Every time the United States sinks into a Middle Eastern war, the same explanation surfaces: Israel made us do it. Gilbert Achcar traces that reflex from the 2003 invasion of Iraq — where Mearsheimer and Walt’s Israel-lobby thesis became famous — to the joint US-Israeli war on Iran that began on February 28, 2026. His argument is that the thesis is not just wrong, it is convenient: it lets Washington’s own imperial interests go undiscussed.

The tell is what the realists left out:

  • Mearsheimer and Walt said nothing comparable about the 1991 Gulf War — even though Israel’s interest in destroying Iraq’s military was arguably greater then. They supported that war, reading it as serving the US national interest.
  • Their realism treats state interests as flowing from geopolitical position, not from whose interests the state actually serves — which is precisely what the lobby thesis allows them to avoid naming.
  • The 1998 PNAC letter to Bill Clinton urging the invasion of Iraq mentioned Israel once, alongside America’s Arab allies, and led with troops, allies, and oil.
  • Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz were three of PNAC’s twenty-five founders. PNAC’s role in the decision dwarfed AIPAC’s.
  • Alan Greenspan, in his 2007 memoir, put it plainly: “the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

The deeper history is the part worth sitting with. Once Arab nationalism forced Washington out of its Dhahran air base in the early 1960s, Israel became the region’s “watchdog of imperialist interests” — a gendarme, and also a way of showing Arab states that the US held the leash. Against that function, some $300 billion of inflation-adjusted aid from 1946 to 2024 is one of the most profitable investments in hegemony the United States has ever made — compare it to the $1.5 trillion the Trump administration wants for the Pentagon in a single fiscal year.

The Gulf still pays: leverage over China, over import-dependent European and East Asian allies, and over oil money — GCC sovereign wealth funds hold nearly $6 trillion, over 40 percent of the global total, and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar all rank among the world’s top ten arms importers, buying largely American. Add the Trump, Kushner, and Witkoff family stakes in the Gulf and the tech oligarchy’s interests, and Trump’s decision to go to war needs no Israeli prompting to explain it. Achcar calls it the most botched up of all US imperial wars — and pins responsibility on the American president and his administration, not on Netanyahu, whom the Israeli opposition now derides as a puppet of Washington.