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The United States did not enter the war with Iran because it was attacked or was about to be attacked. It seems to have entered after concluding that once Israel moved, American involvement would be unavoidable. When Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefed congressional leaders last week, three days before the strikes began, the debate, as later reported by the Washington Post, was not whether to fight but whether to strike alongside Israel or wait until Iran retaliated against American forces in the region. The choice was not between war and peace. It was between two pathways into the same war.

Rubio said to the press: “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces.” The administration’s rationale was framed in terms of timing and force protection, not in terms of an independent American casus belli.

That distinction is consequential. When a great power justifies entry into a conflict as unavoidable because an ally is acting, control over escalation and, indeed, foreign policy writ large has shifted. The United States was not responding to an attack on the homeland. It was responding to an ally’s decision to strike. Scholars of alliances call this entrapment. History suggests it rarely ends where its architects expect.

The Blank Check, Then and Now

In the summer of 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II sent a telegram to his cousin Tsar Nicholas, assuring him that the crisis in the Balkans would stay local. “It would be quite possible for Russia to remain a spectator,” he wrote, “without involving Europe in the most horrible war she ever witnessed.” Germany had just given Austria-Hungary what historians call the “blank check” — unconditional backing to crush Serbia, a regional rival that posed no direct threat to Germany. Within weeks, Germany was at war with France, Russia, and Britain. Not because any of them threatened Berlin, but because an unconditional commitment to a smaller ally with a regional obsession had eliminated every reason for that ally to show restraint.

Political scientist Glenn Snyder called this the alliance security dilemma: States in alliances face two risks pulling in opposite directions. The first is the fear of abandonment: that your ally will leave you exposed. The second is the fear of entrapment: that your ally will drag you into a fight that is not yours. Commit unconditionally and you eliminate any fear of abandonment. But you also eliminate your ally’s incentive for restraint. Why would a junior partner hold back if it knows the senior partner will follow no matter what?

This is exactly what Rubio described, whether he used the term or not. Israel was going to attack. The United States could join or absorb the retaliation. That is Snyder’s entrapment mechanism operating in real time, reported not by critics but by the administration’s own top diplomat. A ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — after hearing the administration’s classified briefing — reached the same conclusion: This was “a war of choice with no strategic endgame.”

How the Commitment Became Unconditional

The U.S.-Israeli alliance has no mutual defense treaty. Legally and technically speaking, it is not an alliance. In practice, however, it has operated like an unconditional guarantee in every crisis that matters, and that is exactly where entrapment creates enormous risks and costs.

It was not always this way. In 1956, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower forced Israel, Britain, and France to withdraw from Sinai after the Suez Crisis, threatening to cut aid and back U.N. sanctions. That was a senior partner willing to restrain a junior partner. It worked. The shift came in 1973, when U.S. President Richard Nixon ordered a massive airlift to resupply Israel during the Yom Kippur War at enormous diplomatic cost, triggering an Arab oil embargo that reshaped the global economy. That decision transformed the relationship from conditional support into something closer to a blank check. Every president since has treated it as untouchable.

The Trump administration went further. During the first Trump administration, the U.S. government withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal that Israel opposed, assassinated Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani. During his current term, President Donald Trump ordered the June 2025 strikes and launched joint operations aimed at regime change. Each step told Israel the same thing: there is no ceiling on American support. This also meant there was no floor on Israeli escalation.

The sequence that followed on Feb. 28 was textbook. Israel targeted dozens of senior Iranian officials in the opening salvo, including the Supreme Leader himself, reportedly with CIA cooperation and assistance. Israeli officials described it as a preemptive attack to “remove threats to the State of Israel.” The strikes also killed senior Iranian officials whom U.S. intelligence had identified as potential successors to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — the very figures around whom the administration had built a Venezuela-style transition scenario in which the government survived under new management. Whether they were hit by American or Israeli strikes remains unclear, but the result is the same, the operation may have destroyed the very political pathway the senior partner needed to end the war it had just started.

