The Iran War: US Neoconservatives’ and the Israeli Right’s Perfect Storm

Joshua Emmott, History & Social Science

In the last four weeks, crude oil prices have skyrocketed from around $70 per barrel to over $115 per barrel, with many experts predicting that oil will remain above the $100 per barrel mark for months after the war has ended. These prices have not been seen since the Covid pandemic. The US is now more insulated from oil price shocks than we were in the 1970s, but Asia, particularly China, is not. Meanwhile, twenty percent of global production of urea (the key ingredient for making fertilizer) comes out of the Persian Gulf, meaning that the closing of the Strait of Hormuz threatens a global fertilizer shortage, which in turn will result in a global food shortage, as well as significant global supply chain disruptions.

This present economic quagmire raises many questions, and President Donald Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have offered as many explanations for why we invaded and what our objectives are as there are colors on a Sherwin Williams paint chart. Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene have come to the rescue with a simple and repetitive explanation for the complex and nuanced events disrupting the global order: to paraphrase the far-right pair’s polemical rants, what we are witnessing is “Israel’s war,” motivated by clandestine Israeli influence in the upper ranks of US politics. I would counter that Tucker and Marjorie are dumb and dangerous, and that the war with Iran is the culmination of a half century of misguided, but explainable, US and Israeli foreign policy, and that it will reshape the Middle East in a way that is not in the interest of the US, Israel, or the people of Iran.

The present war with Iran originates in the years 1979, 1983, and 2023, which set in motion the defining political forces in, respectively, Iran, the United States, and Israel. In 1979, America’s staunchest ally in the Middle East, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, was overthrown in a popular revolution that ultimately brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei and his system of Islamic jurisprudence (vileyeti faqih) to power. Within a year, President Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded Iran and started an eight-yearlong war, which echoed the mass violence of WWI, complete with the use of chemical weapons (supplied to Iraq by the US), and resulted in a stalemate and an estimated 1-2 million casualties. The US supported Iraq in a cynical attempt at keeping the two biggest military powers in the Middle East weak and the supply of cheap oil flowing. The lessons that Khomenei took away from this war were that the US was Iran’s enemy and that Israel was America’s Achilles heel in the Middle East.

In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon (which was in the middle of a civil war) in an attempt to remove the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the UN-recognized Palestinian representative coalition, from Lebanon. The Israeli army occupied southern Lebanon, including the capital of Beirut. This offensive set off a chain of events that resulted in the Syrian army’s invasion of Lebanon, and President Reagan’s sending the Marine Corps to Beirut where it quickly became embroiled in this confusing conflict. On October 23, 1983 a truck loaded with explosives drove into the Marine barracks in Beirut and killed 241 US service members, resulting in the withdrawal of all US forces from Lebanon. Israel withdrew to southern Lebanon until 2000, when they finally left the country. Out of the chaos and violence of 1982 emerged one group, Hezbollah, dedicated to the removal of US forces from Beirut (which they achieved with the bombing of the Marine barracks) and the removal of Israel from Lebanon (which took another twenty years to achieve). It is here in the violence of the Lebanese Civil War that Iran created what would ultimately become its Axis of Resistance—a proxy army, political organization, and community service organization that could fulfill the functions of the Lebanese state and violently oppose Israel’s occupation of Lebanon. Effectively, Iran would hurt America by striking its ally in the region, while avoiding direct confrontation with the superpower. As the US entrenched itself in the region by invading and occupying Iraq for nine years, and initiating a twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan (both countries border Iran), Iran responded by expanding its reach and funding proxy forces across the region—all targeting American and Israeli interests. Effectively, there has been a continuous proxy war in the shadows between the US-Israel axis and Iran’s Axis of Resistance between 1983 and 2024.

The final significant date is October 7, 2023: the most devastating attack on Israel in its history. This is the day in which Yahya al-Sinwar, leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, launched a devastating attack on southern Israel, killing and capturing approximately 1200 Israeli citizens. This attack led to Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip and killing over 75,000 Palestinians in a war that is still ongoing. The political impact of the October 7 attacks and the ensuing war was that they unleashed far-right political forces in Israel that had been growing for decades but never had the opportunity to gain political power. October 7 made possible the rise of a rightwing, coalition-based government, primarily dominated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party, which focuses on security, religious Zionism, and conservative policies. The political landscape is now dominated by right-wing and religious parties, with significant influence from religious Zionist and ultra-Orthodox factions whose goals are to reoccupy the Gaza Strip (in 2005 the Israeli government forced Israeli settlers to leave Gaza), and expel Palestinians from the West Bank. Finance Minister Smotrich, as reported in the Times of Israel (20 March 2023) stated, “David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, should have “finished the job” and kicked all Arabs out of the country when it was founded.” In the February 6, 2026 edition of Haaretz, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert published an opinion essay titled, “A Settler Drive to Ethnically Cleanse Palestinians Is Underway in the West Bank. Israel’s Security Apparatus Is Complicit.” Until October 7, 2023, an all-out invasion of Gaza and widespread support for ethnic cleansing were merely visions held by the far right of Israeli politics. October 7 made them a possibility, then a reality.

The October 7 attacks, which resulted in an Israeli invasion of Gaza, which in turn led to a military conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, and then escalated into a barrage of missile attacks on Israel from Iran and its proxies, made the impossible possible. For the first time, Iran’s confrontation with Israel became regional and drew in Lebanon, Yemen, Jordan, and Iraq. Then, in June 2025, as part of Operation Midnight Hammer, the US bombed Iranian nuclear sites. The ensuing war is the moment when the Trump administration’s policy met the forty-year foreign policy goals of Netanyahu. Finally, the likes of former National Security Advisor John Bolton and Israeli nationalists—supported in the US by a faction of neoconservative policymakers, pro-Israel hardliners, and specific think tanks focused on regime change in Iran since the George W. Bush administration— found an American administration that was susceptible to the vision of regime change in Tehran.

Remember that it was President George W. Bush who declared that the Axis of Evil ran through Tehran. Bolton, Netanyahu, and the neocons had peddled their regime change plans to the Clinton, Obama, Biden, and first Trump administrations, and had been turned away each time. Now, post-October 7, with an American president bent on changing the world order and intoxicated by his belief that he has solved eight conflicts around the world in a year, recent months have finally brought the Iran regime change plan that Netanyahu, and the neocons have been peddling since the Clinton administration into the mainstream. While the armed forces of Israel and the US bomb Iran, Netanyahu can focus on dismantling Israel’s democracy, finally destroying Hezbollah, and Smotrich and the far right can continue rolling out their Greater Israel project without the scrutiny of the world media. The US, meanwhile, will either have to accept something far short of regime change in Iran or commit to a prolonged war that it can neither win nor afford.