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Despite the nascent peace in Gaza, it appears the stage is being set for renewed belligerence in the Middle East, unless the US can restrain Israel.
After two years of Israel’s devastating war in Gaza, a ceasefire deal has officially been signed. President Donald Trump previously revealed his 20-point peace plan to end the conflict and, while it is not immediately clear if the plan will be implemented in its entirety, it seems that an initial phase is currently underway. Captives from both sides will be exchanged, and Israel will partially withdraw from Gaza.
As the war in Gaza hopefully draws to an end, an embattled Iran is now facing the reimposition of United Nations “snapback” sanctions that will wreak havoc on its oil trade, reinstate an arms embargo, and prohibit all uranium enrichment. Previously, the Iranian parliament was set to deliberate on a resolution to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a response to the sanctions being implemented. With sanctions now in effect, Iranian withdrawal from the NPT might be interpreted as a move toward nuclear weaponization and amplify Israeli and American calls for regime change. Despite the nascent peace in Gaza, it appears the stage is being set for renewed belligerence in the Middle East. Accordingly, the US must definitively restrain Israel to disentangle from a region where involvement has not provided any tangible benefits.
After the Iran-Israel War, Iran preconditioned resuming diplomacy on a good faith guarantee from the US that they would not be attacked while negotiating. From the Iranian perspective, it is evident that the US is unable to ensure Iran’s safety amid renewed nuclear negotiations. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has conducted offensive operations in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and Qatar. Israel’s unilateral bombing of Qatar, a US ally which hosts the largest US military base in the Middle East, represents a dangerous and unprecedented escalation. Qatar plays the role of a de facto regional mediator, and Israel’s brazen strike targeted Hamas representatives in Doha who were discussing President Trump’s ceasefire proposal to end the war in Gaza.
This is a glaring instantiation of the fact that the US is either unwilling or unable to restrain Israel. If US support for Israel remains unconditional despite bombing the mediator country in peace negotiations, which voices will be elevated in Tehran: the moderates open to resuming diplomacy or the hardliners asserting that the US cannot be trusted? Iran’s suspicions are reflected in Ayatollah Khamenei’s assertion that negotiations with the US would not serve Iran’s interests.
It is becoming impossible to ignore that Israeli and American interests are separate and distinct: Israel wants regional hegemony, while the US’ interests lie in diplomacy.
Moreover, the underlying strategic considerations remain relatively unchanged after the war in June. The US was unable to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, Israel failed to spur regime change, and Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium is believed to have survived US strikes. While reattempting nuclear diplomacy is preferable to renewed hostilities, diplomatic efforts have reached an irreconcilable impasse. Israel and the US remain committed to imposing a policy of zero uranium enrichment on Iran while Iran remains steadfast on retaining their enrichment capability. Although President Trump proclaimed that Iran’s nuclear sites were totally "obliterated,” assessments from the US, Israel, Iran, and the International Atomic Energy Agency appear to contradict his rosy estimation. Subsequently, Israel reportedly is planning for additional strikes if Iran resumes enrichment and President Trump has asserted that he would be open to striking Iran again “without question” if enrichment continues. Why would Iran agree to suspend uranium enrichment and forfeit nuclear latency when their existential fears were reinforced by surprise bombings amid diplomatic talks?
The inconvenient truth is that Israel hopes to seize this unique opportunity to coordinate with the US to change the Middle East. Concerning Gaza, the expulsion of the Palestinian population and opposition to Palestinian statehood enjoy a national consensus that transcends partisan lines in Israeli society. Since the Gaza war began in 2023, the human cost has been enormous—Israel has killed over 67,000 Palestinians, an estimated 20,000 of which are children; starvation is rampant; and nearly all of Gaza’s educational and medical infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed. Similarly, Israel’s primary strategic objective in Iran is regime change wherein Iran shares a fate similar to Iraq and Syria: a fracturing along ethnic and religious lines into smaller, manageable entities that pose no threat to Israel.
Realistically, Israel needs to drag the US into further hostilities with Iran due to Israel’s inability to adequately defend itself without US augmentation. Indeed, in the past two years alone, the US spent tens of billions on military aid to Israel. This figure pales in comparison with the fact that Israel has been the leading recipient of US aid for decades. Additionally, the war with Iran in June exposed glaring capacity insufficiencies with Israel’s missile defense systems and the US accounted for “almost half of all interceptions.” The US reportedly burned through about 25% of its THAAD missile interceptors defending Israel from Iranian retaliations. Israel could not execute their expansive agenda without unconditional, absolute, and unlimited guarantees from the US. Bewilderingly, the US continues to underwrite Israel’s ambitious foreign policy contrary to the US national interest. The US must first acknowledge this bizarre dynamic to ultimately divorce itself from it.
