The United States and Israel are in sync on Iran, only to the extent of 95%.
What about the other 5%? Israel struck petroleum and gas infrastructure in Iran without U.S. involvement, without even prior White House knowledge. When the Israel Defense Forces attacked the South Pars gas field on March 18, President Donald Trump stated on Truth Social that the U.S. “knew nothing” about the operation. Axios later reported, however, that Trump had in fact been informed in advance.
Whatever the precise mechanics of that coordination, the episode illustrates a recurring pattern: Tactical divergence between allies who nonetheless share a fundamental strategic objective.
Is this cause for alarm on the part of those of us who fervently wish for an entire regime change in Iran and for the total and unconditional surrender of the mullahcracy? No. And the historical record is instructive on this point.
The World War II precedent: Disagreement as a feature, not a bug
The three major allies of World War II, the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, were in far less accord than the U.S. and Israel are today. Their ideological and strategic differences were profound, and at times their disputes over tactics threatened the entire alliance.
Britain, under Winston Churchill, consistently pushed for what became known as the “peripheral strategy”: striking at what Churchill called the “soft underbelly” of the Axis through the Mediterranean and North Africa, rather than committing to a direct cross-Channel assault on Germany itself. The Americans, led by Gen. George Marshall, favored Operation Roundup, a concentrated invasion of France in the spring of 1943, believing it would strike at the heart of German power. The Soviets, bleeding on the Eastern Front, demanded a second front in Europe immediately. These were not minor tactical quibbles — they represented fundamentally different theories of how to win the war.
At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, this dispute came to a head. Marshall argued that the Mediterranean was a strategic vacuum pump that would drain Allied resources from the decisive theater. Churchill, drawing on British experience at Gallipoli and Passchendaele, warned that a premature cross-Channel invasion would fill the English Channel with corpses. Roosevelt, caught between his military advisors and the British, ultimately capitulated to Churchill’s Mediterranean strategy, delaying the Normandy invasion by a full year.
By comparison, the disagreements between Washington and Jerusalem over whether to strike oil refineries versus gas production facilities, or over the timing of escalation against Tehran, are trivial. If the U.S., the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, three countries with almost nothing in common philosophically, morally, economically, or culturally, could align well enough to defeat Nazi Germany, then the U.S. and Israel, two democracies that share foundational values and have been close strategic partners for decades, can certainly manage tactical friction.
The Six-Day War standard
On the morning of June 5, 1967, Israel launched Operation Focus, a coordinated air strike on eighteen Egyptian airfields. Within three hours, the Egyptian Air Force had been effectively destroyed on the ground. By the end of that single day, Israeli pilots had achieved air supremacy over the entire theater. In six days of fighting, Israel routed the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, tripling its territorial size and capturing the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.
Some 20,000 Arab soldiers died in a mere 132 hours of combat. The IDF lost approximately 800. It was, by any metric, one of the most decisive military victories in recorded history, executed not by overwhelming numbers or industrial supremacy, but by superior intelligence, preemptive timing, and an institutional culture that prizes speed and decisiveness over caution and attrition.
The prolonged Hamas campaign is not a counterexample. That war stretched into years primarily because the Biden administration repeatedly constrained Israel’s freedom of action, withholding weapons shipments, imposing ceasefires, and pressuring Jerusalem to accept terms short of the complete destruction of Hamas. Had Israel been permitted to operate without those constraints, the war would have concluded far sooner. The lesson of that campaign is not that the IDF has lost its edge — it is that the IDF cannot fight at its best when it is micromanaged by an ally with a shorter political attention span.
The energy infrastructure dispute
This brings us to the present divergence. The IDF, if given its full discretion, would presumably target all of Iran’s energy infrastructure, including its oil refineries, gas fields, and power generation facilities, to accelerate the collapse of the regime’s economic base. Trump has demurred. Why?
The principled reason is that Trump has his eye on the day after: the reconstruction of a post-theocratic Iran and the economic benefits of resumed Iranian energy production in a stabilized Middle East. Destroying every barrel of production capacity makes that reconstruction longer and more expensive.
The political reason is simpler: Brent crude was already above $108 a barrel when Israel struck South Pars, and spiked toward $119 at the height of the retaliatory exchanges. Democrats, who are looking for any lever to attack Trump’s economic and military management, have been quick to tie high gas prices to the war. Trump, with his particular sensitivity to economic optics, has been reluctant to hand them that ammunition.
“I told him don’t do that,” Trump said of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the South Pars strike, “so he said we won’t do that. We get along great; everything is coordinated, but on occasion he will do something and if I don’t like it, so we’re not doing that.”
Netanyahu, for his part, publicly acknowledged that the South Pars operation was conducted by Israel alone, and pledged to hold off further strikes on gas infrastructure at Trump’s request. The divergence is real. But it is a divergence about methods and tempo, not about the fundamental objective: the end of the Islamic Republic’s capacity to threaten its neighbors, destabilize the region, and pursue nuclear weapons.
The case for trusting the junior partner
A war is not won by worrying about what comes after it. The cart-before-the-horse error that currently afflicts Washington’s approach to the Iran campaign is this: Trump’s attention is already drifting toward reconstruction and oil prices and post-war diplomacy, while the regime in Tehran, wounded but not yet broken, still has fangs. Iran’s missile production, according to Iranian officials themselves, has not stopped.
BIBI ON THE BRINK: DOES NETANYAHU STILL HAVE TIME TO FINISH THE JOB IN IRAN?
Unconditional surrender cannot be extracted from a regime that believes its adversary is about to declare victory and go home. The historical precedent of premature disengagement is unambiguous. A negotiated pause is not a victory. It is a delay.
Trump has done more for Israel than any other American president. But the correct measure of that commitment is not what has been done so far — it is what needs to be done to finish the job. On the core question of how to prosecute this war to conclusion, Trump should place greater reliance on the strategy and tactics of his junior partner. The IDF knows how to end wars quickly. The U.S., in three consecutive conflicts, Vietnam/Afghanistan/Iraq has demonstrated that it does not.
Walter E. Block is the Harold E. Wirth eminent scholar endowed chairman and professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans. Oded Kohn Faran holds degrees in law from Sha’arei Mishpat College in Israel. He is the general director of Faran & Co. International Translations and lives in Tbilisi, Georgia.