Washington and Jerusalem Are Fighting the Same War in Iran, For Comple

The US wants a deal. Israel wants regime collapse. Their conflicting strategies are undermining each other and leaving Iran's Islamic Republic wounded but intact.

The April 8, 2026, ceasefire between the United States and Iran paused six weeks of devastating conflict. But it did nothing to resolve what Hussein Banai, writing in Foreign Affairs, calls "the strategic incoherence at the heart of the U.S.-Israeli campaign." Washington and Jerusalem launched their war together on February 28, 2026. They have been pursuing fundamentally incompatible objectives ever since.

The United States, under President Trump, entered the conflict believing that "a sufficiently credible demonstration of military force could coerce the regime's leadership into making a deal", a nuclear agreement that would permanently end Iran's enrichment program. Israel, under Prime Minister Netanyahu, has pursued something far more ambitious: the systematic elimination of Iran's leadership and the eventual dissolution of the Islamic Republic itself.

How Israel destroyed America's negotiating partners

The divergence has played out in devastating fashion on the ground. Israel assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the war's first day. On March 17, Israeli forces killed Ali Larijani, Iran's security chief and a figure widely seen as a potential interlocutor for negotiations. US counterterrorism chief Joseph Kent resigned in protest, stating that Trump had started the war "due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby."

What is the Islamic Republic's institutional structure?

Iran's post-1979 constitutional system was deliberately designed to survive the loss of any single leader. Power is distributed across multiple overlapping institutions: the Supreme Leader, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Basij militia, an independent judiciary, the Assembly of Experts, the Guardian Council, and the Expediency Council. As Banai writes, this architecture ensures that "the destruction of any single node could not bring the whole system down." The system passed its ultimate test when it survived Khamenei's assassination and rapidly installed his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, as successor.

A Carnegie Endowment analysis by Eric Lob documented how the divergence extended to energy targets. On March 18, the US authorized Israeli strikes on Iran's South Pars natural gas field, a move that drove up global petroleum prices, directly undermining Trump's own stated priority of lowering energy costs. Netanyahu then claimed Israel had acted independently.

The war backfired on regime change hopes

Banai's most provocative argument is that the conflict has produced the opposite of what both partners intended. Rather than galvanizing Iranian citizens against their government, the strikes on civilian infrastructure, universities, residential neighborhoods, factories, "made regime critics inside Iran less, not more, likely to agitate for the system's collapse."

The regime's founding narrative, that foreign powers seek to destroy the Islamic Republic, was "galvanizing in ways that neither Washington nor Israel appears to have adequately anticipated." The result is what 47 years of US policy toward Iran was designed to prevent: "a regime that has survived its ultimate test and has every incentive to reconstitute and fortify its capabilities with a new clarity of purpose."

The CSIS analysis by Daniel Byman identified six risks flowing from this dynamic, including the likelihood of "wars after the war", recurring clashes rather than a clean settlement. Over 250 high-ranking Iranian officials have been killed, an unprecedented toll that virtually guarantees prolonged cycles of retaliation.

What comes next

Negotiations are underway in Islamabad, with Vice President JD Vance leading the US delegation and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi heading Tehran's team. The positions remain far apart. The US demands zero uranium enrichment and an end to proxy support. Iran demands sanctions relief, war reparations, and continued control of the Strait of Hormuz.

The Israel variable remains the wild card. Netanyahu has explicitly stated that the ceasefire does not cover Lebanon, and on April 8, the day the ceasefire took effect, Israel launched its largest coordinated wave of strikes against Hezbollah targets, killing more than 250 people in a single day. As Banai concludes, "Whether or not the cease-fire holds, a growing rift between the goals of Israel and the United States has been exposed and the Islamic Republic can claim confirmation of what its founders always argued: that survival, on whatever terms, remains tantamount to victory."