Israel is leading the charge against Iran. It is being supported by the United States, but the true extent of its involvement is unclear beyond numerous Truth Social posts by US President Donald Trump.
How did Israel come to assume this prominent role in the Middle East and on the world stage in general?
The countdown began during the Gulf War.
The Gulf War (1990-91) was the real beginning of the post-Cold War order, the true Pax Americana. Saddam Hussein had completely misinterpreted the moment. Although he correctly sensed that the Cold War was nearing its end, he misunderstood the emerging order as one moving from two superpowers to none at all. In his view, it was the opportunity not to be missed for Iraq to grab whatever it deemed should rightfully belong to it.
The United States, under the leadership of then-president George H. W. Bush, assembled a coalition of almost all European and Middle Eastern powers, secured the support of the USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev, and made itself the sole arbiter of international norms and behaviors.
The legacy of George H. W. Bush
Bush showed the entire world that the United States could and would enforce the rules and was the only country capable of doing so. It was a truly happy beginning of a new, prosperous era. But not for everyone.
Israel, the country directly and unprovokedly attacked by Iraq, was asked – or, to be precise, forced – by the United States to stay away from the coalition and not to retaliate against missile attacks, potentially chemical ones, against its civilians and infrastructure. Then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, not an easy person to coerce, was forced into submitting to American dictates under threats he could not disregard.
Israel was attacked with Scud missiles, Israelis were killed, and Israel did not fire a single shot back. Moreover, the Patriot batteries that the United States deployed in Israel to shoot down incoming Scuds proved to be highly inadequate, showing poor performance and causing much collateral damage.
For the first time since the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Jerusalem appeared vulnerable and fully dependent on the graces of a superpower. The Middle East took notice.
For Israel, the most painful lesson of the war had both strategic and tactical implications. The first was that its existential threats were no longer confined to immediate neighbors and could be delivered over vast distances, with payloads capable of annihilating the Jewish state.
The second was that the United States controlled Israel’s defensive capability and was willing to withdraw it, even when the attack happened to be unprovoked, based on political expediency, regardless of the severity of the threat.
Again, the home front became the weakest point in the country’s defense. Israel had no choice but to technologically catch up to the most advanced capabilities possessed by the superpowers. Jerusalem embarked on one of the longest-term and most daring projects in its history to build what nobody else in the world had built.
The significance of Operation Roaring Lion
What occured on Saturday, February 28, 2026, was a culmination of more than three decades of work that began right after the Gulf War. The Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow, Iron Beam, precise intelligence collection methods, cyber offensive and defensive capabilities, and Israel’s modification to the American-produced fighter fleet – all of those are lessons learned from the sad and tragic days of the Gulf War.
And yet, Israel does not operate in a political vacuum. It still needs support from its great ally, the United States. But when the situation requires it, and the country finds itself in the present and immediate danger, Israel can act on its own or even lead a reluctant ally along to do the right thing when “everything else has already been tried.”
It is a remarkable turnaround for a country that only a few decades ago was shunned by the United States and forbidden to retaliate.
Did Israel’s leaders in the 90s foresee the world of today? It is safe to assume they did not. The Jewish state was very lucky, in a very Jewish way, to suffer from a predicament that has since become almost the norm.
What in August of 1990 appeared as a strategic crisis specific to Israel’s position in the Middle East has, over the coming decades, become the state of world affairs where the hesitant United States is challenged from multiple directions. Now, every country is trying to emulate Israel’s policy of relative self-sufficiency and strategic freedom, from tiny Azerbaijan to the most populous, India.
Israel must continue maintaining its independent qualitative edge. History is not a sprint but a marathon where every section is run as a sprint. Iran’s supreme leader. Ali Khamenei, the man who proclaimed Israel’s eradication as the most important of his goals and dedicated his life to the destruction of the Jewish state, is dead.
The supreme leader thought he was invincible, but he was a lazy thinker. He did not do his homework; Israel, on the other hand, did.
The author lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. He is a founding member of San Francisco Voice for Israel.