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U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has offered a striking explanation for why the United States attacked Iran: Washington, he said, “knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” anticipated that Iran would retaliate against U.S. forces, and therefore hit first to reduce American casualties. The formulation is not only politically convenient; it is conceptually confused. It implies that the United States acted because Israel was going to act—yet also insists that the operation “needed to happen,” as Rubio put it, regardless. That is, the argument simultaneously portrays America as reluctantly reacting to an ally and decisively pursuing its own war aims—an oxymoron that muddies responsibility rather than clarifying it.

Rubio’s framing is worth taking seriously precisely because it is likely to be repeated. In a party contesting the balance between “America First” restraint and hawkish power projection, blaming a war on an ally can be electorally useful. It allows a would-be presidential contender to have it both ways: to claim toughness against Iran while displacing accountability for the decision to fight. And historically, narratives in which the United States is said to fight someone else’s war, under pressure from Jewish actors or Israel’s agenda, have too often been a gateway for conspiratorial and antisemitic politics at home. That risk is heightened in a polarized environment and with the 2028 election cycle already in view.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has offered a striking explanation for why the United States attacked Iran: Washington, he said, “knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” anticipated that Iran would retaliate against U.S. forces, and therefore hit first to reduce American casualties. The formulation is not only politically convenient; it is conceptually confused. It implies that the United States acted because Israel was going to act—yet also insists that the operation “needed to happen,” as Rubio put it, regardless. That is, the argument simultaneously portrays America as reluctantly reacting to an ally and decisively pursuing its own war aims—an oxymoron that muddies responsibility rather than clarifying it.

Rubio’s framing is worth taking seriously precisely because it is likely to be repeated. In a party contesting the balance between “America First” restraint and hawkish power projection, blaming a war on an ally can be electorally useful. It allows a would-be presidential contender to have it both ways: to claim toughness against Iran while displacing accountability for the decision to fight. And historically, narratives in which the United States is said to fight someone else’s war, under pressure from Jewish actors or Israel’s agenda, have too often been a gateway for conspiratorial and antisemitic politics at home. That risk is heightened in a polarized environment and with the 2028 election cycle already in view.

It is legitimate to debate whether the United States should be fighting Iran. It is legitimate to question strategy, costs, objectives, and exit plans. What is not legitimate, absent evidence, is the claim that Washington entered war unwillingly because Israel manipulated or compelled it.

The historical record does not support that argument.

The confrontation between the United States and Iran did not begin with Israeli action. It stretches back more than four decades—to the 1979 hostage crisis, to attacks on U.S. personnel in Lebanon in the 1980s, to the sanctions regimes of the 1990s, and to the long shadow conflict between U.S. forces and Iranian-backed militias in Iraq after 2003. Successive Democratic and Republican administrations have identified Iran as a strategic rival, a proliferator risk, and a sponsor of armed networks hostile to U.S. interests. Those assessments were not drafted in Jerusalem. For better or for worse, they emerged from U.S. intelligence collection and analysis and the policymaking process.

Alliance politics also provides perspective. International relations scholarship distinguishes between “entrapment,” where a smaller ally compels a larger patron into unwanted war, and “abandonment,” where a patron fails to support an ally. Classic entrapment cases involve binding treaty commitments and automatic escalation. The U.S.-Israel relationship does not have those features. There is no automatic mutual defense clause. U.S. presidents retain full operational autonomy.

History as it unfolded from the 1956 Suez crisis to the present demonstrates that autonomy clearly. In 1991, during the Gulf War, the United States apparently withheld flight identification “friend or foe” codes from the Israeli air force, fearing that Israeli involvement in the war would fracture the coalition. Washington has opposed or constrained Israeli initiatives on multiple occasions when U.S. interests diverged. That is not the behavior of a superpower unable to say no.

Even today, official statements from Washington frame the war in customary terms—deterrence, nuclear nonproliferation, missile threats, regional stability, even liberal interventionism. They do not describe the United States as following Israel’s lead. Whatever one thinks of the wisdom of those objectives, they are articulated as U.S. priorities.

It is worth noting as well that President Donald Trump’s governing style hardly suggests susceptibility to foreign control. His skepticism toward alliances, embrace of power politics, and emphasis on unilateral U.S. action make it difficult to square the image of a president meekly following another state’s direction. Public statements by the White House and the Defense Department describe U.S. objectives, not Israeli dictates.

Why, then, does the “dragged into war” narrative resonate? Because it simplifies complexity. It transforms structural rivalry into a story of manipulation. It allows critics to shift responsibility away from U.S. leaders and onto an ally. And in a polarized political environment, such narratives can be politically useful.

But they also carry risk. Claims that America fights wars at the behest of Jews or Jewish interests have appeared repeatedly in modern political discourse, often with deeply corrosive consequences. That does not mean every critic traffics in antisemitism. It does mean that rhetoric implying foreign control over U.S. war decisions has a dark lineage and requires extraordinary care.

Democracies depend on accountability. If the United States is at war, it is because U.S. leaders judged that U.S. interests required it. That judgment may be flawed. It may prove costly. But it was made in Washington.

A serious debate about this war should focus on strategy and consequences, not on insinuations of lost sovereignty. To argue otherwise diminishes both the complexity of international politics and the responsibility of U.S. decision-makers. Wars are tragic precisely because they reflect deliberate choice. We owe it to ourselves to confront those choices honestly.

This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage. Read more here.

This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage. Read more here.