Two Decades Of U.S. Appeasement Led To Israeli Strike On Iran

Like many, if not most, wars, the conflict between Israel and Iran didn’t have to happen, and certainly, not in this way. But the blame for the hostilities now underway doesn’t belong to the Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who ordered the Israeli Air Force to undertake a pre-emptive strike on Iranian nuclear targets in the early morning hours of June 13.

That won’t be the way the international media, as well as liberal legacy news outlets in the United States, report it. The same sources that have been demonizing Jerusalem’s efforts to eradicate the Hamas terrorists who launched the Gaza war with unspeakable atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023, will put all the blame on Netanyahu and the Israelis. They will blast him for not waiting to see if President Donald Trump’s efforts at diplomacy could succeed in ensuring that Iran could not obtain a nuclear weapon.

Voices on the “woke right,” such as Tucker Carlson, will undoubtedly repeat their appalling apologias for the Islamist regime in which they falsely claimed that Tehran wasn’t working for a bomb. They’ll likely refloat familiar antisemitic tropes about Jerusalem trying to drag the United States into an unnecessary war against its interests.

And left-wing Israeli and Diaspora Jewish outlets will likely echo some of those accusations. Netanyahu will be accused of acting for political reasons or of being a reckless war-monger determined to start another conflagration before his coalition finally splinters.

Don’t blame Netanyahu

While those who claim that it didn’t have to go down like this will be right, they’ll be wrong about who bears the primary responsibility for the destruction and casualties in Iran, as well as any harm that comes to Israel by way of the regime’s retaliatory efforts,—whether by missile strikes on the Jewish homeland or terrorist attacks by its proxies around the region.

Though Netanyahu is the one who gave the order for the blow to fall on Iran, the real blame for the war happening at this time belongs to the party that is currently standing on the sidelines: the United States.

All four of the last U.S. presidents have played a decisive role in leading to the point where Israel was left with no choice but to roll the dice on a military effort to ensure that Tehran’s nuclear ambitions could not be realized. Had Washington taken decisive action at any point in the last 20 years to deal with the Iranian threat, it wouldn’t have been left to Netanyahu and Israel to do the dirty work that the leaders of the Western world weren’t prepared to do. Indeed, Israel’s actions are defending not just itself but the entire world, which stands to benefit from its efforts to prevent a terrorist regime from getting a nuclear weapon.

The problem first became apparent during the second term of President George W. Bush.

Bush had been advised by then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon not to invade Iraq in 2003, but rather to focus on Iran. He rightly understood that the Islamist government in Tehran was a far greater long-term threat to both the West and Israel than the admittedly awful Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad. Getting rid of Saddam was a good thing, but the unintended consequence of the collapse of Iraq was to strengthen Iran immeasurably.

By his second term, when Sharon had already passed from the scene after being felled by a stroke, Bush was too distracted by the disaster in Iraq to spare the attention and political capital needed to address an Iranian threat that he preferred to punt on.

Obama’s appeasement

Bush was succeeded by President Barack Obama, who came into office with a big idea that was a lot worse than Bush’s obsession with toppling Saddam.

Far from understanding the necessity of halting the Iranian push for nuclear weapons, in addition to hegemony over a Middle East in which its allies in Syria, Lebanon and a fractured Iraq gave it a dominant position, Obama wanted a rapprochement with the Islamists. He was convinced that America and the West had wronged the Muslim world and that if it only apologized and then appeased it, all of America’s problems in the region would be solved.

This meant more “daylight” between the United States and Israel, about which Obama was, at best, ambivalent. So, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began to campaign for an international effort to stop the Iranian nuclear program, it fell on deaf ears in Obama’s Washington circles.

Israel might have done well to attack Iran during Obama’s first term, before it got even close to a nuclear weapon. Washington not only said “no,” but it also helped influence the Israeli defense and intelligence establishment to effectively veto Netanyahu’s idea of a pre-emptive strike.

What followed then was one of the worst blunders in American foreign-policy history. Having reluctantly agreed to sanctions on Iran and with the support of most of the international community, Obama and John Kerry, his second secretary of state, opted to throw away their leverage and give in to virtually every Iranian demand in the negotiations they initiated behind the back of the Jewish state.

The result was what became the 2015 Iran nuclear deal—Obama’s signature foreign-policy “achievement.” It not only legitimized Iran’s nuclear program but also put limits on its enrichment of uranium that were easily evaded. Even worse, its sunset provisions guaranteed that Iran would eventually get a nuclear weapon by the end of the 2020s. On top of that, the relaxed sanctions and billions handed over to Tehran in heretofore frozen funds enriched and empowered the regime to escalate its activities as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. That made it able to strengthen Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and, crucially, Hamas in Gaza, making Obama indirectly responsible (among many others who also bear the blame) for setting in motion the chain of events that led to the horrors of Oct. 7.

‘Maximum pressure’

To his credit, Obama’s successor, President Donald Trump, rightly understood that the Iran deal was a fiasco. But as was true of many of his correct foreign-policy decisions, it took him a while to do something about it. New to government and hindered by establishment-oriented cabinet appointees as well as distracted by the Russia collusion hoax that hamstrung his efforts, it took Trump more than a year after taking office to get around to withdrawing from the nuclear deal.

