What guides states in their foreign policy against enemies is, at its base, their understanding of those enemies – of who they are, what is important to them, what drives their operations, what inspires them, and what their goals are.
Israel and the United States, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump, respectively, announced victory over the Iranian regime after a 12-day war over the last two weeks, saying that the immediate threat of nuclear missiles had been destroyed.
Although Netanyahu has been warning against the threat the Iranian regime poses for about four decades now, and the Israel Air Force completed an amazing and impressive operation, the attack on the Fordow nuclear site was carried out by the Americans.
How they understood and understand the Iranian regime shaped their foreign policy, had a hand in the war, and will continue to shape the region, with ripple effects to the Iranian people under the regime, as well as to Israelis and Palestinians.
Dr. David Wurmser, an American foreign policy specialist with a storied history in the US defense and diplomacy establishment, is a fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, he explained how, ultimately and through the years, American foreign policy on Iran, though it changed, was inaccurate, and that the mistakes are because the US doesn’t understand the Iranian regime at all.
Wurmser served as the Middle East adviser to former US vice president Dick Cheney in the administration of former US president George W. Bush.
America’s foreign policy doctrine
US policy “has consistently been that we can’t let Iran get a nuclear weapon. In that sense, it’s always been aligned with Israel’s foreign policy,” he said.
But the question of approach, of how to avoid that, split into different schools for a long time, and “those elements cause great variations between the administrations.”
Wurmser was a senior adviser to Cheney from 2003 to 2007 on the Middle East, proliferation, and strategic affairs.
He cited that administration, which was in power from 2001 to 2009, as an example. It “was fairly straightforward in saying [that] Iran can’t get a nuclear weapon - and tried, through diplomacy, to hamstring the Iranian regime so that major components of the program couldn’t advance.”
These included pushes by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and eventually United Nations resolutions, that were aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear aspirations. Sanctions were placed as well “to deny them the means to pursue various programs.”
By contrast, he explained, the Obama administration, from 2009 to 2017, “went in a completely different direction: Rather than dealing, front and center, with the nuclear program, they thought that shaping the Iranian government into a more favorable structure would be the best way to control their nuclear ambitions.”
The way Wurmser sees it, the Obama administration “wrote off any real aggressive policy to constrain the nuclear programs of Iran or North Korea, because [former US president Barack Obama] ultimately saw them as reactionary to the American, Russian, French, British, and Chinese nuclear programs.”
What Obama did was to “cast the real stopping of Iran’s nuclear program through a set of incentives,” emerging from the concept of global denuclearization - the long-term goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons worldwide - to reduce the threat of nuclear war and promote global stability.
“He felt that America needs to embark on policies that comfort the Iranian regime, to prove to them we are not their enemy.”
The American foreign policy specialist noted that Iranian hatred toward America did have some legitimacy. For decades, the US strongly supported the monarchy of shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran.
This was eventually toppled by a popular uprising – the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which birthed today’s oppressive regime.
The outlook of the Obama administration was, “If the United States [were to double] its effort to both encourage and validate [the] moderates through agreements and reduce threats, they could shape the Iranian government to reduce their desire to produce a nuclear weapon.”
The approach was to “instill good faith in your enemy.” On the global scale, this meant denuclearization on the immediate scale by “allaying Iranian fears that we [the US] are their enemy.”
The second approach
This changed during President Trump’s first term, from 2017 to 2021, when “there was a feeling that Iran was inherently hostile,” and that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed in 2015, in which Iran agreed to curb its nuclear activities in return for having international sanctions lifted, “was weak and actually provided a glide path for Iran to acquire the final capabilities for breakout.”
Trump took the JCPOA off the table by withdrawing America from it in 2018, asserting that the agreement is “ultimately a legitimization of Iran’s cheating.”
Wurmser added that, “As far as allaying Iran’s fears, Trump understood it quite differently: He understood that Iran wasn’t operating out of some deep sense of grievance towards the US, but that it was operating out of a sense of American weakness,” and that it could feed on that and challenge it.
He credited this to the fact that Trump “grew up and reached political maturity and involvement roughly [around] the time of the US Embassy takeover in Tehran.” Angry about American support for the shah, whom the US helped rise to power in a CIA-backed coup in 1953, a group of Iranian students stormed the US Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, and took 52 American diplomats and staff hostage. This crisis lasted 444 days.
Trump also grew up around the time of the Vietnam War, “which is why he doesn’t like endless wars, but he also remembers very well the embassy takeover, and he understands that the Iranian regime – from day one – has been inherently hostile.”
What this policy pushed to the front lines was a choice for the Iranian regime: “Choosing the welfare of their country, or at least the welfare of their regime, over nuclear ambitions.”
By the end of Trump’s first term, the regime was “restless and beginning to get into a rebellious state.
It was nearly out of resources due to sanctions, and was unable to fund the other crown jewel of its regional aggressive strategy: the ring of fire around Israel.
“The Trump administration thought that leverage was the way to begin to constrict the program; if it led to the destabilization of the regime, that was okay, too,” he explained.