At the genesis of President Trump’s second term, he claimed the success of his administration would be measured “not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” Why Israel is allowed to continually derail the US’ “no new wars” agenda without fear of consequence defies credulity. It is becoming impossible to ignore that Israeli and American interests are separate and distinct: Israel wants regional hegemony, while the US’ interests lie in diplomacy.
If the Iranian regime is toppled, Israel will have achieved their goal of changing the strategic landscape of the Middle East. As the sole regional nuclear power with a sophisticated intelligence apparatus, unconditional US support, and no local competitors posing a threat, Israel will have ascended to the uncontested hegemon of a region that encompasses vital continental trade crossroads between Asia, Europe, and Africa. With diplomacy seemingly buried, the US must restrain their “greatest friend.” Facilitating regime change in Iran serves Israel, but leaves the US vulnerable to retaliations, blowback terrorism, or managing regional destabilization due to an ensuing refugee crisis. If there is to be a second Iran-Israel War, the US should make it clear that Israel will have to go it alone.
One foreign policy expert said these congressional authorizations "have become like holy writ, documents frozen in time yet endlessly reinterpreted to justify new military action."
Almost exactly 24 years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the US House of Representatives voted Tuesday to finally repeal a pair of more than two-decade-old congressional authorizations that have allowed presidents to carry out military attacks in the Middle East and elsewhere.
In a 261-167 vote, with 49 Republicans joining all Democrats, the House passed an amendment to the next military spending bill to rescind the Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress in the leadup to the 1991 Persian Gulf War and 2003 War in Iraq.
The decision is a small act of resistance in Congress after what the Quincy Institute's Adam Weinstein described in Foreign Policy magazine as "years of neglected oversight" by Congress over the "steady expansion of presidential war-making authority."
As Weinstein explains, these AUMFs, originally meant to give presidents narrow authority to target terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and use military force against Saddam Hussein, "have been stretched far beyond their original purposes" by presidents to justify the use of unilateral military force across the Middle East.
President George W. Bush used the 2002 authorization, which empowered him to use military force against Iraq, to launch a full invasion and military occupation of the country. Bush would stretch its purview throughout the remainder of his term to apply the AUMF to any threat that could be seen as stemming from Iraq.
After Congress refused to pass a new authorization for the fight against ISIS—an offshoot of al-Qaeda—President Barack Obama used the ones passed during the War on Terror to expand US military operations in Syria. They also served as the basis of his use of drone assassinations in the Middle East and North Africa throughout his term.
During his first term, President Donald Trump used those authorizations as the legal justification to intensify the drone war and to launch attacks against Hezbollah in Iraq and Syria. He then used it to carry out the reckless assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq.
And even while calling for the repeal of the initial 2001 and 2002 authorizations, former President Joe Biden used them to continue many of the operations started by Trump.
"These AUMFs," Weinstein said, "have become like holy writ, documents frozen in time yet endlessly reinterpreted to justify new military action."
The amendment to repeal the authorizations was introduced by Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas).
Meeks described the authorizations as "long obsolete," saying they "risk abuse by administrations of either party."
Roy described the repeal of the amendment as something "strongly opposed by the, I'll call it, defense hawk community." But, he said, "the AUMF was passed in '02 to deal with Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and that guy's been dead... and we're now still running under an '02 AUMF. That's insane. We should repeal that."
"For decades, presidents abused these AUMFs to send Americans to fight in forever wars in the Middle East," said Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) shortly before voting for the amendment. "Congress must take back its war powers authority and vote to repeal these AUMFs."
Although this House vote theoretically curbs Trump's war-making authority, it comes attached to a bill that authorizes $893 billion worth of new war spending, which 17 Democrats joined all but four Republicans Republicans in supporting Wednesday.
The vote will also have no bearing on the question of President Donald Trump's increasing use of military force without Congressional approval to launch unilateral strikes—including last week's bombing of a vessel that the administration has claimed, without clear evidence, was trafficking drugs from Venezuela and strikes conducted in June against Iran, without citing any congressional authorization.
Alexander McCoy, a Marine veteran and public policy advocate at Public Citizen, said, "the 1991 and 2002 AUMFs" are "good to remove," but pointed out that it's "mostly the 2001 AUMF that is exploited for forever wars."
