Trump’s War Alliance With Israel Is Reshaping the Middle East. But It Carries Risks.

President Trump is the first American leader to embrace fighting a full-fledged, joint war with Israel. Washington has tried to avoid that level of coordination in the past.

In 1991, American officials flew to Israel to keep the country from retaliating against Scud missile attacks and joining the Gulf War.

In 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned it would be “in Israel’s overwhelming best interests not to get involved” in the looming invasion of Iraq.

In 2026, the United States went to war alongside Israel.

“It’s the first time,” said Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israeli military intelligence, “that Israel is going to war together with a superpower.”

The United States has been the Jewish state’s most important backer for decades, providing it with weaponry and working closely with the Israeli military. But successive U.S. administrations avoided fighting with Israel as a wartime ally. They were worried about losing U.S. support in the Arab world and have seen Israeli interests in the Middle East as divergent from American ones.

“There was a fear that any association with Israel would cost us with the Arabs,” said Dennis Ross, a longtime U.S. diplomat and the Middle East envoy for President Bill Clinton.

Now President Trump has become the first American leader to embrace fighting a full-fledged, joint war with Israel — a level of coordination that Mr. Ross said would have been “unthinkable in the past.” The combination of Israel and the United States fighting side-by-side, their warplanes flying coordinated sorties using data from their world-leading intelligence agencies, has created a fighting force with a destructive potential and technological edge that is, by many measures, overwhelming.

On the aircraft in the skies, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Friday, Iranians see “the Stars and Stripes and the Star of David — the evil regime’s worst nightmare.”

The military campaign has attacked thousands of targets, but it has had uneven results. The United States struck an Iranian elementary school, using outdated intelligence, according to the U.S. military’s preliminary findings. Israel’s strike killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior officials at the beginning of the war, relying in part on U.S. intelligence, failed to topple the regime and has led to Mr. Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, being appointed as the new supreme leader.

And the U.S.-Israeli combination is creating tensions reminiscent of those that past American administrations have tried to avoid as they balanced the close relationship with Israel against other priorities.

Across the Middle East, the fighting is thrusting America’s Arab partners into a conflict being waged by both the United States and Israel, at a time when Arab public opinion remains widely critical of Israel in the wake of the Gaza war.

In the United States, the joint warfare is exacerbating the already charged domestic politics of American support for Israel, which has declined in recent years on both the left and the right.

The Iran war “just doesn’t make any sense to me,” Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster who endorsed Mr. Trump in 2024, said on his show this week, “unless we’re acting on someone else’s interests, like particularly Israel’s interests.”

There is also the risk of tensions between the two new war partners themselves. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel continues to urge regime change in Iran and revolution even though Mr. Trump has signaled he would be satisfied with a future, pragmatic Iranian leader from inside the ruling system. And Mr. Trump is more politically sensitive to the impact of rising oil prices, in part because, polls show, most Americans oppose the attacks on Iran.

In 1991, as President George H.W. Bush led an international coalition, including Arab countries, to push Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait, American diplomats talked Israel into eschewing retaliation against Scud missiles that Iraq fired at them. The Israelis reluctantly agreed, even though they worried that the lack of retaliation would “be a blow to deterrence,” one of the American diplomats involved, Daniel Kurtzer, recalled.

A decade later, as the George W. Bush administration geared up to invade Iraq, American officials worried that an Israeli entry into that war would stir up Arab public opinion against the invasion. Mr. Netanyahu, who was not in power at the time, publicly argued in favor of the war. Mr. Kurtzer, then the U.S. ambassador to Israel, recalled that the message from the Israeli government was “it will benefit us if you do it, but we are not, in a sense, pounding the pavement to make you do it.”

Already in 2003, Israel saw Iran as a greater threat than Iraq. Years later, in Mr. Trump’s first term, a series of moves laid the groundwork for greater U.S.-Israel collaboration against Iran.

The Abraham Accords established diplomatic relations between Israel and two Gulf Arab countries, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, that had close ties with the United States and their own tensions with Iran. And Mr. Trump moved Israel into the purview of the U.S. military command for the Middle East, a step toward closer defense cooperation.

In his second term, Mr. Trump embraced Mr. Netanyahu’s longstanding determination to topple the Iranian regime. American and Israeli military leaders together drafted plans for an attack on Iran. Their officers have been embedded at each other’s command centers and have divided up their targets.

The tightness of the alliance, its supporters say, has already shifted the balance of power in the Middle East by showing the world that the United States and Israel now have the capacity to wage war together.

“Everybody’s calculations will end up being affected by this,” said Eliot A. Cohen, a senior State Department official in the George W. Bush administration. “You have to think, ‘Gosh, the next time, the Americans and Israelis might come after us together.’”

In the Middle East, the strength of the U.S.-Israel partnership could strain the United States’ other relationships. No Arab country has publicly broken with the United States over the war, but some experts said that Arab leaders could look for ways to distance themselves, especially if public opinion in their countries turns even more firmly against Israel. And in Lebanon, Israel is escalating an offensive against Hezbollah, the Iranian-allied militia, that is increasingly pressuring Lebanon’s American-backed government and roiling the politics of a country that the Trump administration has tried to stabilize.

“The U.S. never said it’s an honest broker and always said that it favored Israel — but not in this blatant manner,” said Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian foreign minister who is the vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It’s not hiding the fact that it is cooperating with Israel, nor apparently does it care for the reaction in the Arab world.”

But the biggest question may be how the United States’ close partnership with Israel in the war affects the politics of American support for the country. A Quinnipiac University poll published this week found that 44 percent of voters think the United States is too supportive of Israel, the highest share since the survey first asked the question in 2017.

The poll showed that among Republicans, 17 percent said the United States was too supportive of Israel, up from 9 percent in 2023. Katherine Thompson, who advised Republicans in Congress and served as a Pentagon official under Mr. Hegseth last year, said in an interview that many young conservatives see “fighting on behalf of” Israel as being “decisively anti-America First.”

“Rightly or wrongly, there’s a segment of Republican voters who place blame on the relationship with Israel for getting us into quagmires in the Middle East,” said Ms. Thompson, now a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. “I think that this is going to shape the culture.”

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