Who is in charge of this war: Israel or the United States?

One side believes Israel lured Trump into a trap from which he cannot extricate himself. The tail is wagging the dog.

The other believes that the US, as the world’s sole military super-power, is the one that writes the geo-strategic script. If Israel acts, it is only because it serves Washington’s interests as well. The dog is wagging the tail.

Certainly, the idea that the tail, the client state of Israel, could be wagging the dog, the military juggernaut that is the US, seems, at best, counter-intuitive.

But then again, there is plenty of evidence that suggests advocates for the tail wagging the dog scenario may have a case.

They can point to the fact that Trump launched this war of choice on Iran despite winning the presidency on an “America First” platform in which he promised: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”

Rushed into war
His secretary of state, Marco Rubio, openly stated that the administration was rushed into war, finding itself apparently unable to restrain Israel from attacking Iran.

Joe Kent, Trump’s top counter-terrorism official, noted in his resignation letter that the administration “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.

Addressing the Israeli Parliament last October, Trump appeared to confess to being under the thumb of the Israel lobby. As he praised himself for moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to the illegally occupied city of Jerusalem, he repeatedly pointed to his most influential donor, the Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson, before observing: “I actually asked her once, I said, ‘So, Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more, the United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That means, that might mean, Israel, I must say.”

A video from 2001 shows Benjamin Netanyahu, now Israel’s Prime Minister, caught secretly on camera, telling a group of settlers: “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in the way.”

Former US president Barack Obama, who ran up against Netanyahu repeatedly as Obama tried and failed to limit the expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements, thought the same.

In his 2020 autobiography, he wrote that the Israel lobby insisted that “there should be ‘no daylight’ between the US and Israeli governments, even when Israel took actions that were contrary to US policy.”

Any politician who disobeyed “risked being tagged as ‘anti-Israel’ (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election”.

Obscuring the relationship
But any rigid, binary way of framing the relationship between the US and Israel obscures more than it illuminates.

I addressed this issue in my 2008 book on Israeli foreign policy, titled Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iran, Iraq and the Plan to Remake the Middle East. My conclusion then, as now, was that the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv was better understood in different terms: as the dog and the tail wagging each other.

What does that mean?

Israel is Washington’s most favoured client state. It must, therefore, operate within the “security” parameters for the Middle East laid down by the US.

In fact, part of Israel’s job — the reason it is such an important client state — is because it has, until now, been able to enforce those parameters on others in the region.

But the story is more complicated than that.

At the same time, Israel seeks to maximise its ability to influence those parameters in its own interests, chiefly by shaping military, political and cultural discourse in the United States, through the many levers available to it.

Mobilised by Zionist lobbies
Zionist lobbies, both Jewish and Christian, mobilise large numbers of ordinary people to support whatever Israel claims to be in both its and US interests.

Mega-donors like Adelson use their wealth to cajole and intimidate US politicians.

Think-tanks with murky funding write legislation on Israel’s behalf that US politicians wave through.

Legal organisations, again with opaque funding, weaponise the law to silence and bankrupt.

And media owners, all too often in Israel’s camp, mould the public mood to stigmatise as “antisemitism” anything that opposes Israeli excesses.

This makes for a very messy arrangement.

The trouble with the idea that the US simply dictates to Israel — rather than that the two are constantly bargaining over what constitutes their shared interests — becomes apparent the moment we consider the two-and-a-half-year genocide in Gaza.

Desire to ‘disappear’ Palestinians
Israel has long had a fervent desire to disappear the Palestinians, whether through ethnic cleansing or genocide.

It wants the whole of historic Palestine, and the Palestinians are an obstacle to the realisation of that goal. Should the opportunity arise, Israel is also keen to secure a Greater Israel that requires grabbing and annexing substantial territory from neighbours, particularly Lebanon and Syria — as it is doing again right now.

After the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, Israel seized on the chance to renew in earnest the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians it began in 1948, at the state’s founding.

It carpet-bombed Gaza, creating a “humanitarian crisis”, to force Egypt to open the floodgates into Sinai, where it hoped to drive the enclave’s population. Cairo refused.

As a result, Israel tried to increase the pressure by slaughtering and starving the people of Gaza. In legal terms, that constituted genocide.

But the idea that the US was deeply invested in Israel carrying out a genocide in Gaza, or directed that genocide, or had any particular interest in the genocide taking place, is hard to sustain.

Washington — first under Biden, then under Trump — gave Israel cover to carry out the mass slaughter of the Palestinian population, and armed and financed the genocide. But that is very different from it having a geostrategic interest in the mass slaughter.

