Israel and the U.S. are fighting the Iran war together — but they may not have the same goals. What’s Israel’s strategy?

Guests

Lazar Berman, diplomatic reporter at The Times of Israel.

Ori Goldberg, independent Israeli analyst.

Daniel Kurtzer, professor of Middle East Policy Studies at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. He spent 29 years in the U.S. Foreign Service. He served as U.S. ambassador to Israel from 2001 to 2005 and as U.S. ambassador to Egypt from 1997 to 2001.

Transcript

Part I         

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Though he issued it in demanding tones, President Donald Trump was essentially pleading with countries around the world to send their militaries to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz this weekend. Thus far, in response to the U.S. and Israel’s attacks on Iran, the Iranian military has successfully choked off the strait and the vast amounts of oil and other commodities that usually transit through it.

On Saturday, Trump posted on Truth Social, quote: Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK and others will send ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a nation that has been totally decapitated. End quote. And yesterday aboard Air Force One, Trump repeated his plea saying, quote, I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory because it is their territory, end quote.

The President is wrong about that. The Strait of Hormuz is technically international waters, though Iran and Oman have long had defacto control of it. Again, aboard Air Force One, the president went on.

DONALD TRUMP: It’s a place for which they get their energy and they should come and they should help us protect it.

You could make the case that maybe we shouldn’t even be there at all because we don’t need it. We have a lot of oil. We are the number one producer anywhere in the world times two.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Since he was aboard Air Force One, I do know that tape is hard to hear. So here’s what the president said, quote: It’s a place from which they get their energy, and they should come and they should help us protect it.

You could make the case that maybe we shouldn’t even be there at all because we don’t need it. We have a lot of oil. We are the number one producer anywhere in the world times two. End quote. Trump is correct that the U.S. is the number one daily oil producer in the world and does indeed produce twice as many barrels per day as Saudi Arabia, who is No. 2.

But that does not insulate the U.S. from rises in oil prices. American oil is directly part of the international oil market. As a Rice University energy economist told us just last week, supply restrictions anywhere create oil price shocks everywhere. But it’s the president’s casual mention of, quote, you could make the case that we shouldn’t even be there at all, that’s worth greater scrutiny.

Thus far, Trump and his administration have not been able to provide the American people a clear and consistent rationale for why the U.S. began its attack on Iran or what the administration’s end goal is for the war. Of course, this is not the U.S.’ war alone. The United States has gone to war alongside Israel, to better understand the Trump administration’s true position, or at least to help get us further down that road. Today we’re actually going to look at Israel’s strategic security and political rationales for launching attacks on Iran. Israel has also expanded its military operations, particularly in Southern Lebanon.

So what are Israel’s end goals and do they align with the United States?

So let’s go to Jerusalem, where Lazar Berman joins us. He’s diplomatic correspondent for the Times of Israel. Lazar, welcome to On Point.

LAZAR BERMAN: Hi Meghna. Good to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: First of all, can you tell me what daily life has been like in Israel over the past several weeks?

Because of course, in retaliation for the strikes on Iran, the Iranian military has tried to also reign down attacks on Israel.

BERMAN: Yeah, so it’s certainly not been normal life here, but it’s perhaps been somewhat comparable to the way life has been since October 7th, 2023, where we have been in increasing states of war and then a few months of pauses, and then we find ourselves at war again, whether it’s the Houthis firing into Israel, whether it’s Hezbollah, Lebanon, Hamas and Gaza, or indeed, we’ve had this would be the fourth round against Iran since 2023. Things certainly aren’t normal, but daily life is going on. People are at work. There was a limited opening of some schools today.

We do get usually warnings ahead of time, a warning before the siren, before the missile. For now, thank God, casualties have been relatively low. Damage has been relatively limited, but there’s no question it’s a disruption and a real strain on life and on families and on businesses.

CHAKRABARTI: And the Israeli government is confident that security systems like the Iron Dome, et cetera they’re stocked well enough to be able to continue to protect Israeli territory.

BERMAN: Yeah. This is not a campaign that took Israel by surprise. This is something of course, that Israel and the U.S. initiated, that they’ve been planning for months. There was the 12-day campaign last year, and obviously Israel and Iran as well have learned a lot of lessons from that.

