Iran war: Are Donald Trump and Israel's war aims moving in different directions?

Sunday, 22 March 2026

ANALYSIS: The list of countries Donald Trump takes issue with since he launched strikes on Iran grows by the week. The UK has gone from being his 'most solid relationship of all' to 'very, very uncooperative'. Other Nato governments do not fare much better, described as freeloaders making a 'very foolish mistake' by staying out of his war.

But amid all the fury, there's one country many of his supporters fear Trump has gone too soft on: Israel. The two countries went into this conflict together. Trump has praised Israel for doing what other allies failed to: showing up to fight. But many members of his Maga base blame Israel for luring America into the war in the first place.

As the war moves towards talk of the endgame, Trump's supporters are concerned that the president could be led into a political quagmire that may absorb the remainder of his term.

On Friday, Trump was asked if Israel would be ready to end the war at the same time as the US. 'I think so, yeah,' he responded on his way to Mar-a-Lago. 'The relationship's a very good one, I think so. We want more or less similar things.'

But for the Israelis, Iran is an existential threat rather than something far away that we should probably do something about. 'It's like we've broken into a department store and the Americans want to go in and take a few things and then get out of there whereas the Israelis want to change what the store is,' says one DC-based diplomat.

For Maga and some Democrats, Israel is fast becoming the bogeyman. 'Israel led us into this but it's the one country we're not allowed to talk about,' complained a wonk this week at a think-tank happy hour on Capitol Hill. 'If it was any other country we'd be allowed to say it.'

While Republicans have been traditionally pro-Israel, parts of Maga - particularly the younger generation - are a lot more sceptical. A poll of young Republicans by Pew Research a year ago found 50% had a negative view of Israel.

Such concerns were expressed publicly last week in the first resignation over Iran: Trump's counterterrorism intelligence chief Joe Kent. He appeared on The Tucker Carlson Show to explain his reasons, suggesting that the US president was being dragged into an Israeli plot. 'The Israelis drove the decision to take this action,' he told Carlson. 'Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.'

He went further, claiming that Iran was nowhere close to developing a nuclear weapon. While he was at it, he found time to float the possibility that the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Maga activist, could be linked to Israel.

Some in the Trump administration now dismiss Kent, whose wife was killed in an Islamic State suicide bombing in Syria in 2019, as a crank. But a detail that is harder to ignore is the fact that he met both JD Vance, the vice-president, and Tulsi Gabbard, the intelligence chief, before he quit. Vance and Gabbard sit on the isolationist wing of the party. While the vice-president is understood to have acted loyally by telling Kent to speak to the White House, it feeds the idea that a group with long-term reservations over foreign interventions is in close conversation as the war goes on.

Even Trump's most vocal supporters are keen for the president to find an offramp, with allies talking of a window of two to three weeks to put this issue to bed. That would keep it broadly on track with the four to six weeks mentioned by the White House two weeks ago.

'The president enjoys a lot of support right now but I do think that people are starting to look towards the endgame - how does he wrap it up,' said Matthew Boyle, the Washington bureau chief for Breitbart News, a Conservative outlet which has close links to the Trump administration.

The military operation may have been successful in destroying Iran's capabilities but the economic hangover has been messy. Last week Delta Airlines announced that air fares were going up as a result of high fuel costs. 'Whether he likes it or not he made affordability his thing - holidays are about to get more expensive,' a figure with links to the administration said.

In a bid to ease rising oil prices, the Treasury department has lifted sanctions on Iranian crude oil already at sea - effectively giving Iran's war effort a boost.

Will Trump be able to decide Israel's endgame too? The nature of their relationship will be key. On Thursday, the president publicly slapped down Binyamin Netanyahu over an Israeli attack on a major gasfield that sent world prices soaring. Markets crashed as they switched their prognosis from 'short campaign' to 'long war'.

While some defence veterans are sceptical that Trump would have been caught totally unaware, Netanyahu at least backed up the president's claim that he acted alone.

But while Trump has said the war is all but over, the Israeli leader said this week that the Iranian regime won't be toppled from the sky. Then on Friday there were reports that the Pentagon is seeking an additional US$200 billion from Congress to fund the fighting, and considering land troops.

Netanyahu has long been a canny operator who doesn't guarantee subservience to US presidents. In 2024, he and Joe Biden stopped speaking after the president described Israel's military response in Gaza as 'over the top'. Trump was quick to criticise Biden for it, and said Netanyahu had visited Mar-a-Lago.

Netanyahu has often got around presidents by dealing with politicians on the Hill or through public relations: he's appeared on Fox News many times. In the Trump administration, only one man's attention tends to matter, so Netanyahu has adapted, speaking to the president directly and saving the rest of his efforts for his domestic audience. 'He used to talk about Iran a lot in English [in TV broadcasts] to land the message,' notes one figure close to Middle East countries. 'Now he talks about it in Hebrew, leaving the rest to Trump.'

Last year Trump pulled rank, forcing the Israeli leader to apologise to Qatar over Israel's airstrikes. 'Donald Trump is in the driver's seat firmly and [Netanyahu], like the rest of the world, is in the passenger seat for the ride,' says Boyle.

Insiders say it's wrong to blame Israel alone for the escalation. Several of the Gulf states, such as Saudi Arabia, now say America had better keep going. These are the countries signing big business deals with members of Trump's family.

There's also the president himself. 'Netanyahu has been working out how to get into a major war with Iran to knock out the regime for 30-plus years,' says Joel Rubin, a senior state department official in the Obama administration. 'No American president wanted to do it. But Trump has been hawkish towards Iran for his whole adult life.'

'There is no way Trump would have done this in the first term,' says a figure close to the administration. 'He had people around him that wouldn't have let him. This time it's different - he doesn't give a shit what anyone else thinks. He is thinking about legacy - do what I want - and f… everyone else.'

It's why no one can be sure how the next three weeks will play out, or whether it's really viable for Trump to get out and leave other countries to it - including clearing the Strait of Hormuz.

There is a worry among those who have studied Iran that the US keeps cutting off the head of the snake, but what they are left with could be worse. 'The more you get rid of the senior figures of the regime, the more you are left with the militant wing who don't care about money, wealth or property overseas. Iran may simply dig in,' says a diplomatic source. The regime is already exhibiting a more hawkish approach, with its furthest recorded missile launch reaching the Diego Garcia base - which is roughly as far from Iran as London or Paris.

The risk is not that Trump lacks a plan, but that he is no longer the only author of it. He can talk about 'winding down', set timelines, and insist he is in the driver's seat. But wars have a way of slipping their political constraints. Israel has its own logic, Iran has its own incentives, and both retain the capacity to pull the US back in just as Trump tries to step away.

'I can stop this at any time,' Trump said recently. But while the clean exit his allies are hoping for still exists, it is no longer fully his to deliver.