The Manufactured War: United States, Israel and the Structural Path to the Conflict in Iran

History rarely unfolds in isolated explosions; rather, it is the slow tightening of structural constraints, the gradual accumulation of intentions, capabilities, and fears. The 2025 war between Israel and Iran is not an anomaly nor a sudden eruption.

It is the predictable consequence of a decades-long trajectory engineered by the United States and shaped by Israel’s exceptional influence over American foreign policy. The war did not materialise out of thin air; it was structurally inevitable, a war that had been long prepared, long rationalised, and long embedded in the very institutions and security doctrines of the West.

The Structural Origins 

The seeds of the current war were sown in 1953, when the United States and the United Kingdom orchestrated the coup that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. In restoring the Shah, the West established a transactional partnership with Iran: oil in exchange for weapons and political allegiance. Israel, then a fledgling state, became a key partner to the Shah’s Iran, quietly supplying weapons and intelligence in exchange for oil. This pragmatic axis served Western interests, but it was always a brittle alliance, anchored to a regime with no popular legitimacy.

By 1979, the Islamic Revolution dismantled this relationship. The Shah fell, and Ayatollah Khomeini emerged at the helm of a new theocratic state defined by anti-Israel and anti-American ideology. 

It is important to remember that the West’s fingerprints were not merely on the Shah’s rise but also on his fall. As declassified documents now confirm, the Carter administration, fully aware of the Shah’s terminal illness and political weakness, made the strategic choice to manage his exit rather than save his regime.

The United States did not orchestrate Khomeini’s rise, but it facilitated the Shah’s demise through diplomatic abandonment and the quiet neutralisation of loyalist military factions. This cold, structural decision would set the trajectory for four decades of hostility.

The Long Leash 

What makes the Israel–Iran conflict uniquely persistent is not merely the hostility between the two states but the role of the United States as an unbreakable guarantor of Israeli security. Israel enjoys what no other state in the international system does: a virtually unlimited diplomatic, financial, and military backstop provided by Washington. Through billions in annual military aid, co-development of missile defence systems, and ironclad vetoes at the United Nations, the United States has enabled Israel to pursue aggressive strategies that would otherwise be too costly.

Israel’s unique influence over U.S. foreign policy, through lobbying groups like AIPAC and the pervasive alignment of the American security establishment, allowed it to continuously shape the narrative around Iran’s nuclear program. Intelligence leaks and internal assessments, such as the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, repeatedly suggested that Iran was not actively pursuing nuclear weapons. Yet these dissenting analyses were routinely sidelined in favour of public alarmism that perpetuated the notion of an imminent Iranian bomb. 

The nuclear narrative was less a reflection of ground realities and more a constructed political device, a pretext for sustained aggression, sanctions, and eventual military confrontation. 

Chronology of Manufactured Escalation 

From the late 2010s to 2025, a pattern emerges: Israel strikes Iranian assets, Iran retaliates through proxies or limited missile barrages, and the United States provides cover, military, diplomatic, or informational. This is not random tit-for-tat; this is a controlled ladder of escalation designed to incrementally weaken Iran while managing international fallout.

This timeline reveals a war that was not spontaneously triggered but meticulously staged, each step providing the justification for the next. The casus belli was not an event, but a process.

The Engineered Casus Belli

Successive U.S. administrations have operated as both restrainers and enablers in this conflict. Their core function has been to maintain the viability of the casus belli. Through strategic intelligence leaks, the United States amplified Israel’s claims of an imminent Iranian nuclear breakout, even when its intelligence assessments contradicted these assertions.

In 2012, the infamous “red line” speech by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at the United Nations was publicly ridiculed as cartoonish. But privately, Mossad assessed that Iran was not pursuing weaponisation. This pattern continued into 2025, when U.S. intelligence confirmed Iran was not building nuclear weapons, even as Israel prepared its largest offensive.