And one of the main lessons that Israel’s learned is that it needs to make sure that its stockpile is high. And Iran’s ability to fire ballistic missiles has been much more limited this war also because it’s firing on many more countries. In general, I’d be very surprised if Israel didn’t take into account its need to have very significant stockpiles of the interceptor missiles.

BERMAN: Okay. So then give us some insight into, if there was at all, I presume no, but public conversation about a potential attack on Iran just prior to the launching of the war at the end of February. And if there was no public conversation, like what have you been able to discern about what the Israeli government was saying?

Internally before February 28th.

BERMAN: Sure. So Israel is not a system that guards secrets very well. There’s leaks all the time, which is very nice for a journalist like me, but it’s not always good for operational security. But as you saw ahead of the June 2025 operation, obviously Israel fighting alone took Iran by surprise, was able to take out a number of top nuclear scientists and top military commanders, and they achieved surprise again with the U.S.

When it was clear that an operation was going to happen, or very likely to happen at some point in that they got Khomeini, they got some 40 senior officials. So the fact that they were able to do that means that they were, this was a very closely guarded secret between two countries, which is no small feat, but it was very clear that we were moving in that direction.

We had that very open and overt buildup by Trump in the region. I was with the Prime Minister on the two most recent trips to the United States. There was the December trip to Mar-a-Lago where they spoke about the Iran, a potential Iran operation. And then there was the trip in February to the White House, which was, felt very different in that there was no press element.

It was just a three hour, very serious meeting with none of the pomp and circumstance around it. So it was clear where things were moving. But in terms of the timing, if you go back to the reporting, then it was all over the place, but the idea was that it was on its way.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So what has Israeli leadership told the people of Israel what their end goal is for this war?

BERMAN: Sure. So Israel, especially Netanyahu, but a couple other spokespeople as well have actually been very consistent and more consistent than the Trump White House in terms of the goals, they’ve said three things. And this is all around making, pushing away the existential threat from Iran in their words.

One is obviously on the nuclear program to making sure that they cannot move forward on a nuclear weapons program, their enrichment program. Stopping the ballistic missile program and keeping the program from being moved underground and away from the reach of the U.S. and Israel. And of course, its ability to support armed proxies in the region, including in Lebanon and Hamas and Gaza.

And then there’s this interesting formula that Netanyahu uses, which is we want to create the conditions for the Iranian people to take their destiny into their own hand, which is recognizing that Israel itself, the U.S. also, cannot bring down a regime from the air. Ultimately, it’s up to the Iranians.

But you can see that the logic of some of the strikes, focus, targeting the besiege, the IRGC, is meant to try to encourage the Iranian people, whether it’s during the war or in the coming year, to rise up and topple the regime.

CHAKRABARTI: So about this question of toppling the regime and creating the conditions for that, I mean from, at least from U.S.’ own, our own history here in the United States over the past 25 years, we have a track record of zero successes in doing that in terms of creating the conditions after the end of a military engagement.

Does the Israeli government, does Prime Minister Netanyahu have any further plans to create those conditions after, as and when military operations end?

BERMAN: So I think, yeah, I think both countries don’t want to get into nation building. And that’s where there’s a real scar in the U.S memory from Iraq and Afghanistan.

But also Israel has scars from its one attempt of this in Lebanon in the 1980s. But the U.S. has very, has been able to topple regimes. They did it obviously in Afghanistan very quickly, and they did it in Iraq and plenty of other places. And then there was the decapitation in Venezuela. But that generally, it takes ground troops to actually bring down a regime.

And that’s something Trump doesn’t want to do. Netanyahu continues to talk about creating the conditions, but he does not talk about what comes next. I think the feeling is that anything that comes next is better than a very competent, a very smart, a very brutal, and a very religiously ideological Islamic Republic.

So whatever comes next, I think wouldn’t be any worse than that. But it wouldn’t surprise me if given the extent of Israel’s intelligence penetration of Iran that they’re in touch with minority groups, I would imagine that they’re in touch with the Kurds and possibly even with some officers within the regime that might want to break off.