Most importantly, though, Trump’s approach denied, or at least stalled, the impending, immediate, tangible threat. Reversing the Obama approach brought renewed confidence “that Iran could be brought back around into a new deal if the US would solve the Palestinian issue and essentially show the Iranian regime how serious it is about reintegrating them into the international system, if not even having them as a partner in regional stabilization.
The seminal date: October 7, 2023
When Hamas led the brutal cross-border massacre attack from the Gaza Strip against Israel on October 7, 2023, triggering the Israel-Hamas War and launching the region into intense clashes, “you started seeing a fundamental divide between the US and Israel,” under former president Joe Biden, who was in office from 2009 to 2017.
“For Israel, October 7 was the watershed where the Iranian problem became acute, urgent and active, as [Jerusalem] entered a direct war with Iran… the backer and the ultimate invader.” Hamas is its proxy, “but Iran was deeply involved and this was a structure Iran had set up deliberately to do exactly that… toward the active phase of destroying Israel once and for all.”
Once Israel realized this, the Palestinian issue was essentially put on hold and the Iranian issue essentially became the primary one, Wurmser explained. “It was even said by the Israeli government at the time that this war may have begun in Gaza but it ends in Iran: that essentially this is now a twilight struggle to the death.”
The US, on the other hand, saw it as a localized Palestinian issue, “in part triggered by the frustration of Palestinians. So, it raised the importance of solving that, of the Palestinian Authority, and believed that it needed to even more aggressively engage Iranians to find and encourage the moderates, because ultimately they were the only mechanism to help partner with America to stabilize” the proxy groups, like Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, or the groups in Iraq.
Washington “didn’t see Iran directly controlling them,” rather it saw them as, “essentially, forces operating independently that only Iran could rein in.”
America’s efforts then shifted to ask how this reigning in can be done.
One option was cooperating with Iran, manifesting in several ways.
One of them was to push for Israel to not occupy the Gaza Strip, which would be the nail in the coffin of a prospective Palestinian state. “In the American mind,” Wurmser explained, “the creation of a Palestinian state was the only path to solve the Palestinian issue, a prerequisite for reducing the Iranian threat.”
Another route was “the restraint that America imposed on Israel” in responding to direct Iranian strikes.
When the Israel-Hamas War broke out, “America gave Israel a bear hug,” sending “tremendous amounts of assistance as well as moral support.”
But, he said, “the US’s primary concern at that point was that Israel would go crazy and lash out at Hezbollah and Iran in a final, decisive way, which would eliminate the American ability to come to terms with Iranian moderates and bring in Iran as a force for stabilization.”
“At that point,” the security and foreign affairs researcher said, “while Israel thought that it was getting full support, [that full support] actually expressed the deeper American strategic intention of keeping Israel from engaging, and ultimately winning, the regional strategic twilight struggle between Iran and Israel.”
That strategic momentum had been against Israel, he explained, because, before October 7, Jerusalem was restrained in its ability to reverse it by directly striking Iran.
This all changed in October 2024, when, in three waves of strikes against 20 locations in Iran, Iraq and Syria, Israel carried out the largest attack against Tehran since the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.
These attacks humiliated Iran, Wurmser explained, but more than that, it exposed the regime’s limitations. “Thirty years of apocalyptic scenarios spun by various elites in Washington were proven to be hollow and wrong: Iran really did have limited responses and resources, and was as afraid as anybody [else].
“It stomached the humiliation that Israel imposed on it because it knew any response it would do would actually deepen the exposure of its weakness.”
And, America feared losing its relevance in this fight, which is what Trump tried to leverage again, “to return first to the formula: Build leverage to establish American power, and leverage that power to force the Iranians.”
The Trump administration “didn’t see a link between the Palestinian and Iranian issues, like the Biden administration,” did, but it was interested in restraining Iran to stifle its program and bring it again to the brink of that choice between its regime and its nuclear aspirations.
This was the situation until Israel struck Iran on June 13, when Iran made its choice clear: that it wasn’t going to give up, “no matter what the price.”
The mirror of reality
This marked the beginning of a reality check for the Trump administration, Wurmser said, where it asserted that “there will be a breaking point, at which point the Iranian regime will surrender its nuclear program.” The regime, by contrast, “hearkened back to Quranic memory,” Wurmser suggested as a framework of understanding.
The Quran tells of the Battle of the Trench, in which the city of Medina was put under siege in 627 CE by Arab tribes and Meccan forces whose goal was to eliminate the fledgling Muslim community.
The Prophet Muhammad dug a trench around a part of the city that was exposed to prevent a full-scale attack. The trench held for the two-week siege, and the attackers eventually pulled back. Symbolically, this highlights the power of faith, unity, and strategy.
This battle “was to be a test of faith: the worse it got for Muhammad’s forces, the more grumbling and desertion there was. As a test of faith, only true believers would stick to the bitter end.”