That was something an American president was going to have to do sooner or later if the deal’s reckless provisions were to be prevented from ensuring an Iranian weapon. And Trump followed it up with a “maximum pressure” campaign that—had it been started earlier, or more importantly, had been continued after his first term—might have forced the Iranians to their knees and possibly led to a real nuclear agreement that might have prevented an Iranian nuke.

After Trump was defeated in 2020, President Joe Biden was eager to restore Obama’s deal. Despite his earnest wooing, the Iranians had by then gotten to the point where they knew that, via their cheating on Obama’s accord and a feckless international monitoring effort, they could get to a nuclear weapon without the benefit of renewed Western diplomacy.

Throughout this era, Israel was essentially prevented from acting on its own to stop Iran by American diktats and pressure, despite clear evidence that it was moving closer and closer to nuclear capability. It’s also true that the Israelis were aware that the best plan for dealing with the threat from Tehran would involve American forces participating in an offensive aimed at destroying its nuclear facilities. But the wait for America to wake up to the fact that an Iranian weapon was a certainty if the world’s inaction and/or indifference to the threat continued to the point where Jerusalem rightly understood that if they weren’t going to do something about this problem, no one would.

That became even more obvious after Trump’s return to office after his victory in the 2024 presidential election.

The Trump 2.0 administration has been more focused and purposeful than his first try at the presidency. However, along with the experience he gained from the triumphs and the failures of his first term was an even deeper conviction that his primary foreign-policy mission was to avoid starting wars and to end any conflicts in which the United States was entangled, either directly or indirectly. That included the Ukraine-Russia conflict, as well as Israel’s fight with Iran’s terror proxies in Gaza and elsewhere.

Trump’s diplomatic delay

Though he had been very tough on Iran in his first term, the first months of his second term saw him unleash the inexperienced Steve Witkoff on the Middle East as his regional envoy. Witkoff is possibly compromised by his business connections to Qatar, an ally of Iran and Hamas. He seemed bent at times on repeating all the same mistakes made by Obama and Kerry with respect to Iran, sounding at times as if he, too, was negotiating a deal that would let Tehran keep its nuclear program and even refine uranium, in addition to failing to get them to stop funding terrorism.

It is possible that Trump, who knows a good deal from a bad one, would never have agreed to another appeasement of Tehran. Still, his decision to double down on diplomacy wasn’t just misguided but seemed to ensure a fatal delay in any attempt to use force to stop Iran, should, as is likely, his negotiations fail to achieve their purpose.

Israel had largely destroyed Iran’s air defenses in 2024 after the Islamist regime launched missiles against the Jewish state as part of its efforts to help Hamas. At the time, Biden forbade Netanyahu from attacking nuclear targets. Dependent as they are on American military aid to continue the war against Hamas, the Israelis complied with that demand. Taking out Iran’s air defenses didn’t directly violate Biden’s request, though it did go around it. But it also provided a window for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities that were effectively undefended until Tehran’s ally, Russia, could help rebuild them with a new system.

Trump, besotted as he always is by the idea that he is the ultimate dealmaker and peace broker, insisted that Israel not act while his futile diplomatic gambit was allowed to play out.

Israel had no choice

In the end, Netanyahu decided that he had to risk offending Trump in order not to throw what may well be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to deal a fatal blow to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. More delays in acting might have led to a situation where a military solution would no longer have been possible.

We don’t know yet how successful Israel’s effort will be or what form Iran’s retaliation might take. Nevertheless, the notion that Israel or the West should have continued to avoid the necessity of acting because of what the Islamists may do in response would have been yet another blunder.

Equally uncertain is how Trump will react to Netanyahu refusing to take his advice about standing down. Let’s hope that he concludes that not only was the prime minister right to act, but that in doing so, he was doing the West a favor as well as helping his own country.

The one thing we do know is that the events of June 2025 were made necessary not by Netanyahu’s yearning for conflict. If anything, he has been as cautious and reluctant to use force against Iran as he has been on all fronts until forced into a war after Oct. 7.

Instead, it has been four American presidents who, for one reason or another, chose to prevaricate on the issue or to appease Iran over the course of the last two decades that led to this moment. Had the United States acted decisively against Iran at any point during this period, especially in the years of Bush and Obama, the likelihood is that the possibility of an Iranian nuke could have been forestalled indefinitely. And that could have happened, despite the false warnings of Obama and Tucker Carlson that the only choices were war or appeasement, without significant risk to the United States or its allies.

In the end, it was those four presidents and their failed, foolish or indecisive policies that left Netanyahu no choice but to act before Iran went from a threshold nuclear power to an actual one, with unknowable and possibly catastrophic consequences for Israel and the world. Regardless of whether you support or oppose Netanyahu, it’s imperative to recognize that his decision to act wasn’t about his government’s longevity or his political prospects, but the survival and security of the State of Israel as well as the West. Sensible observers can only hope that by June 13, 2025, it wasn’t already too late.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.