That wouldn’t surprise me, but I can’t confirm any of that.

CHAKRABARTI: Point well taken, especially about Israel’s intelligence penetration in Iran, which makes me wonder, if one of the end goals is to create a environment in which there’s less, a less radical leadership of the country, thus far, that goal has not yet, not at all been met because the presumed, as has been announced in Iran, a successor to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is his own son, Mojtaba Khamenei, I should say, who is widely presumed to be even more radical than his father was.

BERMAN: I would remind you that we’re, what, 17 days into this? So it’s still very early, but so far, the Iranian regime, which has prepared for this for a long time and has spent 40 plus years really building and firming up its ability to operate and its ability to take some shocks, and it’s been through the Iran-Iraq War.

This is a regime that knows how to survive. It’s never faced anything like the U.S.-Israeli attack that’s happening right now. It certainly has plenty of redundancies and it is not, Israeli officials tell me that there are signs, initial signs of cracking, but nothing that I’ve seen, and I think nothing that any other journalist could see would indicate that the regime is cracking.

The army is still operating. The IRGC is still operating, the besiege is still going out into the streets, and even though missile and drone launches are down drastically as time goes on, they’re still able to launch. I would imagine there’s a lot of trouble. Command and control and coordination, but as of now, the regime looks pretty firm, but that doesn’t mean that will persist in the future.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Let’s listen to a little bit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

He held a press conference just last Thursday where he outlined Israel’s goals for attacking Iran and Netanyahu explained that it was a continuation of Operation Rising Lion, the 12-day war in June of 2025, that targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities.

NETANYAHU: If we wouldn’t act immediately, within a few months, the death industry of Iran would’ve been immune from any strike.

That is why we went together into this operation, the U.S. and Israel, to continue what we did in Rising Lion, to prevent Iran to develop a nuclear weapon, to prevent Iran from developing ballistic missiles that would threaten Israel, the U.S., and the entire world. This is our objective.

CHAKRABARTI: That’s again, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Just last week, you heard him there through a translator. Let me bring Ori Goldberg into the conversation right now. He’s an independent Israeli analyst and joins us from Tel Aviv in Israel. Ori Goldberg, welcome to On Point.

ORI GOLDBERG: Hi. Thank you for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Listening to what the Prime Minister has been saying about the reasons for Israel’s war, with Israel and the U.S.’ war with Iran, do you buy that? Because hearing Prime Minister Netanyahu say that Iran was within a few months of having, as he called it, a death industry immune from any strike.

Does that comport with what we know about the state of Iran’s nuclear program prior to February 28th.

GOLDBERG: If you’ll permit me, I’d like to start with what Lazar just said. Lazar and I are friends. We were colleagues for some time. I have the utmost respect for him, which is why I feel very free to say that I pretty much disagree with every word he said.

So obviously I don’t buy the Prime Minister’s version of events. Not with regard to why this strike began not with regard to cooperation with the United States, not with regard to the implications for the Israeli public, and basically again, just about every aspect of the account with which Lazar presented you, I think an opposite case can be made and can be made quite persuasively.

I don’t buy the Prime Minister’s version of events.

Ori Goldberg

CHAKRABARTI: Okay let’s continue the conversation again with both of you on this. But Ori tell me first of all, okay. He gave, Lazar gave us four points. Let’s say the first and most concrete one was a complete cessation of Iran’s nuclear program.

GOLDBERG: We have absolutely no idea if that happened.

And I’ll remind you that after the American B-2’s struck in June of 2025, we were also told that the Iranian nuclear program suffered a very major blow, potentially decisive, and that turned out to be just patently untrue.

CHAKRABARTI: Tell me more.

GOLDBERG: Oh, there’s nothing much to say. Iran is huge. It has its nuclear stockpile, hidden aerial superiority.

The aerial superiority of which Israel is so proud does not bring it any closer to wiping out Iran’s enrichable uranium stacks. And there’s absolutely no proof and no indication that this has happened. You don’t have to take my word for it. Knowing Israeli media as I do, and American media as well, had one of these strikes actually taken out an Iranian stockpile, we would’ve heard it very clearly, very overtly.