The gap between public alarmism and private intelligence was not a failure of analysis; it was strategic theatre. The bomb, as a threat, proved to be far more useful than the bomb as a reality.

Decapitation and Controlled Chaos

The Israeli air campaign in June 2025 is not designed to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capability; this is nearly impossible given Iran’s strategic depth and dispersal. The real objective was psychological and political decapitation.

By killing top IRGC commanders, striking deep within Tehran, and forcing Iran to demonstrate its limited ability to defend its airspace, Israel sought to fracture the regime’s prestige. The intended audience was not just the Iranian leadership but the Iranian public.

The strategy was to create controlled chaos: to weaken Iran without inviting catastrophic escalation, to keep the conflict below the threshold that would draw in Russia or China directly, and to preserve plausible deniability for U.S. escalation restraint.

This doctrine of calibrated violence, where the tempo of war is managed, not avoided, perfectly mirrors the U.S. and Israeli operational logic since the early 2000s.

The Myth of Restraint 

The consistent feature of this conflict is the moral hazard created by unconditional U.S. support. Israel’s leaders, knowing that their security risks are underwritten by Washington, are free to pursue high-risk strategies that a truly independent state could not sustain.

From missile defence co-development to intelligence sharing to active military participation in intercepting Iranian drones, the United States has functioned as an escalation partner. The result is a cycle where Israel’s freedom of military action is preserved, while Iran’s capacity to retaliate meaningfully is structurally suppressed.

This asymmetry is not accidental; it is a deliberate outcome of American grand strategy in the Middle East.

The Usefulness of Eternal War

Israel’s strategic posture is not just about territorial security; it is about maintaining regional hegemony through the perpetual management of threats. The long war against Iran serves multiple functions:

a) It ensures continued American military aid.
b) It maintains Israel’s status as the indispensable U.S. ally in the region.
c) It provides the political cohesion of a society permanently on a war footing. 

The war is not meant to end; it is meant to be managed. The constant reification of Iran as an existential threat legitimises not only Israeli pre-emptive strikes but also the broader security architecture of the region.

The Israeli-Iranian war reveals the crumbling credibility of international legal norms. The U.S. veto shield ensures that Israeli strikes, whether on consulates, civilian targets, or scientific facilities, face no substantive international consequence.

The so-called international community, particularly the UN Security Council, has been structurally incapacitated in this conflict. Great power politics override legalistic condemnations.

Furthermore, the declassified history of the U.S. engineering Islamist forces during the Cold War, from the cultivation of the Muslim Brotherhood to the weaponisation of jihad against the Soviets, reveals the long-standing Western practice of short-term ideological alliances to achieve strategic goals.

The Broader U.S. Middle East Strategy and Linked Patterns

The Israel-Iran conflict is not isolated. It is connected to a long chain of U.S. interventions and escalations in the Middle East:

Each intervention shares key characteristics:
a) Creation of power vacuums.
b) Unravelling of local political structures.
c) Long-term regional destabilisation. 

The Israel-Iran war is a continuation of this pattern, a proxy battlefield where U.S. strategic interests are pursued through indirect escalation and managed chaos.

The Unspoken Logic of Great Powers 

The Israel–Iran war is not a failure of diplomacy; it is diplomacy by other means.

The strategic logic that governs this conflict is structural, not personal. Leaders may change, but the security interests, threat perceptions, and political incentives remain constant. The United States, by entrenching its strategic alignment with Israel, made war with Iran not just possible but unavoidable.

The manufacturing of the casus belli, the careful inflation of the nuclear threat, the systematic escalation ladder, and the calibrated strikes display the cold rationality of great power competition.

There was no peace to be had. There was only the timing of the next blow.

And that is the most honest sentence that can be written about this war.

About the author: Kishan Kumar is a graduate in Economics from the University of Delhi with a strong interest in politics, policy, and media. Follow him on X (Twitter): @FreezingHindoo.

Note: The opinions in the article are those of the author alone and do not reflect the Editorial Line of ForPol.