Benjamin Netanyahu spent forty years arguing that Iran posed an existential threat to Israel and that only decisive military action could neutralize it. On March 1, the morning after the opening strikes on Tehran, he said the current “combination of forces” allowed him to do what he had “been hoping to do for 40 years.” It was the most honest thing he has said in years. It was also, by most serious strategic assessments, the beginning of a slow-motion catastrophe for the country he leads.
The core problem is not whether the strikes were militarily justified — polling shows over 80% of Israelis supported the decision to attack. The problem is what the war is doing to the foundations on which Israeli security has rested for seventy years. Those foundations are not military. They are political, and they are American.
Spending Down a Strategic Reserve
For decades, bipartisan U.S. support for Israel has been the single most important guarantee of its security — more important than the Iron Dome, more important than the IDF’s technical superiority, and more important than any regional alliance. That support is now eroding at a pace that should alarm anyone in Jerusalem thinking beyond the next election cycle.
The erosion began before the Iran war. A Gallup poll released on February 27 — one day before the strikes — showed for the first time in the survey’s history that more Americans sympathized with Palestinians than with Israelis (41% vs. 36%). That shift was driven by the Gaza campaign following October 7, 2023, which killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and generated imagery that reshaped Western public opinion more durably than any Israeli government seemed to anticipate. The Iran war has accelerated a trend that was already in motion.
The political consequences are crystallizing on both sides of the aisle. A conventionally pro-Israel candidate will now struggle to win the Democratic primary in 2028. Gavin Newsom, widely considered a frontrunner, recently described Israel as an “apartheid state” in an appearance in Los Angeles, citing analysts like Thomas Friedman. That framing would have been disqualifying for a serious presidential candidate five years ago. It is now a plausible political position within the Democratic mainstream.
The Republican side is, if anything, more alarming. Anti-interventionist sentiment — sometimes shading into explicit skepticism of foreign aid — has been spreading through the MAGA ecosystem for months. Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned on March 17 and publicly accused Israel of a “misinformation campaign” to manipulate the United States into the Iran conflict. Whatever one makes of that accusation, its political impact is real: it gives cover to a strand of MAGA populism that has always been ambivalent about U.S. support for Israel and now has a specific grievance to point to.
A Pattern of Hollow Victories
The deeper problem is that Netanyahu’s military strategy has a consistent track record of producing declared victories that fail to hold. Hamas was declared defeated multiple times during two years of operations in Gaza. It remains entrenched. The assassination of Hezbollah’s senior leadership in 2024 was presented as a decisive blow. Israel is now fighting a major war in Lebanon again. After Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear program last June, Netanyahu proclaimed a “historic victory” that would “abide for generations.” The phrase was still on banners in Tel Aviv when the February 28 strikes began.
Former Israeli defense intelligence officials are raising these contradictions publicly. Danny Citrinowicz, a former head of Iran research for Israeli military intelligence, recently argued that the Iranian leadership—now largely decapitated—were “cautious, calculating” actors who had signaled a willingness to dilute their enriched uranium in 2025 negotiations. In his assessment, military force may delay the program, but it “cannot erase nuclear knowledge” and may actually accelerate Iran’s resolve to build a bomb as a final deterrent.
A country as small and as regionally isolated as Israel cannot afford perpetual war against a backdrop of declining great-power support. Netanyahu has spent decades mortgaging Israel’s long-term security for short-term political survival. The bill is starting to come due.
Original analysis inspired by Gideon Rachman from Financial Times. Additional research and verification conducted through multiple sources.