We’ve heard nothing of this sort.

CHAKRABARTI: Would you like to chime in here?

BERMAN: Sure. First of all, it’s not the first time Ori and I have disagreed, but that’s part of the fun. I would actually agree with him on much of this in that certainly after the June operation, the achievements were somewhat oversold. Because we were told that this would give us a couple of years of setting back the program.

And here we are once again. But I think we understand that there is this large stockpile of enriched uranium. It seems like in order to definitively get rid of it, you might need a special forces rate.

So that is certainly a challenge, but there is a whole ecosystem here of Iran’s nuclear program that’s not just the uranium, it’s obviously the facilities, it’s facilities under mountains and that can’t be struck and there are attempts to build those. It’s all the centrifuges and it’s the scientists and Israel and now the U.S. are trying to take out all of them. But ultimately what has to happen is there has to be a commitment, a verifiable commitment by whoever is running Iran, that it is not going to move forward on this.

If we find ourselves once again where we’ve destroyed a lot. But Iran still wants to enrich, then we’ll find ourselves back here probably in another war in a few years.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay.

GOLDBERG: In that sense, both historically and with regard to the present conflict, the Iranians have made such a commitment.

A number of times already, including in the negotiations that they were having with the Americans in Switzerland when this thing began. And I think it shouldn’t behoove us all to remember that there’s one nuclear country in the Middle East and that’s Israel. Who, according to unverified reports, has hundreds of nuclear devices deliverable on a broad variety of platforms.

Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, and the fact that Israel and the United States, but mostly Israel, I’ll suggest that Israel has taken a leading role on this becoming an irresolvable war. The fact that Israel, who has done this, who has led its fighters, but more than anything, a large portion of the United States military into a war with Iran, that nobody knows how one might win.

I think that really takes a lot of gall. Israel is constantly raising the stakes on the gall here, and that’s as professional as I can get when describing it.

CHAKRABARTI: Ori let me ask you this. It goes without saying that for many decades Iranian leadership, every chance it gets calls for the death to Israel.

GOLDBERG: And I’ll stop you there, Meghna. It doesn’t really go without saying, true when Iran was overtaken by Khomeini and his cohorts and the Islamic Republic was established and it was launched into a nearly nine-year war with Iraq.

There was certainly talk about the destruction of Israel, but I think the burden of proof that there is an Iranian plan that has been in place for decades to destroy Israel, that Iran has devoted all of its resources to this destruction and to the creation of a system of allies who would as one turn on Israel. I think that burden of proof lies on the shoulders of those who claim that this is true. I don’t think reality demonstrates that this is true.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Okay. Fair enough. In terms of the complete obliteration of Israel, but I would argue that it’s been enough for Iran to support its proxies surrounding Israel such that it is reasonable for Israelis to think that support constitutes an ongoing national security threat to the Israeli state.

GOLDBERG: Would you assume the same thing goes for the Islamic Republic who has assassinations carried out on its soil? Who has military installations, but also diplomatic and civilian facilities compromised regularly by Israel, not just compromised.

… I’m not in any shape or form suggesting that the Islamic Republic consists of an administration of humanists. The Islamic Republic is a dictatorship. It’s a brutal dictatorship. It’s a repressive dictatorship. But in the war against Israel, trying to suggest that Iran is uniquely and exclusively motivated by aggressive notions regarding Israel’s future, whereas all Israel does is defend itself, is really, I think, a wild misrepresentation of reality.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. … So your point is well taken, but let us presume for a moment that we, particularly from Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government, that we take at face value what their beliefs are about the Iranian threats. Okay. And with that in mind.

And the goals that Lazar pointed out earlier, ending the nuclear program, ending the ballistic missile threat, completely disempowering Iranian armed proxies and creating a less radical, the soil for a less radical government in Iran. My question I want to get to Ori, is that is there any other scenario than, in a sense, a year’s long military engagement that Israel would have to continue to achieve these goals?

