Hassan Mneimneh is a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. He specializes in the Middle East and North Africa and the wider Islamic world, with a particular emphasis on radicalism and factionalism. For three decades, Mneimneh held research positions at multiple think tanks in Washington, as well as principal executive roles in policy and development organizations in the United States and the Middle East. He appears frequently on a variety of Arabic-language news channels internationally. Diwan interviewed Mneimneh in early March to get his perspective on the ongoing conflict between the United States and Israel on the one side, and Iran and its regional allies on the other.

Michael Young: In your remarks during several television interviews, you have suggested that this U.S. and Israeli war with Iran is effectively Israel’s war, which the Americans joined. You have cited Marco Rubio’s comments to that effect in support of your point of view. If you are right, how do you see this having a bearing on the outcome of the war, since U.S. and Israeli objectives in the conflict do not appear to be identical? Or are they?

Hassan Mneimneh: Beyond the plentiful anecdotal evidence strongly suggesting U.S. acquiescence to Israel’s desire to resume the June 2025 war, even a cursory review of the regional situation prior to the joint U.S.-Israeli action reveals that U.S. involvement in such a war was always destined to only marginally improve the overall U.S. strategic position vis-à-vis Iran, while exposing the architecture of leverage, influence, and dominance that the United States had established across the region to severe risks.

From Pakistan to Egypt, from Türkiye to Yemen, the United States had succeeded in creating conditions of engagement that were in its interests, despite the damage to its credibility from its unequivocal support for Israeli maximalism. For all capitals in the region, the relationship with Washington, even when adversarial, was and is primordial in shaping policy and affecting the tone of engagement with other partners and interlocutors. Iran may have been the only place in the region where the United States was not in effective control. But even there, since the killing in January 2020 of Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran had indeed lost momentum and fallen into a defensive posture that Washington exploited well—strengthening the sanctions regime and pressure, and providing Israeli intelligence with ample opportunities to increase its penetration of Iranian society and state.

The end of the Islamic Republic in its aggressive state-revolution setup is an objective U.S. national interest. Washington cannot afford a repeat of the North Korean fiasco. North Korea aptly used gaps in the international system and lapses in U.S. attention over the decades to emerge as a nuclear power capable of threatening the United States, and even upending the global order. Even without Israeli hypersensitivity demanding the demise of all governments posing a threat to Israel, the United States had a genuine interest in thwarting any Iranian ascent to nuclear military status.

Iran adjusted accordingly. Rather than seeking outright military nuclear capabilities, it endeavored to accumulate the components—all “dual use”—that would enable it to eventually cross the threshold toward nuclear weapons, if and when deemed necessary, within a reasonable time. This approach—developing its own scientific, industrial, and military cycle within the confines of what was presumed to be lawful internationally—was in fact the deterrence that Tehran believed would be the equivalent of North Korea’s actual acquisition of nuclear weapons. Iran may have thought it had acquired assets rendering it immune to aggression. The 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran seemed to confirm the soundness of the Iranian approach.

However, the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the agreement in 2018 revealed Washington’s desire to undo the equilibrium that Tehran sought. Objectively, this new U.S. policy was consistent and productive. Iran resorted to “strategic patience” hoping that Washington’s focus would dissipate with the change of administrations. The Biden years, however, were not a resumption of president Barack Obama’s accommodationist approach, but instead merely represented a remission until the second Trump administration.

In spite of hawkish statements from inside and outside the current administration, which raised the stakes by claiming a direct link between Iran and the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, a general sense of comfort could be felt in Washington that the United States had placed Iran on a slow path to its demise. The dominant view of policy realists was that overwhelming pressure and sanctions would exacerbate the regime’s ills, cause fractures within it, incite protests, and push it to collapse, whether through a coup from within the military, or through a systemic crisis after the death of the supreme leader. Washington provided unconditional support to Israel for its actions in historical Palestine and its vicinity, and it also sought not to disrupt the momentum of the strangling containment of Iran—both for its perceived efficacy, and for the potential impact of such disruption on the regional architecture that the United States had built, restored, and maintained.

Abandoning this delicate and painstakingly balanced approach in favor of high-risk military action in Iran that provided low marginal returns would have been a reckless decision of any U.S. leadership. Trump is indeed prone to recklessness, and is even more receptive to propositions that afford him the possibility of emerging as an exceptional leader. However, the abject manipulation of the idiosyncrasies of this uniquely flawed president by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hawkish supporters in Washington, extracting from him one statement after another that entrapped him in bellicose action, and ultimately having him engage in a course of action destructive to U.S. policy, were harsh demonstrations of the potentially tragic vulnerability of the U.S. political system.

It would have been in the U.S. national interest for the war not to take place, and to allow the process of Iran’s gradual demise to continue toward a soft landing. Now that the war is happening, the remedial interest of the United States is to limit the damage to the U.S.-crafted regional architecture. This is in conflict with Israel’s aim of collapsing the Iranian regime at any cost, but also of creating through such a collapse conditions that erode the power of all current or future regional Israeli adversaries. Israel has leveraged Trump’s need not to emerge defeated from this war of choice to advance its vision and interests, while undermining a gradualist, realist U.S. approach.

MY: How do you see this conflict ending, and what is your opinion of the optimistic comments from U.S. and Israeli officials? Do you really see that they are in a position to secure the objectives they have set—to end Iran’s nuclear program, severely curtail its ballistic missile capacity, and end ties between Iran and its regional allies?

HM: The conflict can end in a Venezuela-style resolution, with the remnants of the Islamic Republic submitting to Trump, who may declare himself president or maybe even supreme leader of the new Iran. But this an extremely unlikely outcome. The far more likely result of the joint U.S.-Israeli war may, instead, be a weakened Islamic Republic that will have lost much of its power and gravitas, but which is still capable of ruling and dominating a devastated Iranian society, perhaps with even more ferocity. The risks for Israel in such an outcome would be diminished, but not eliminated. That is why Israel would prefer, and may succeed in ushering the U.S. into, achieving a third possible outcome of the war, which is to push Iran into a situation of chaos and conflict, with some nominal non-Islamic government in place, as a repeat on steroids of the Afghanistan and Iraq scenarios. 

MY: The U.S. and Israelis collaborated in killing Iran’s former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but last weekend, his son Mujtaba was named as his replacement. What does this tell you, and more broadly what does it indicate about the capacity of the Iranians to push back against U.S. conditions?

HM: The Iranians, convinced that the conflict would be an existential one for the regime, announced that they had put in action contingency plans. It is therefore no surprise that the son of Khamenei is now the new supreme leader. Symbolically, this is a significant move by the regime to indicate its resilience. Mujtaba is the new face of hardline Iran. His assassination, which the Israelis have threatened, were it to succeed, would not in itself derail the survival plans of the Islamic Republic. His selection was one of the more likely outcomes of the war, namely a diminished but more radicalized Islamic Republic. 

MY: Iran brought Hezbollah into the battle on March 2, when the party fired rockets into northern Israel. For many Lebanese, including many Shiites, this step was suicidal. Do you agree with this view, and what outcome to you see in this new Lebanon war?

HM: Iran naturally benefits, albeit marginally, from the renewed war in Lebanon, toward which Israel is now forced to allocate resources. I agree that the Hezbollah action is quasi-suicidal, but I consider it to be based on a harsh calculation of self-interest rather than subservience to Iran. Israel had succeeded in drastically changing the rules of engagement with Hezbollah—from precarious understandings of mutual red lines after 2006 to targeting anyone connected with Hezbollah since 2024. In fact, hawks in Israel and the United States have openly adopted a maximalist position that Hezbollah must not only be eradicated as a military force and dissolved as a political party, with its institutions dismantled, but also that the ecosystem that incubated Hezbollah and supported it must be held accountable for the damage it caused and therefore broken up. The target is, quite openly, the Shiite socioeconomic strata that gained ground and entered into symbiosis with Hezbollah.

For the moment, the Lebanese state may not be in line with the full extent of this hawkish vision, but Hezbollah could assess that, out of weakness or actual agreement, the state could be pushed in the direction of implementing it, with no prospect of any alternative. So, from Hezbollah’s perspective, its demise was all but certain if it remained inactive in the war (and this is still likely), but participation offered the possibility that it might lead to some arrangement better than total eradication as part of a regional settlement, if the Iranian regime survived. The possible outcomes of the Lebanon war may in fact mirror those of the Iran war: an even more battered Hezbollah that has survived—still dominant within its own community, but also facing more opposition from inside it—against a backdrop of an even weaker and more damaged Lebanon. This seems to be the most likely outcome.

MY: One of the broader narratives in the region is that we are seeing the emergence of major regional powers filling the vacuum left by a United States focused elsewhere—by which I mean Israel, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Israel’s assault on Iran can be understood in this light, but Israel has also pushed back against Türkiye in Syria, and is now present at the entrance to the Bab al-Mandeb, which worries the Saudis. How do such dynamics feed into the conflict with Iran, and how might they provoke the Turks and Saudis, who are wary of Israeli hegemony in the region, backed by the United States?

HM: The dynamics described in your question are indeed those of the unravelling of the U.S.-led regional order, and reflect the conflict between this order and the model of Israeli domination. The fatal flaw within Israel’s imperial approach is that it is premised on U.S. power. Only with the level of financial, military, and diplomatic support provided by Washington can Israel contemplate achieving its goals of supremacy, and even then, such success is bound to be unstable, precarious, and ultimately short-lived. Still, the prerequisite for an imperial Israel is that the United States in effect becomes Israel’s vassal. The unstated Israeli desire is to be rooted in an Israel-aligned America that largely submits to Israel’s priorities, something we saw from the Biden and Trump administrations after the October 7, 2023 attacks.

However, is Israel, despite its extensive reach within the United States at multiple levels, overestimating its sway in Washington? The sensitivity and feigned vulnerability in many Israeli political and intellectual circles to a potential switch in U.S. direction may indeed be vastly overstated, and is often summoned to secure supplementary support and prevent even marginal dissent. That said, some change may indeed be in progress. The strategic interest of the United States is in managing shifting alliances in the region, and by squandering its influence to the benefit of Israel, it creates a vacuum that can eventually be exploited by China. Some of the damage that has been done is already irreversible, but the stakes are too high to allow bad policy to continue to unravel what still survives.

The objective interest of the more powerful states across the region—Pakistan, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Algeria—is to combine their military capacities into a durable structure and counter an imperial Israel, mitigate U.S. volatility, better coordinate with a disappointed Europe, and maybe even contain or absorb Iran. Such an awareness is readily noticeable in the region.

MY: Will the region be reshaped by this war? If so, how? 

HM: Ideally, the United States would find an exit from its current war. It would declare that its kinetic actions have obliterated what was left of Iran’s nuclear program, eradicated the offensive power of the Iranian navy, and downgraded Iranian missile capabilities, which would thus end military operations before the U.S. resumes crippling sanctions on Iran. This would come as the U.S. restores and upgrades the regional security architecture, with Israel gradually ascending to become an integral part of this arrangement as a function of a credible and acceptable resolution of the Palestinian question. Such a scenario, however, is fiction.

Instead, the United States is more likely to continue to submit to the Israeli urgency of “achieving” as much as possible before unconditional support from Washington passes. The exaggerated Israeli influence over U.S. policy is not the only problem that Washington faces in its putative quest to maintain its position of dominance globally. In fact, Washington’s vulnerability to Israeli influence is symptomatic of the disarray the United States is experiencing today as a result of changing geostrategic realities, due in large part to the short lifespan accorded to successive administrations in a global confrontation unfolding over decades; to the erosion of trust in the political system; as well as to incompetent leadership in recent years, culminating in the wrecking ball approach of Donald Trump.

The potential and need for the region to be reshaped are intense. However, the vision for reshaping it in a sustainable, broadly beneficial way is lacking. What remains instead are Quixotic imperial dreams and missed opportunities that unfortunately translate into more death, misery, and destruction.