Indifferent to Palestinians’ fate
Rather, the US is and always has been largely indifferent as to the fate of the Palestinians, so long as they are contained. They can be locked up permanently in occupation prisons.

Or ethnically cleansed to Sinai and Jordan. Or given a pretend statelet under a compliant dictator like Mahmoud Abbas. Or exterminated.

The US will bankroll whichever option Israel believes best serves its interests — so long as that “solution” can be sold by pro-Israel lobbies to western publics as a legitimate “response” to Palestinian “terrorism”.

What Israel could get away with changed on 7 October 2023. The US was prepared to approve Israel shifting from a policy of intermittently “mowing the lawn” in Gaza — short wrecking sprees — to the incremental levelling of the whole of Gaza.

In other words, Israel worked all its levers to persuade Washington that it was the right time for it to get away with genocide. It sold to the US the plan that Gaza could now be destroyed.

To present that as Washington’s plan is simply perverse. It was decisively Israel’s plan.

That doesn’t diminish in any way US responsibility for the genocide. It is fully complicit. It paid for the genocide. It armed the genocide. It must own it too.

Similar Iran war analysis
A similar analysis can be applied to the Iran war.

The US and Israel share the same larger policy towards Iran: they want it contained, weak, unable to exert influence. But they do so for slightly different reasons.

Israel demands to be regional hegemon in the Middle East, an invaluable client state with privileged access to Washington policymakers. Its supremacy and impunity, therefore, depend on Iran — its only plausible rival in the region — being as weak as possible and incapable of forging effective alliances with armed resistance groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Equally, Washington wants Israel unthreatened, leaving its ally free to project US imperial power into the Middle East.

But it has a more complex set of interests to consider. It needs to ensure that the Arab monarchies remain compliant, and it does so by both wielding a stick — threatening to unleash the attack dog of Israel on them should they disobey — and proffering a carrot — promising to shield them under its security umbrella against Iran so long as they stay loyal.

The ultimate goal is to guarantee unchallenged US control over the flow of oil and thereby the global economy.

In other words, the US has to weigh far more interests in how it deals with Iran than Israel does.

Effects on the global economy
Unlike Israel, Washington has to consider the effects of an attack on Iran on the global economy, to assess any impact on the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and protect against rival powers like China and Russia exploiting strategic missteps.

For those reasons, Washington has traditionally preferred maintaining a degree of stability in the region. Instability is very bad for business, as is being demonstrated only too clearly right now.

Israel, by contrast, regards its struggle against Iran in existential terms. Many in the Israeli cabinet view it as a religious war. They are not interested in simply containing Iran – a decades-old policy they believe has failed. They want Iran and its allies on their knees, or at least in so much chaos that they cannot pose any kind of challenge to Israeli regional hegemony.

That point was highlighted by Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s former national security adviser, this week in an interview with Jon Stewart. He cited recent comments to him by Israel’s former military intelligence lead on Iran, Danny Cintrinowicz, that Netanyahu’s aim is to “just break Iran, cause chaos”.

Why? “Because,” says Sullivan, “as far as they’re concerned, a broken Iran is less of a threat to Israel.”

In other words, Israel wants to engineer instability in Iran, which is sure to spread instability across the region.

Those two agendas, as should be clear by now, are not easily compatible. Which is why Netanyahu has spent decades working every lever at his disposal in Washington to create an appetite for war.

Had war been self-evidently in US interests, his efforts would have been superfluous.

Israel deployed its lobbies
Instead, Israel has had to deploy its lobbies, marshal its donors and recruit sympathetic columnists to slowly shift the public mood to the point where a war was conceivable rather than patently dangerous.

And most importantly of all, Israel nurtured an intimate, ideological alliance with the neocons — hawkish, zealously pro-Israel US officials — who long ago gained a foothold in the inner sanctums of Washington.

Each recent administration has been a cat-fight over whether the neocons or more “moderate” voices would win out. Under George W Bush, the neocons dominated, leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Israel’s short war on Lebanon in 2006, and a failed plan to expand the war to Syria and then Iran.

I documented all of this in Israel and the Clash of Civilisations.

Under Obama, the neocons were forced to take more of a back seat, which is why his administration was able to sign a nuclear deal with Iran that held until Trump ripped it up in 2018, during his first term as president. Biden, as with so much else, dithered.

In Trump’s second term, the neocons seem to be firmly back in charge, again weaving their mischief. The result — an illegal war on Iran — is likely to be a strategic catastrophe for the US, and a potential, if short-lived, victory for Israel.

So isn’t this the same as saying the tail wags the dog?