GOLDBERG: Talking about a year’s long military engagement with Iran is tantamount to me announcing that I will accept the Miss Universe crown only once World Peace is firmly in place. These are things you can talk about details till we’re all blue in the face, but there isn’t going to be a year’s long military excursion, certainly not into Iran. And if you want to talk about Lebanon as a means for decapitating the most pernicious Iranian proxy according to our Prime Minister’s paradigm, we’ve already done that. We spent nearly 20 years in Lebanon. Some of them were about other organizations, but most of them were about Hezbollah and its potential damage. The potential threat it poses for Israel’s North, and we didn’t get the job done because what the job entails is what happened in Gaza.

And here I’m linking it to Israel’s campaign in Gaza. What the job possibly entails is full wholesale destruction. Israel doesn’t want to commit to full wholesale destruction of Iran, mostly because it can’t. Not because it doesn’t want to, and it still manages to observe some rules of international decorum when it comes to Lebanon with Israeli sources leaking that negotiations between the governments of Israel and Lebanon is expected.

But the truth is that Israel has been violating Lebanese sovereignty pretty much forever on a daily basis from flights to commando units being active inside Lebanon. And there’s no reason to assume that Israel does not plan for Lebanon, when it planned for Gaza. Maybe not the same scope, but there is no years-long military confrontation. There is annihilation, which is meant to assure Israel what Israelis like to call a security zone or a security strip, which means a sterile space around Israel with no friction, or there is a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. There are no other options. Military experts, again, can iterate and reiterate whether a two-year confrontation is better than a five year one.

Israel is not in a position to make this happen, and I don’t get a sense that the Trump administration wants this or is in a position to make this happen.

CHAKRABARTI: Lazar, go ahead to share your thoughts right now.

BERMAN: Sure. On Lebanon, there’s nothing Israel would want more than for the Lebanese government to do what it has committed to do and to disarm Hezbollah. This is a state that Israel and Lebanon have no real disputes over major pieces of land or anything like that. Israel has never brought any civilians into any territory claimed by Lebanon. So this is a conflict between Lebanon and Israel that would be gone tomorrow if Hezbollah was disarmed or if Iran was not meddling in Lebanese affair.

Obviously, Israel does not want to go to war in Lebanon while it’s got its handful in a very complex operation in Iran, but it seems like it’s being forced to, I think Israel expected Hezbollah to stay out of this fight. … And when Hezbollah decided to fire hundreds of rockets on the north, once again, Israel, against what it wants to do, moving toward a ground operation, Lebanon. It’s something that it doesn’t wanna do. It would like nothing more than for Lebanon to take care of the problem of Hezbollah itself.

But given the way Iran has dominated that country for the last 20 years plus, the Lebanese government obviously is not the most powerful actor within the Lebanese state.

GOLDBERG: So we’re constantly at a situation where everything bad that happens to Israel is Iran’s fault. There was an attempt to pin the Hamas massacre of October 7th on Iran.

We’re constantly at a situation where everything bad that happens to Israel is Iran’s fault.

Ori Goldberg

That failed spectacularly. And now what you’re saying is it’s not about Lebanon at all. It’s about Iran interfering in Lebanese affairs. And Iran, obviously, as Meghna said in the beginning of our conversation, wants to destroy Israel. So we can’t have that. But the Lebanese government offered Israel to sit down and negotiate, at the least, a fragile truth that would stop the hostilities and allow for more serious negotiation that would give Israel time to explain exactly what it wants the Lebanese government to do, which it never really has. Because saying effectively disarmed Hezbollah is just like saying a five-year militant confrontation.

So Israel doesn’t want peace with Lebanon. No country that wants peace is on the verge of mobilizing nearly 500,000 reservists. That is not something that you are forced to do. That is a political decision. It’s not based on any kind of security standards. And let’s, again, be very real about this.

Israel claimed that the northern annex of its Gaza war was a prolonged operation meant to secure the future of Israel’s North. Israel failed as spectacularly as anyone can fail. Now Israel wants Iranians to go out into the streets and rebel to keep Israel safe, and it wants the Lebanese government to do who knows what to keep Israel safe.

That may very well work in closed military forums. It doesn’t work in the real world.

