yet Israel’s strategic objective goes beyond merely degrading Iran’s military capacity or delaying its nuclear and missile programmes. The ultimate goal, in Israeli strategic thinking, is to remove what it perceives as an existential threat at its roots. 

That broader ambition also helps explain an earlier episode that might otherwise seem contradictory. According to a New York Times report in January 2026, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged the US president during a phone call to postpone military action against Iran. A clear message was conveyed to Washington: the proposed operational plan at the time was unlikely to bring about regime collapse in Tehran. From Israel’s perspective, launching a major campaign without a clear political endgame would offer limited strategic payoff. The concern was therefore not insufficient military capability or regional pressure to avoid escalation, but rather the belief that the proposed operation would fail to achieve Israel’s highest strategic objective.

Israel ultimately seeks to reshape the regional balance of power in its favour. In its most ambitious form, this objective implies inducing fracture or even collapse within Iran’s political system — not through invasion, but through leadership decapitation, sustained military pressure, and the psychological shock of escalating strikes. 

In a Hebrew-language address following the strikes, Netanyahu described the operation as an effort to remove the “existential threat” posed by Iran while creating conditions that might allow the Iranian people to determine their own political future. Netanyahu later stated that the war is a “gateway to peace”, aiming to create conditions for the Iranian people to form a “democratically elected government”. Military analysts, however, caution that airpower alone rarely topples regimes. The underlying expectation appears to be that the combination of leadership disruption, military attrition, and economic strain could eventually trigger internal political collapse.

Yet even within Israel’s strategic community, there is debate about what the conflict can realistically achieve. One possible endgame is the degradation of Iran’s military capabilities — strikes that delay missile development, weaken command structures, and slow elements of the nuclear programme. Such an outcome could provide Israel with several years of strategic breathing space. However, the more ambitious objective of triggering regime collapse in Iran remains highly uncertain and carries significant regional risks.

Recent US intelligence reporting says even a large-scale assault is unlikely to remove Iran’s entrenched clerical-military system, which has succession mechanisms and institutional continuity built in. Foreign Affairs similarly argues that, even after severe blows, some version of the Islamic Republic is more likely to survive than collapse outright. Meanwhile, Iran retains substantial capacity for asymmetric retaliation. Recent incidents in which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched ballistic missiles and drones toward Gulf states — even after Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian reassured neighbours that attacks would cease — reflect the fragmented nature of Iran’s security apparatus and the difficulty of controlling escalation.

The regional spillover of the US-Israel war with Iran brings China more directly into the strategic picture. As the world’s largest crude oil importer and a major economic partner of Middle Eastern states, China has a strong structural interest in regional stability. Any disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz — through which about one-fifth of global seaborne oil and LNG passes — raises oil prices, insurance costs and freight rates, creating economic vulnerabilities for energy-dependent Asian economies, including China, Japan, and South Korea.

Beijing’s response reflects these concerns. Chinese officials condemned the US-Israeli strikes as destabilising and called for an immediate ceasefire, warning that the use of force without UN authorisation risks widening the conflict. At the same time, China focused on crisis management, evacuating more than 3,000 citizens, mourning a national killed in the conflict, and emphasising the need to safeguard maritime navigation in the Gulf.

Yet the crisis also exposes the limits of China’s influence in Middle Eastern security affairs. As some Chinese analysts note, the war has reinforced the “US-Israel axis” in the region, further squeezing the influence of other major powers, including China. Despite being Iran’s largest oil customer and maintaining close ties with Tehran, Beijing has avoided providing military support, restricting its response to diplomatic criticism and calls for negotiation.

Unlike the US, whose close alliance with Israel creates the risk of “entrapment”, China has deliberately avoided entanglement in regional conflicts. Nor has Beijing offered security guarantees to Gulf states during the crisis, in contrast to some European countries that have discussed protective naval deployments. 

As some analysts argue, however, interpreting China’s behaviour through a US alliance lens can be misleading: Beijing’s partnerships do not carry the security obligations typical of American alliances but instead form a diversified network designed to preserve strategic flexibility. This approach does not necessarily reflect weakness. But in practice, it constrains China’s ability to shape security outcomes, leaving it to absorb the spillover risks of regional conflicts largely as a bystander.

At the same time, the war complicates China’s already delicate relationship with Israel. Political tensions between the two countries have grown in recent years, particularly as China has taken a more vocal stance on the Palestinian issue and Israel has become increasingly sensitive to US pressure regarding Chinese involvement in sensitive technology sectors.

In addition, Taiwan has emerged as another sensitive factor in bilateral ties: contacts between Israeli and Taiwanese officials, along with discussions of technological and defence-related cooperation, including Taiwan’s interest in missile-defence systems modelled on Israel’s Iron Dome, have drawn criticism from Beijing, which regards the Taiwan issue as a core sovereignty concern. A prolonged regional conflict could deepen these strains, especially if instability in the Gulf begins to threaten Chinese commercial interests or supply chains.

In a direct US-Israel-Iran military confrontation, sustaining China’s longstanding policy of “equidistance” in the Middle East becomes increasingly difficult. However, the overall direction of China’s Middle East policy is unlikely to shift toward any dramatic political realignment.

Instead, Beijing is more likely to adopt a more cautious and defensive regional posture, moving away from symbolic diplomatic balance toward a more pragmatic focus on risk management. In practice, this means prioritising crisis response, the protection of overseas personnel, secure energy flows, and supply-chain resilience in an increasingly volatile regional environment.

Israel succeeded in catalysing a US-led war to remake the Middle East on its own strategic terms. Yet, in doing so, it has created a new reality that challenges its most important ally’s patience and complicates its relationship with a rising China. For Beijing, the war underscores the limits of its diplomatic influence when hard power is unleashed. As Special Envoy Zhai Jun heads to the region, China’s role will not be that of a mediator, but of a defensive power trying to shield its citizens and supply lines from a fire it cannot control. 

At the same time, the conflict has not fundamentally altered China’s approach to ties with Washington. At the Two Sessions, Foreign Minister Wang Yi criticised the war in unusually strong terms but affirmed that preparations for a China-US summit were ongoing, urging Washington to “manage risks” and “eliminate unnecessary interference”. This suggests that even amid sharp geopolitical tensions, Beijing remains intent on preventing regional conflicts from derailing broader ties. The visit is now being rescheduled, as Trump plans to delay his trip by about a month to oversee the war in Iran.

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