“In my view, that is what you’re seeing with the Iranian regime: They believe that any concession whatsoever, even utter destruction, is the final test of faith, which leads to the final showdown where they must assert their full, complete blind faith in Allah. Otherwise, if they show any doubt and sign a deal, they truly are not fully faithful and they really, truly will lose. Why would they?”
So, the American administrations misunderstood the enemy, he explained. Even under the JCPOA, “Iran never came clean… they weren’t restrained by it - they were enabled by it.”
The Biden approach was “that you really can’t stop Iran from getting a bomb, all you can do is create a context in which they’re incentivized not to want to pursue it.”
Can Iranian terror be stemmed?
After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Wurmser was appointed to a two-person Pentagon intel unit, searching for a link between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government. The Global War on Terror began soon after as “a comprehensive plan to seek out and stop terrorists around the world,” per the US National Archives.
These included the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but was also a blanket term to tamper with the cash flow that provided a safe harbor for terrorists.
“The US made some serious mistakes during the Iraq War, the largest being the goal to destroy the Iranian and Iraqi regimes, that we would occupy Iraq, and then engage in nation-building,” he explained.
The idea was to rebuild Iraq in the long-term, but what American presence actually led to was that “we were neither here nor there, which delegitimized the idea of regime changing.”
The larger delegitimization that took place though, as Wurmser sees it, “is in the idea of mass American presence in a war of nation building.” Israel, for example, does not have the power to truly change the Iranian regime from the inside, and though the US might have it, “it should in no way become the agent of changing Iran’s regime.”
“Only the Iranians can change the Iranian regime,” he said. “All America and Israel can do, and in this case specifically Israel - because American involvement was limited - is to destabilize the regime” to halt its nuclear missile program. “In order to do that, you destroy command and control… the functioning capacity of the Iranian government, which in parallel also destroys its repressive and governing capacities.”
He added that while it presumably wasn’t Israel’s intent to have Iran inherently destabilized, “it was recognized as a possible and desirable byproduct to hand the Iranian people a shot at taking back their own country. The assumption is they do want it, and that whatever emerges afterwards is going to be better than what we have now.”
So far, the flimsy ceasefire between Israel and Iran seems to be holding, but things can change fast, and the window of opportunity to overthrow the regime could expand again.
Wurmser said he believed this narrow time window would exist until the last bullet was fired, because then the regime would turn “its residual power and its unbridled brutality against the Iranian people to reestablish authority and a sense of terror, to reestablish a sense of confidence and omnipotence. I think we are looking at an absolutely horrific slaughter of the Iranian people.” As long as the war continues, the Iranian people have a shot, but the chaos makes it impossible.
“My bet, as the shock wears off, is where the opposition [may] emerge internally in Iran, not externally. They are very capable; the opposition will find its way. The Iranian people have had it with their regime and want a better future,” he said.
Netanyahu, who was lauded across the political spectrum for what is widely seen as a success, first became premier in 1996. That year, Wurmser authored a memo titled, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”
Written in the shadow of the Oslo Accords, it advocated for pre-emptive strikes against Iran and Syria, removing Saddam Hussein from Iraq, and moving away from the “land for peace” doctrine with the Palestinians.
Largely though, Wurmser explained to the Post, it pushed for Israel to recognize its own power.
“The whole theme of that clean break was that Israel must begin to realize it is a regional power, no longer clinging by its teeth following the Holocaust, at the edge of the Mediterranean, always living by the indulgence of the West.” It had become a real power, a real player in the Middle Eastern world, and as such, it also increased its utility as a key American ally, he explained.
Once the Soviet Union’s fog of power over the Middle East began to lift after it fell in 1989, Israel could “really begin to define the region in a way that secures its future and strategically changes the regional balance, but also makes it an indispensable part of the American regional architecture.”
But, he continued, this had to be balanced with Arab interests. “To do that, Israel had to act more independently and reassert its original Zionist principles of defending itself by itself.” These were the factors that led to the memo.
However, Wurmser said, “the whole theme of that clean break has been inverted by people for their own agenda.”
In the best-case scenario that the Iranian regime is defeated, the Palestinian issue will remain, because it exists not just in the realm of being led by an Iranian proxy, but in the local plane of independence and national identity.
Wurmser said he believes that returning to the starting point of Oslo is the best path forward, though not to its framework.
“The Palestinian issue had become so intertwined with the global radical attack on the idea of the West, making Israel truly the vanguard issue for global radicalism. As a result, any validation of Palestinian statehood, any weakening or delegitimization of Israel through the Palestinian issue was inherently a weakening of the West - in its strength as a whole,” he explained.
“After 1982, the Palestinian Liberation Organization [the partner in the Oslo Accords] was on its deathbed, along with the collapse of Soviet [regional support]. The West suddenly began to look strong.”
For the radical camp though, “what it did was it essentially provided the lifevest,” because by 1989, the Palestinian issue became the vanguard issue - “much more important than anything to do with Israel and the Palestinians, and everything to do with the global attack on the West.”
These days, with the idea of Palestinian nationhood being so tied up with “the global attack on the West” keep it in the same challenging place? Only time will reveal if it can be separated.