Sole repositories of power
No, not least because that assumes the visible realm of US politics — the President, the Congress, the two main political parties — are the sole repositories of power in the system.

Even in this visible sphere, support for Israel has dramatically waned since the Gaza genocide. As the illegal war on Iran grows ever more costly, both in treasure and lives, support for Israel among US voters is going to fall off a cliff.

Israel is for the first time a deeply partisan issue, dividing Democrats and Republicans, as well as a generational divide between the young and old. It is even splitting the MAGA base Trump depends on.

This political polarisation will continue to get much worse, ultimately freeing braver figures in US politics to start speaking out in franker terms about Israel’s nefarious role.

But power in the US isn’t just wielded at the formal, visible level. There is a permanent bureaucracy, with an institutional memory, that operates out of sight. We have gained brief glimpses of its covert operations from the work of Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s publishing platform for whistleblowers, and from Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who revealed illegal mass surveillance by the US state of its own citizens.

Both suffered serious consequences for their efforts to bring a little transparency to a profoundly corrupt system of secret power. Assange was locked away in a London high-security prison for many years as the US sought to extradite him on trumped-up “espionage” charges, while Snowden was forced into exile in Russia to evade arrest and long-term incarceration.

That bureaucracy — sometimes referred to as the Deep State, or the military-industrial complex — doesn’t play or fight fair. It doesn’t need to. It operates in the shadows.

Curtailing Israel’s influence
Were it to so choose, it could undermine the Israel lobby, and thereby curtail Israel’s influence over the visible realm of US politics.

It could effectively do to the leaders of the lobby — AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, the Zionist Organisation of America, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations, Christians United for Israel, and others — what it did to Assange and Snowden.

It could, for example, influence public discourse to begin questioning whether these groups are really serving US interests or acting as foreign agents. That would, in turn, free up space for the media and legislators to call for tighter restrictions on these groups’ activities, requiring them to register as such.

The permanent bureaucracy is doubtless capable of doing much darker, underhand things too.

The fact that it hasn’t chosen to do any of this yet suggests Israel’s goals are not seen so far to be significantly in conflict with US goals.

But that could be about to change. In fact, the current, all-too-public debates about Israel driving the US into a war against Iran — an idea already seeping into popular consciousness — may be the first salvoes in the battle to come.

If the war on Iran turns out to be a catastrophic misstep, as it gives every appearance of being, there will be a price to pay — and leading US politicians are likely to scramble to shift the blame on to Israel. It may be that they are already getting in their excuses.

The all-too-visible freedom Israel has enjoyed in Washington to buy, bully and silence could soon become a central liability. It will not be hard to argue that a system so clearly open to manipulation that the US could be bounced into a self-sabotaging war needs to be remade, to prevent any repeat of such a disaster.

This may be the biggest lesson Washington learns from the war on Iran. That it is time to stop the tail wagging so vigorously.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. This article was first published on the author’s Substack and reepublished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

It’s bizarre how little mainstream attention is given to the fact that the President of the United States has repeatedly confessed to being bought and owned by the world’s richest Israeli, especially given how intensely fixated his political opposition was on the possibility that he was compromised by a foreign government during his first term.

During a speech before the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) on Monday, President Donald Trump once again publicly admitted that he has implemented Israel-friendly policies at the behest of Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson and her late husband Sheldon, this time adding that he believes Adelson favours Israel over the United States.

Here’s a transcript of Trump’s remarks:

“As president, I terminated the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, and ultimately, I terminated Iran’s nuclear program with things called B2 bombers. It was swift and it was accurate, and it was a military beauty. I authorized the spending of billions of dollars, which went to Israel’s defense, as you know. And after years of broken promises from many other American presidents — you know that they kept promising — I never understood it until I got there. There was a lot of pressure put on these presidents. It was put on me, too, but I didn’t yield to the pressure. But every president for decades said, ‘We’re going to do it.’ The difference is I kept my promise and officially recognized the capital of Israel and moved the American Embassy to Jerusalem.

“Isn’t that right Miriam? Look at Miriam. She’s back there. Stand up. Miriam and Sheldon [Adelson] would come into the office and call me. They’d call me — I think they had more trips to the White House than anybody else, I guess. Look at her sitting there so innocently — got $60 billion in the bank, $60 billion. And she loves, and she, I think she said, ‘No, more.’ And she loves Israel, but she loves it. And they would come in. And her husband was a very aggressive man, but I loved him. It was a very aggressive, very supportive of me. And he’d call up, ‘Can I come over and see you? I’d say ‘Sheldon, I’m the president of the United States. It doesn’t work that way.’ He’d come in. But they were very responsible for so much, including getting me thinking about Golan Heights, which is probably one of the greatest things ever happened. Miriam, stand up, please. She really is, I mean, she loves this country. She loves this country. Her and her husband are so incredible. We miss him so dearly. But I actually asked her, I’m going to get her in trouble with this. But I actually asked her once, I said, ‘So Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more? The United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That means — that might mean Israel, I must say, we love you. Thank you, darling, for being here. That’s a great honor. Great honor. She’s a wonderful woman. She is a great woman.”