Go back to 1914 and the structure is the same. Austria-Hungary was the declining, regionally focused junior partner obsessed with its neighborhood. Germany was the great power patron. After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Austria-Hungary wanted to crush Serbia. Germany issued the blank check. Vienna escalated because it knew Berlin was committed. Berlin ended up fighting a four-front war that served Vienna’s objectives, not its own.

Here is the critical difference, and it makes the current case worse, not better. Germany had a plausible security rationale for backing Austria-Hungary: the fear of encirclement by France and Russia. The United States has no equivalent. The administration frames the strikes around Iran’s nuclear program and missile capabilities. But that nuclear program was being actively negotiated days before the bombs fell. Oman’s foreign minister told CBS News that a deal was “within our reach.” U.S. officials offered a different assessment, according to Bloomberg, and the American delegation left Geneva disappointed with the results. Rubio himself said before talks even began, “I’m not sure you can reach a deal with these guys.” Whether a deal was truly close may never be settled. But the fact that talks were underway at all — and were abandoned in favor of strikes — suggests that diplomacy was never given the chance to fail on its own terms. Washington chose war over diplomacy not because diplomacy failed, but because the junior partner’s objectives required more than any deal could deliver.

Why Everyone Thinks This Will Be Quick

Entrapment explains why the United States is fighting. But it does not explain why leaders in both Washington and Jerusalem seem to believe the fight will be short and decisive. For that, you need a second framework.

Before World War I, every major European power adopted offensive military doctrines despite overwhelming evidence that technology (such as the machine gun, barbed wire, railroads, etc.) favored planning for a strong defense. Political scientist Stephen Van Evera documented how this “cult of the offensive” warped strategic thinking. According to Van Evera, states adopted more aggressive foreign policies, the premium on striking first went up, windows of opportunity appeared to be closing, diplomacy became zero-sum, and secrecy replaced transparency. Every power believed it had to strike first or lose. All of them were wrong.

The logic in Washington and Jerusalem today is remarkably similar. The case for striking Iran now rests on the conviction that the window is closing: Iran is approaching a nuclear threshold, the protests have weakened the regime, delay strengthens the adversary. The operational bets follow from that conviction: that decapitation will collapse the command structure, that precision can substitute for political strategy, and that regime change is a near-term outcome rather than an open-ended problem. This is the July Crisis of 1914 all over again: the belief that the offense holds the advantage and that hesitation is fatal.

But just as in 1914, the conviction that a swift strike will produce a decisive outcome has no basis in the evidence. Decades of scholarship on coercive airpower tell a consistent story: Bombing degrades military capacity but does not produce cooperative governments. For example, the United States destroyed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime in weeks but two decades later, the situation in Iraq is far from ideal. The government is often influenced by political wings of pro-Iranian militias and the Economist Intelligence Unit classifies the country as authoritarian.

Similarly, NATO toppled former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi from the air — Libya is still a failed state, and President Barack Obama called it the “worst mistake” of his presidency. Even Kosovo — the most cited success story — required the threat of a ground invasion and Russian diplomatic pressure to reach a political settlement, and that settlement remains contested a quarter century later.

There is a technological version of the same illusion at work here too: the belief that precision-guided munitions have solved the problem that plagued earlier campaigns. They have not. Precision lets you destroy what you aim at more efficiently. It does not change what destruction can accomplish politically. A smart bomb that flattens a command bunker is still just a bomb. The political order that must replace what it destroyed, the negotiation, the institution-building, the managed transitions, none of that can be delivered from 30,000 feet.

A Structure, Not a Conspiracy

It is worth being precise about what this argument is and what it is not. The claim is not that Israel manipulated the United States into war through lobbying or hidden influence. It is instead a structural claim: When a great power makes its commitment to a junior partner unconditional, it transfers agenda-setting power to that partner. The junior partner does not need to manipulate anyone, the architecture of the alliance does the work. Rubio’s own account confirms the mechanism: Israel decided and America’s only choice was how to follow.

Otto von Bismarck, the chancellor who unified Germany and built its alliance system, understood this better than anyone. Despite commanding the most powerful military on the continent, he spent his final years in office working to restrain Austria-Hungary, precisely because he saw that an unconditional commitment would let Vienna drag Berlin into wars that served Austrian interests, not German ones. His successors dropped the restraint. What followed was exactly the catastrophe Wilhelm had assured Nicholas would never come. Bismarck spent his final years at his manor house at Friedrichsruh, watching Kaiser Wilhelm II and his chancellors discard the restraint that had kept Germany safe. He reportedly warned that the great European war would come “out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.” He died in 1898, 16 years before he was proved right.

The United States has the tools to restrain a junior partner. It has conditioned aid, withheld support, and imposed costs on allies before. What it lacks is not a mechanism but the political will to use one. No U.S. president since George H.W. Bush has been willing to absorb the domestic cost of saying no to Israel. That is not a structural impossibility. It is a political choice, and it is the most consequential one since 1914.

What a Corrective Would Look Like

The war in Iran may be beyond recall, but the structural problem that produced it is not.

First, commitments need conditions. U.S. security guarantees to Israel should be tied to restraint, not escalation. A partner that launches preemptive operations knowing the patron will follow has no reason to negotiate. Conditionality restores that reason and Washington already knows how to do this. The United States has maintained strategic ambiguity with Taiwan for decades, committing to its defense without spelling out the conditions. Taiwan doesn’t declare independence because it cannot be certain the United States would follow. That uncertainty is the restraint mechanism. It is the opposite of the blank check. The analogy is imperfect. Israel operates in a more volatile security environment than Taiwan, with militant groups on its borders. Nonetheless, much of that environment is itself a consequence of the policies that unconditional backing has enabled – settlement expansion, prolonged occupation, and repeated military operations that generate the very threats used to justify the next round of escalation. Conditionality matters more, not less, in such cases. A partner whose actions produce the threats it then invokes to escalate will always escalate if there are no constraints.

Second, when the United States needs its own diplomatic track with an adversary, it needs to insulate that track from the junior partner’s preference for military action. The Omani back-channel that led to the nuclear deal with Iran under President Barack Obama worked in large part because it was conducted without Israeli knowledge.

The more recent negotiations underway in Feb. 2026, were by all accounts, contentious. The Omani mediator described them as close to a breakthrough. U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff maintained that Iran was never serious and expressed Trump’s frustration that Tehran was not “capitulating.” But the joint military operation launched after the final rounds of talks, suggesting the diplomatic track and military track were running simultaneously, and the alliance with Israel may have determined which one prevailed. The lesson is not that diplomacy should simply happen. It is that diplomacy cannot survive an alliance structure in which the junior partner holds a veto over the senior partner’s exit ramp.

Third, someone in Washington has to be willing to say no to the junior partner and absorb the political cost. It has been done before. In 1991, Israel was rapidly expanding settlements in the occupied territories using American-backed financing. George H.W. Bush withheld $10 billion in loan guarantees until Israel froze settlement construction. He took enormous domestic political heat, but it worked: Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir came to Madrid Peace Conference. It cost Bush politically, which is exactly why no president has tried it since. Every U.S. president since Nixon has treated the U.S.-Israel relationship as untouchable. The result is a commitment so unconditional that it has inverted the alliance hierarchy. The patron serves the client. That is not an alliance. That is entrapment.

The hardest test of any war plan is the political end state. What does regime change mean in practice — exile, decapitation, fragmentation, occupation, or negotiated transition? If Washington cannot articulate a plausible pathway from air strikes to a stable successor order, then the offensive optimism is not a strategy; it is a hope. And hope is exactly what great powers substitute for planning when alliance momentum outruns national interest.

The lesson of 1914 is not that alliances cause wars. Alliances are a permanent feature of international politics, and most of the time they work. The lesson is that unconditional alliances cause wars that neither partner intended and neither can win. Germany’s blank check to Austria-Hungary produced a conflict that destroyed both empires. The United States has now issued its own, and the bill is coming due in American lives, American treasure, and a Middle East engulfed in a war that no one in Washington can explain how to end.

Farah N. Jan is a senior lecturer in the International Relations Program at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in nuclear security and international security policy. Her research focuses on alliances and rivalries in the Middle East and South Asia.

Image: Midjourney