CHAKRABARTI: Lazar. Can I just ask you to follow up with what Ori said about, has there been a call for the mobilization of a half million reservists in Israel?

BERMAN: No, there’s been reports that it, I don’t think there’s a half a million reservists in Israel that they can call up, but there’s been a limited call up.

And there’s already reservist brigades in the North and in Lebanon. In terms of a massive call up, hang on. But the massive call up in terms of what you saw, let’s say after October 7th. We haven’t seen it yet. It’s absolutely a distinct possibility.

GOLDBERG: The government has confirmed that it is about to approve a resolution allowing for the mobilization of 450,000 reserved soldiers.

That’s much more than there were following October 7th. And again, that’s not something you do if you’re forced. That’s something you do if you want to do it, which sits in very well with various considerations of Israeli domestic politics, but also with the new Israeli security doctrine, which is we get to do whatever you want and you pay the costs.

CHAKRABARTI: Let me ask you, Ori, we have a minute before we have to take our next break. There’s rising concern in parts of the United States now that whatever Israel’s end goal is, but whether it’s just for a generically destabilized region with Israel remaining as the sole coherent power is not aligned with what the U.S.’ long-term goals for the region would be.

Do you see a potential break or rift there?

GOLDBERG: I see a wedge that’s already been driven, and I see the amount of daylight between Washington and Jerusalem grow every day. Of course, Israeli interests are almost in direct contrast to American interests as defined both by the American right and by the American left.

I think the Cato Institute has been writing that up extensively online, and I agree completely. If I was an American, regardless of my political convictions, I would not want to be footing the bill for this thing. Not necessarily because Israel is wrong, but because it becomes abundantly clear yet again that for Israel it’s destruction or nothing. And if that’s the case, that means Israel doesn’t know what it’s doing. Why would I want to pay for that?

If I was an American, regardless of my political convictions, I would not want to be footing the bill for this thing.

Ori Goldberg

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: In his first press conference since the war began more than two weeks ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talked about the close friendship he sees between the United States and Israel.

NETANYAHU: We establish an unprecedented alliance with the United States, with our great friend, my personal friend, President Trump. We talk nearly on a daily basis. We speak freely as if we’re in a bar, exchanging ideas. And deciding together.

President Trump told me something that I want to share with you. A short hour ago, this is what he told me.

The relations between us are stronger a hundred-fold than any other relations that a U.S. president had with the Prime Minister of Israel.

CHAKRABARTI: Again, that’s Prime Minister Benjamin Natanya, through a translator. On March 3rd, so just 13 days ago, President Trump distanced him himself from remarks that were initially made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the secretary at that time had said that Israel led the way to this war.

Trump said that it wasn’t Israel that had pulled the U.S. into war.

REPORTER: Mr. President did Israel, Mr. President, did Israel force your hand to launch these strikes against Iran? Did Netanyahu pull the United States into this war?

TRUMP: No. I might have forced their hand. We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first, they were going to attack.

If we didn’t do it, they were going to attack first. I felt strongly about that, and we have great negotiators, great people that do this very successfully and have done it all their lives, very successful. And based on the way the negotiation was going, I think they were going to attack first, and I didn’t want that to happen.

So if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.

CHAKRABARTI: A lot of voices in disagreement there. Just last week, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut was in a closed-door congressional briefing about the war in Iran. This was a briefing with the administration. After that, Senator Murphy said the administration’s justification for going to war were “incoherent and incomplete.”

Asked why the U.S. is at war with Iran, Senator Murphy said this.

MURPHY: The simplest explanation might be the one that they gave 24 hours in, that they’ve tried to backtrack since then, which is that Israel made us do it. That Bibi decided on this timeline. Netanyahu decided he wanted to attack. And he convinced Trump to join him by scaring Trump into believing that U.S. assets in the region would be at risk.

And so Trump was better off just joining Netanyahu.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, let’s go to Daniel Kurtzer now. He’s a professor of Middle East Policy Studies at Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs. He spent almost 30 years as a member of the U.S. Foreign Service, including as U.S. Ambassador to Israel from 2001 to 2005, and U.S. Ambassador to Egypt from 1997 to 2001.

Ambassador Kurtzer, welcome to On Point.

DANIEL KURTZER: Thank you, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: I do want to ask you if you would dare try and disentangle this debate over who took whom into war. Do you have a take on that?

KURTZER: In a sense there’s no real answer. We know that Prime Minister Netanyahu has been pushing for this kind of war for well over 20 years.

We know that Prime Minister Netanyahu has been pushing for this kind of war for well over 20 years.

Daniel Kurtzer

You go back to the late 1990s and including the period when I was serving as ambassador. There’s a drumbeat from Netanyahu on Iran as an existential threat to Israel, and therefore something has to be done. We also know that President Trump will not countenance the idea that anyone has forced him to do anything and therefore he will react the way he did react when he was asked this question.

The reality is probably somewhere down the middle, that Netanyahu’s constant pushing during the four years that Trump was president the first time. And during this first year, including in the war that was fought in June, Netanyahu was pushing Trump to do this. And Trump, for his own reasons, also decided that this would be a good thing for the United States.

What he hasn’t yet indicated, however, to the American public, is why this is a good thing for the United States. We know it may end up being a good thing for Israel, but as you noted earlier in the show, there’s no real coherence in the explanation that the president has given to us.

Let’s talk for a moment about why previous administrations under the same pressures you talked about. Also, internally, I’m thinking of Ambassador John Bolton, who has been just a really outspoken Iran warhawk for years, but previous administrations resisted that urge. In part because there was deep and reasonable concern that what would happen is exactly what we’re seeing now, right? Iran, a nation of 93 million people retaliating against not just U.S. assets in the region, but also regional neighbors. Of course, there’s the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, that this wouldn’t be a quick one and done kind of military operation.

With that in mind, do you see Israel’s long-term interest of having a destabilized Persian Gulf area, very divergent from what the U.S. long-term interest would be, which includes keeping that region stable so we can at least get the oil out of it.

KURTZER: It’s a great question. If you listen to Netanyahu since this war started, at one point, he said we hope that the Iranian people will rise up and there will be regime change.

But it almost doesn’t matter. In other words, the Israelis really don’t care about how Iran is governed, what Iran looks like after this war, as long as they can make the argument to themselves that Iran’s military capabilities have been degraded to the point that for at least a few years, Iran does not present a threat to Israel and that the Iranian nuclear program has been set back substantially.

But that’s not an interest shared by the United States. A destabilized Iran, an Iran that is suffering from state failure, creates all kinds of problems in a region that’s very important to the United States. We have allies across the Gulf Arab states, we are concerned about the situation in South Asia, where Pakistan and Afghanistan are already fighting with each other, and the instability in that area is of great concern.

If you add to that equation an unstable, ungovernable Iran. You have a long-term problem, which will not be a benefit to the United States interests, and therefore, we truly diverge from Israel on this question.

CHAKRABARTI: With that divergence in mind, it does also beg the question of how long, at least the public demonstration or public discussion of this unbreakable relationship between these two countries is going to continue.

KURTZER: I think that’s exactly right. In fact, I’ll be leading a graduate seminar in the fall on exactly this issue. We want to take a look at the ups and downs and future of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. We used to always argue that values and interests aligned and even when we had disagreements on some issues, we would fall back on those two big concepts.

But this war has now really uncovered enough of a divergence in interests. And what we saw over the past couple of years in Israel with the assault on the judiciary and the assault on the judiciary’s independence, suggests that we may also not share the same values anymore.

Quite apart from how we prosecute this war. The two countries are going to have to sit down and figure out whether or not we are as closely tied together as our leaders like to argue, and whether or not there’s a repair that needs to be made in order to move this into the future.

CHAKRABARTI: Now you’re speaking of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s reform of the Israeli judiciary which actually gave rise to mass protests in Israel when that was going on. Your point is well taken on that. I think one could argue though that President Trump has a similarly withering view of the U.S. judiciary right now, and I wonder if the value between the values between those two leaders are shared, if not necessarily by the governments of the United States and Israel.

But on that point, Ambassador Kurtzer, let me ask you. One place where I would posit that Netanyahu and Trump differ is that President Trump has proven over and over again that he’s a transactional leader. And right now, we’re at the point where, speaking of Trump’s sort of plea this weekend for other nations to come help reopen Hormuz, that Trump isn’t getting anything out of this, and I wonder if that lopsided lack of transaction may actually have an impact sooner than we think.

KURTZER: No, I think you’re exactly right. And I think that’s exactly what is befuddling the president right now, the incredible lack of planning that went into this war on all levels.

The military does its job, but even the military probably did not understand well the escalation ladder that Iran is now playing out, with missiles and drones and now the Strait of Hormuz and cluster bombs and terrorism. The lack of planning for American citizens who are now stranded throughout the region.

If you had asked me when I was ambassador, what my primary responsibility was, it was the protection of American citizens. And this administration is not protecting our citizens in the Gulf. We sent a lot of military hardware, and we basically have said to people, as someone told me the other day, who called me from Israel and said, how do I get out of here?

Told me that when they asked, the State Department said to them, call Expedia. This is extraordinary. So the lack of planning is coming back to haunt this president. And he’s scrambling for the allies that he has alienated over the past year. And they’re not stepping up.

Lack of planning is coming back to haunt this president. And he’s scrambling for the allies that he has alienated over the past year. And they’re not stepping up.

Daniel Kurtzer

CHAKRABARTI: Let me see if I heard you correctly.

An American called the United States State Department, whose primary rule for its embassies overseas, one of the primary rules is protection of U.S. citizens abroad and the State Department said call up Expedia to see if you can get out.

KURTZER: Exactly right. This woman was told that she was way down on the list that the State Department was compiling, and she said what do I do?

She’s the mother of a student who was studying and wanted to come home. And the State Department said, we don’t have an answer that day. Therefore, call Expedia. It’s extraordinary. I was astounded and floored by that response, knowing what I know from when I was serving as ambassador. And when our other ambassadors were faced with similar issues, we put in place a warden system to be in touch with all Americans.

We had evacuation plans. And we relied upon the administration at the time in Washington to be prepared to activate those plans. And this administration sent an armada to the Middle East and did no planning to help American citizens. Ambassador, we’ve just got a couple of minutes left and I have a couple more questions, if I may.

We’ve obviously been focused on Israel for this hour. I’d also like to ask, given your regional expertise, there’s been a lot of reporting that Mohammed bin Salman out of Saudi Arabia has also pressured President Trump to continue the military war with Iran. Now, the Saudis have their own reasons for doing that, obviously, including historical Shia-Sunni animosity.

But how does that play into Israel leading this war. Because Israel and Saudi Arabia are very rarely on the same page.

KURTZER: The Saudis have their own reasons. In addition to the Shia-Sunni difference, the Iranians actually fired a missile a couple of years ago at a Saudi oil depot.

The Iranians were supporting the Houthis when the Saudis were fighting in Yemen. So the Saudis have a reason to be supportive of degrading Iran’s military capabilities, and in particular in eliminating Iran’s nuclear threat. We also know that Saudi Arabia and Israel have talked together and shared a lot of things together for many years, even if they don’t have a formal relationship.

So I’m not suggesting that they have coordinated in this situation, but I’m also not surprised if, in fact, and I don’t know this, but if in fact the leadership, Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi leadership are talking quietly to President Trump, not to stop before Iran is fully out of the out of the fray.

CHAKRABARTI: In our last-minute ambassador, it seems that we’re at a position right now which maybe we haven’t been before, at least as overtly, that Israel’s actions in its own national security interests aren’t aligned with what is best for U.S. national security from a multiplicity of reasons.

Do you see that basic fact as having a long-term impact, not just in terms of student conversations, but in Washington on U.S.-Israel relations?

KURTZER: Yes, indeed. Both in Washington and in Jerusalem. I would hope that both governments have set up a planning cell to think about this. Probably not doing much during the actual fighting itself, but they ought to be thinking about this quite significantly.

Not just in foreign policy and strategic terms, but also in domestic political terms here in the United States. Israel has a problem in Washington, in the progressive side of the Democrat party and in parts of the MAGA Republican party.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.