Speaking in Israel, Trump suggests he moved the embassy to Jerusalem as a promise to the Adelsons, who he says have paid more visits to the White House than anyone he can think of.

He then says he asked Miriam if she loves Israel or America more and she refused to answer. Insane pic.twitter.com/jg9VXciRgg

— Keith Woods (@KeithWoodsYT) October 13, 2025

Sheldon Adelson reportedly gave Trump and the Republicans more than US$424 million in campaign funding from 2016 up until his death in 2021. His widow Miriam continued her husband’s legacy and poured a further $100 million into Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

On the 2024 campaign trail Trump also admitted to being controlled by Adelson cash.

Here’s a transcript of those remarks:

“Just as I promised, I recognize Israel’s eternal capital and opened the American embassy in Jerusalem. Jerusalem became the capital. I also recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

“You know, Miriam and Sheldon would come into the White House probably almost more than anybody outside of people that work there. And they were always after — and as soon as I’d give them something — always for Israel. As soon as I’d give them something, they’d want something else. I’d say, ‘Give me a couple of weeks, will you, please?’ But I gave them the Golan Heights, and they never even asked for it.

“You know, for 72 years they’ve been trying to do the Golan Heights, right? And even Sheldon didn’t have the nerve. But I said, ‘You know what?’ I said to David Friedman, ‘Give me a quick lesson, like five minutes or less on the Golan Heights.’ And he did. And I said, ‘Let’s do it.’ We got it done in about 15 minutes, right?”

Take note of which Trump comments provoke controversy, and which don’t. Trump said this week that he “gave” the Golan Heights to Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, his top funders, who came to the White House “almost more than anybody.” Not a peep about this brazen admission of graft pic.twitter.com/MaJLFnH7oi

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) September 22, 2024

Legitimising Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights and moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem were two of the most controversial moves Trump made in Israel’s favour during his first term, which have now been eclipsed by his backing of the genocide in Gaza and his bombings of Iran and Yemen.

And here he is openly admitting that his billionaire Zionist megadonors have been using the access their donations bought them to push him to take drastic action in favour of Israel.

Just imagine for a second if someone had leaked documents to the press proving that Trump and received extensive financial backing from a Russian oligarch to whom he doled out favors of immense geopolitical consequence.

It would be the biggest scandal in the history of American politics, bar none. But because it’s an Israeli oligarch, he can admit to it openly and repeatedly without anyone batting an eye.

During Trump’s first term his political rivals spent years pushing a bogus conspiracy theory that he was controlled by Vladimir Putin, despite his having spent that entire term aggressively ramping up cold war hostilities against Russia. Entire political punditry careers were birthed trying to create a scandal out of a narrative that could be plainly seen as false just by looking at the movements of the US war machine and Washington’s actions against Moscow.

Trump: I am bought and owned by Miriam Adelson, the world’s richest Israeli.

Democrats: Trump is a Putin puppet.

Trump: I do whatever she says.

Democrats: A Russian secret agent.

Trump: I’m controlled by the Israelis.

Democrats: He’s suspiciously close with many dictators,…

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 13, 2025

But here’s Trump openly admitting to bending over backwards to give an Israeli oligarch whatever she wants because she gave his campaign huge sums of money, while pouring weapons into Israel to facilitate its mass atrocities and engaging in acts of war on Israel’s behalf. And it barely makes a blip in mainstream Western politics or media.

This is because mainstream Western politics and media understand that we are living in an unofficial oligarchic empire to which both the US and Israel belong. They never acknowledge it, they never talk about it, but all high-level politicians, pundits and operatives in the Western world understand that they serve a globe-spanning power structure run by a loose alliance of plutocrats and empire managers.

They understand that states like Israel are a part of said power structure, while states like Russia, China and Iran are not. So they spend their time normalising the corruption and abuses of imperial member states while facilitating the empire’s efforts to attack and undermine the states which have successfully resisted being absorbed into the imperial power umbrella.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the only thing I like about Donald Trump is his infantile tendency to say the quiet part out loud. He advances the same kinds of abuses as his predecessors who were no less corrupt and controlled, but he exposes the underlying mechanics of those abuses in ways that more refined presidents never would.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz