Notes on a Catastrophe and Fiasco

David Finkel

Posted April 14, 2026

WITH A SHAKY partial ceasefire subject to cancellation at any moment, a proposition from the murkier corners of the far right has emerged into the mainstream: Did Donald Trump take the United States into “war for Israel”?

It’s a question that opens a whole Pandora’s Box of unsavory tail-wags-the-dog, conspiratorial and, let’s face it, barely closeted antisemitic narratives, especially in the online spaces where the likes of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens play. But in the light of the current catastrophe, it’s impossible to ignore the issue and pretend it will just go away.

The short, accurate but not fully adequate answer is this: No, the United States did not go to “war for Israel” — although it’s entirely understandable that many people think so, not only on the right but in the political center and left too. A longer, more nuanced response has to begin with the understanding that wars, including this one, are about not just one but multiple things, some of which I’ll try to explore here.

First, however, amidst the monstrous war crimes, appalling human carnage, economic and ecological devastation that this criminal imperialist “excursion” has already produced, let’s note one positive outcome — although in no way does it balance the horrors that the war is inflicting.

The war on Iran and its strategic failure have torn a huge hole in Donald Trump’s credibility and image of unlimited power, both globally and in U.S. politics and even within his MAGA cult base. It may impact his other ambitions, from the attempt to “take” Cuba to the Republican voter-suppression drive to rig the midterm elections to the proposed 1.5 trillion dollar military budget and the right wing’s brutal assaults on women and trans people.

We’ll see about those things. And the war is turning into a potential strategic disaster for U.S. imperialism, despite the appalling cost to the peoples of the region and the world, which must never leave our sight.

What’s It All About?

This war, not for the first time, combines grand strategic considerations with some of the most squalid and corrupt ones. The latter include Donald Trump’s insatiable greed, his need to bury the Epstein files, and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s imperative to wage permanent war in order to suspend his corruption trial and hold together his governing coalition that depends on the ultra-Orthodox theocratic and neofascist settler parties.

The fundamental reality, though, is that U.S. imperialism (not just Trump) launched this war against Iran — planned for decades, however spectacularly it’s backfired — to secure its domination of the Middle East or as it’s sometimes now called, West Asia.

This includes control of oil supplies and financial arrangements, shipping routes and choke points, and geopolitical spaces, all of which have been exhaustively explored by many experts (notably, for example, Adam Hanieh’s important book Crude Capitalism).

A crucial component of this strategy is that this imperial hegemony is to be enforced not by a massive, expensive, ever-present U.S. military force but in conjunction with the Israeli state as the regional power, with the Arab kingdoms of the Gulf as junior partners and customers for U.S. and Israeli military hardware, mass surveillance technology and methods of social control.

Rather than repeating details here, for an account of the real depth of the U.S.-Israeli partnership and the interests it serves, I recommend a piece by Moshe Machover that deserves to be read in full, “The dog and the tail,” Weekly Worker, February 19, 2026 (https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1573/the-dog-and-the-tail/).

But the Israeli state and particularly its regime headed by Netanyahu also has priorities that align partially but not fully with those of U.S. imperialism.

Thus the United States has fully partnered with Israel in the Gaza genocide, now in its third year. Trump’s and Jared Kushner’s vision of a Gaza luxury city-state without Gaza’s Palestinians fits perfectly in this enterprise.

Israel’s savage military and settler ethnic cleansing rampage in the West Bank, however, threatens the consolidation of the “Abraham Accords” with the Gulf states. Further, what Israel is now doing to Lebanon with the monstrous drive to depopulate and effectively annex the south of that country and the terror bombing of Beirut, threatens Lebanon’s very existence.

The Lebanon operation (which stretches Israel’s military reservists to the breaking point) also quite obviously serves Netanyahu’s intention to destroy the fragile ceasefire with Iran. These are potentially explosive contradictions with outcomes that aren’t easily predictable.

How it Started

Still, there’s an understandable widespread perception that Israel is what caused Trump to go to war. Here’s how Israeli analyst Amos Harel summarizes the outcome of Netanyahu’s argument in the Situation Room for war against Iran (as also extensively reported in The New York Times):

“Trump and Netanyahu apparently concluded that an external push would reignite the protests and create a reasonable chance of toppling the regime.

“But here many of the weaknesses shared by the current U.S. administration and Israel’s system under Netanyahu came into view: a tendency to gamble based on unfounded wishful thinking, shallow and half-baked plans, disregard for experts, or the aggressive use of pressure to make them align their views with the wishes of the political leadership…

“Those around him were less enthusiastic: the CIA director described the Israeli proposals for regime change as ‘farcical,’ the secretary of state Marco Rubio called them ‘bullshit,’ and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs remarked that the Israelis ‘oversell.’” (HAARETZ, April 8)

In short, Netanyahu convinced Trump of what the narcissistic president, intoxicated with his success in the Venezuela kidnapping operation, was all too eager to hear. Historians may someday explore the deep roots of how these two egos overrode the informed advice of U.S. military and intelligence experts who had no interest in a so-called “war for Israel.”

The simple but frightening point for me is that Netanyahu knows what Vladimir Putin knows, what Mohammad bin Salman (who also argues for the war to continue) knows, and what every foreign leader and American billionaire who deals with Donald Trump knows: that one-on-one, Trump is a manipulable fool who will give you what you want if you offer flattery, a bribe, a Nobel Peace Prize nomination or even a medal invented for the occasion (e.g., the FIFA World Peace Prize).

In short, Trump took the country to war not “for Israel” but for a tangled combination of imperialism and self-gratification.

If this is staggering in itself, perhaps it leads us to consider the consequences of a capitalist world economy dependent on fossil fuels — extracted in the most destructive ways, requiring complex supply chains and global shipping routes, calling into being a semi-chaotic political order of regimes and ruling elites unconstrained by democracy or human welfare. If we now put on top of this whole structure, however he may have gotten there, the power of a pathological narcissist, cult leader and borderline madman, we get to where we are right about now.

Where Next?

The immediate future of the ceasefire, and the fate of Iranian society with its economy and population devastated but its regime surviving and now even more viciously repressive, of Lebanon facing dismemberment, or of the world economy on the edge of meltdown, are all beyond the scope of prediction here.

On April 7, the world trembled as Donald Trump proclaimed the imminent “destruction of a 4000-year civilization” in Iran, “back to the stone ages where they belong.” If those orders had been issued to commit the greatest crimes against humanity since Adolf Hitler, would the U.S. military command have followed them?

We don’t know, but in reality Trump’s bluster was an expression of weakness and desperation for the proverbial off-ramp. Even in his visibly declining and dangerous condition, it’s doubtful that Trump actually thought he could pull it off or that Iran would capitulate. Perhaps the threat of annihilation was intended to freak out the regional states and Pakistan into propelling the ceasefire deal, and maybe it worked.

Of course, the proclamations of victory from both Washington and Tehran are lies, as are the conflicting claims of whether or not the Strait of Hormuz is open and what’s actually being negotiated.

What matters right now is that the partial ceasefire, which may be short-lived, presents the opening to organize against this criminal imperial war, the Israeli genocidal assault in Palestine and Lebanon, and the war at home that the U.S. government and ruling class are imposing on the U.S. population — especially the working class, immigrant communities and our basic democratic rights.

May Day will be the next mass mobilization, and there is no time to waste.