Are the US and Israel on the same page on the Iran war? Questions raised by Trump's message after the gas field attack

 

Are the US and Israel on the same page on the Iran war? Questions raised by Trump's message after the gas field attack

US President Donald Trump issued his usual strong statement on Wednesday after Israel attacked a joint Iranian-Qatar gas field.

Israel targeted the world’s largest natural gas field in South Pars in Iran, and Tehran retaliated by attacking an energy complex in Qatar. The attacks sent energy prices soaring and Trump’s anger rising.

On his social media platform Truth Social, Trump once again used threatening language against Iran, saying he had no knowledge of Israel’s attack plans.

What does the US president’s language tell us about the direction of the war and do the US and Israel have the same strategy and objectives against Iran?

Let’s take a look.

US ‘did not know about attack’

President Trump says the US ‘did not know anything about this particular attack.’

This is in stark contrast to several newspaper reports published in Israel after the attack.

The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported that the attack ‘was already coordinated with the US and… was agreed upon between Prime Minister Netanyahu and US President Trump.’

Israel will no longer ‘attack’ gas fields

President Trump often uses capital letters to write words in English, but in this long post he has resorted to capital letters only once and these capital letters were written for Israel.

He wrote that ‘there will be no further attack by Israel on this very important and valuable South Pars field, unless Iran unknowingly decides to attack a very innocent country (Qatar).’

For a president who always wants to keep the situation under control, was this a promise he has made before or was he warning the Israeli prime minister?

It is not easy to know what is really going on by reading Trump’s incoherent and flowing Truth Social posts.

But it echoes the news that Israeli attacks on Iranian oil reserves early in the war had angered Trump.

So are Israel and the US war aims separate and distinct?

It would be a mistake to read too much into a post by President Trump.

Israeli officials are keen to stress that the two countries are moving forward in complete harmony, even if they occasionally show signs of unintentional disagreement.

“We are in complete agreement on most or all of our targets with regard to the Iranian regime, the Revolutionary Guard Corps and their ballistic and nuclear programmes,” Alex Gendler, a spokesman for the Israeli embassy in London, told the BBC on Thursday morning.

“We want the same thing.”

While the two allies have clearly agreed on many issues, Israel has been more consistent on its desire for regime change in Tehran.

Statements by officials published in Israeli media this morning suggest that they have described the South Pars attack as part of an attempt to undermine the authority of the Iranian regime.

“The gas supply to citizens is being cut off, and this will increase the possibility of a coup,” a government official told Yedioth Ahronoth’s Yosef Yehoshua.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has made no secret of his decades-long desire to overthrow Iran’s Islamic regime, which he and many Israelis see as a regime intent on destroying the Jewish state.

While the United States has focused most of its military operations on weakening Iran’s missile and drone capabilities, destroying its navy and, in recent days, striking targets along Iran’s long coastline along the Gulf, Israel has taken extreme measures to assassinate Iranian leaders and strike key state control systems. This includes the Basij paramilitary units that were responsible for much of the violent crackdown on protests earlier this year.

Iran ‘not aware of facts’ of attack

In his post, President Trump insisted that Qatar was neither involved in the attack nor had any prior knowledge of it.

But he writes that ‘unfortunately, Iran was not aware of this’ and that is why it retaliated ‘unlawfully and unjustly’.

Trump is certainly not exonerating Iran of responsibility here, but he seems to be giving the impression that Iran did not understand the full picture when it retaliated, meaning that Tehran may have mistakenly assumed that Qatar was also involved.

Threat to blow up Iranian gas fields

Some parts of Truth Social’s post show Trump’s traditional style, as he threatens to use extreme force to achieve his goals.

He warns that “if Iran attacks Qatar’s LNG facilities again, the United States, with or without Israeli help or permission, will destroy the entire South Pars gas field with a force the likes of which Iran has never seen before.”

Trump and his hawkish Secretary of Defense, Pat Hegseth, are fond of such threatening rhetoric. Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed “president of peace,” often uses similar language.

And it is certainly true that Washington could do far more harm to Iran and its people than it has done so far.

The reference to Israeli consent to the threatened action seems a bit odd.

Was Trump reprimanding Benjamin Netanyahu for consulting more in the future?

Some circles in Donald Trump’s “MAGA” (Make America Great Again) movement are already convinced that the decisions in this war are being made not by the US but by Israel. There is a risk that some of the president's critics will see the statement as a slip.

But with oil and gas prices rising again, partly due to recent retaliatory attacks by Israel and Iran, and no significant progress in efforts to protect shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, Donald Trump appears uneasy.

The war continues to present the US administration with a difficult situation that it may not have expected.

Support for the war, which is still very high in Israel, is below 50% in the US. The conflict could help Netanyahu win another term, while hurting Donald Trump's Republican Party in the November midterm elections.

Israel and the US are close military allies, but this is the first time they have fought a war together.

Together, the two have achieved remarkable successes in less than three weeks. But with each passing day, this war is proving to be more complicated than Donald Trump anticipated.