"Not to mention, McCoy added, "we have reached a point where AUMFs almost seem irrelevant, because Congress has shown no willingness whatsoever to punish the president for just launching military actions without one, against Iran, and now apparently against Venezuela."
In the wake of Trump's strikes against Iran, Democrats introduced resolutions in the House and Senate aimed at requiring him to obtain Congressional approval, though Republicans and some Democratic war hawks ultimately stymied them.
However, Dylan Williams, the vice president of the Center for International Policy, argued that the repeal of the AUMF was nevertheless "a major development in the effort to finally rein in decades of unchecked use of military force by presidents of both parties."
The vote, Williams said, required lawmakers "to show where they stand on restraining US military adventurism."
Someday Israeli leaders will stand in The Hague for what they have done in Gaza, and they will deserve to. But if we are honest, we know US leaders belong there too.
I have met people who gave me grace in Iran, in Mexico, in Haiti, in Gaza, in Cambodia, in Vietnam. People who understood the difference between ordinary citizens and the governments that rule them. People who offered me kindness when they had every reason not to. That grace stays with me.
As a US citizen and physician, I have lived my life trying to hold onto a sense of responsibility. But what I see now, in Gaza, in Haiti, in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan, is the full weight of what psychologists call diffusion of responsibility. It is the shrug that says: Someone else will answer for this, someone else will carry the shame.
The United States cannot keep living in that shrug. We armed, funded, and protected Israel as it has carried out the genocide of the Palestinian people. We have supplied not only weapons but coordination, intelligence, and political cover. We let the American Israel Public Affairs Committee function as the arm of a foreign government, not as a lobbying group. We looked away from the checkpoints, the administrative cruelty, the killing of children. This is our legacy.
But Gaza is not an aberration. It is a mirror held up to the long history of our interventions. We overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, in 1953, not because he was a tyrant but because he dared to nationalize oil. We turned that nation toward dictatorship and decades of repression, then had the arrogance to call it democracy. In Central America, we toppled leaders and propped up death squads. In Chile, we helped usher in the bloody reign of Augusto Pinochet, betraying yet another democratic choice in favor of authoritarian brutality.
We speak of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murderous ways as if they are foreign to us. They are not. We have assassinated leaders. We have sanctioned extrajudicial killings, calling them “targeted strikes.” We have funded militias and trained torturers. We still carry Guantánamo on our conscience. We are not better than Putin. We are his rival and his mirror.
We should be an anti-interventionist nation, one that stops imagining itself as the builder of nations and instead takes responsibility for its own failures, its own violence, and its own complicity.
In Vietnam, we unleashed hell. Entire villages were burned to the ground. At My Lai, US soldiers slaughtered more than 500 unarmed civilians, women, children, elders. It was not an accident, not a one-off. It was part of a culture of violence we exported and excused.
And then there is the School of the Americas, now rebranded as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, a US military institution in Panama where we trained some of the worst dictators and death squad leaders in Latin America. The manuals we gave them were explicit: torture, execution, terror as tools of governance. We sowed horror and called it security.
Someday Israeli leaders will stand in The Hague for what they have done in Gaza, and they will deserve to. But if we are honest, we know we belong there too. For Mossadegh, for Pinochet, for Central America, for My Lai, for every extrajudicial killing and every sanctioned massacre, and most immediately for Gaza, we should be in the dock as well. We should stand in handcuffs, our heads lowered in shame, finally facing the truth of what we have unleashed in the world.
The truth is that our foreign policy has been one long history of intervention, violence, and betrayal of human dignity. We were in Haiti. We were in Iraq. We were in Afghanistan. We have left the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa littered with the bones of our experiments. Always we tell ourselves it was complicated. Always we tell ourselves we meant well. But what we meant was power, and what we left was ruin.
What reparation looks like now is not cash or aid dropped into a void. It is restoring justice. It is ending our culture of nation building and intervention, and replacing it with support for people, families, language, culture, dignity, and jurisprudence. It is standing against genocide, no matter who commits it. It is admitting that our strength lies not in military power but in whether we can build schools instead of prisons, communities instead of empires.
This is not just a populist opinion. It is a moral imperative. We should be an anti-interventionist nation, one that stops imagining itself as the builder of nations and instead takes responsibility for its own failures, its own violence, and its own complicity.
I am a doctor. My oath is to heal, to do no harm. But as a citizen, I see harm everywhere our government touches. We cannot keep pretending that this is someone else’s crime, someone else’s burden. This is ours.
The reckoning will not wait forever. The question is whether we face it with honesty now, or whether we let it destroy us later.