以色列从伊朗战争中想要什么？这与美国的诉求有何不同？

What does Israel want from the Iran war? Is it different from what the US wants?

2026-03-16T21:49:39.194Z / CNN

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The US and Israel attacked Iran together at the same time. But as the war drags into its third week, it is becoming clear the two countries have some differences in how they see the war proceeding.

In order to better understand what Israel wants from the war compared with what we know about what the Trump administration wants, I spoke with Daniel Shapiro, an Atlantic Council fellow who was US ambassador to Israel during the Obama administration and was deputy assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle East policy during the Biden administration.

Our phone conversation, edited for length and style, is below.

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Do Israel and the US have the same objectives in the war as we’ve seen it play out so far?

SHAPIRO: Israel and the US have a number of overlapping objectives, but there is some divergence, and probably an increasing divergence of those objectives as time passes.

Both countries are clearly focused on degrading Iran’s ability to project power and threaten its neighbors. They have focused on degrading Iran’s air defense capabilities, its ballistic missile stocks and launchers and production capability, same for its drones, its navy and what remains of any kind of air force assets.

Another area of common concern is the nuclear program and ensuring that Iran does not regain access or make use of the access that it has to its highly enriched uranium, and to try to presume enrichment and potentially try to create the material for a nuclear weapon.

SHAPIRO: Both the US and Israel also have, at different times, in different ways, expressed hope the Iranian regime could be weakened to the point where it might fall or the Iranian people might rise up and overthrow it.

Although the president in the early days of the war spoke about his hope that the regime’s overthrow would be approaching, he has de-emphasized that in recent days.

SHAPIRO:So we have the real question about whether this is a regime change war. And I think there’s no question that Israel would like to continue to prosecute the campaign and does hope that it will lead to the end of the regime, and for understandable reasons. They face an implacable enemy sworn to their destruction through decades of sponsoring terrorist organizations that have the blood of many Israelis on their hands, building nuclear capabilities and ballistic missile capabilities to try to carry out that vision. For Israelis, seeing a weakened Iran in a moment that they might be able to lead to that change that reality is very understandable.

SHAPIRO: But the United States has its own history of regime change wars, which the president has spoken against and which most Americans don’t support.

There is the risk that a war that goes on for many more weeks or even longer could be highly costly to US blood and treasure, and in the form of a global economic crisis — which we are not yet in, but perhaps on the cusp of. It could certainly happen. The way it would degrade US military resources, that could harm our strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific and in Europe, simply because we’ve expended so much of our capability in the Middle East.

Regime change would affect Israel and the US differently

SHAPIRO: So I do see a divergence of interests in this conflict as time goes by, and even if the regime were to fall, there are different ways that scenario would affect each country. The United States would be forced to deal with the fallout of a chaotic scenario after the regime fell, potentially a civil war within Iran, potentially spillover instability that affects neighbors, potentially migration flows that could destabilize Europe and Gulf allies. While the United States could be sucked into dealing with all of those problems, Israel would be very satisfied to see the end of the regime and would be less concerned.

Are the US and Israel on the same timeline in the war?

SHAPIRO: I think the Israelis will want to continue longer because they will want to continue to weaken the regime and even hope that it will actually fall.

President Donald Trump has been very inconsistent and unclear about what his objectives are and therefore how long it will take to achieve. It’s getting more complicated as the Strait of Hormuz crisis develops.

It’s possible President Trump could claim victory immediately, today, by citing the significant degradation of all those Iranian power projection capabilities. But it’s not certain if he were to declare a ceasefire that Iran would cease fire. They might continue to launch drones into the Gulf or missiles at Israel and they might continue to harass ships in the Strait of Hormuz until they were satisfied that there were terms that they could live with.

It’s definitely possible that President Trump will reach a point, much sooner than the Israelis would like, where he would try to bring this to an end. Whether he’d be successful in doing that is a different question, but I do think those timelines are probably divergent.

SHAPIRO: There’s one more piece, which is that Israel has a related but separate agenda in Lebanon, where Hezbollah has attacked Israel since the war in Iran started. The Lebanese government and the Lebanese armed forces have not fulfilled their commitments under the 2024 ceasefire to disarm Hezbollah. And so (Israel is) clearly intent on an ulterior campaign to try to do significantly more damage to Hezbollah and possibly use that campaign as leverage to spur a diplomatic process that would get the Lebanese government — perhaps to recognize Israel, but also to step up to its responsibilities to disarm Hezbollah.

This is not of the same level of priority for US interests, although obviously it wants to see Hezbollah disarmed. But I suspect President Trump will not object if Israel continues to pursue some activity in Lebanon, even if there is a ceasefire in Iran. As for when the ceasefire with Iran comes — once President Trump decides that this campaign is over, I don’t think Israel will be able to continue it in Iran in the same way it’s being conducted now, as long as the Iranians are standing down.

SHAPIRO:This is a very integrated campaign with an extraordinary level of coordination between Israel and the US. Even if Israel wanted to continue, it would have to adjust its operations to account for the fact it wasn’t operating in the same way alongside the United States.

But I suspect even more than that there would be a political reality where if President Trump says, “We’re ending,” Prime Minister Netanyahu is not in a position to defy him and say, “Sorry, we are going to continue this war.”

There will almost certainly still be Iranian threats and capabilities to be dealt with. Of course the nuclear threat is its own issue. But I could imagine Israel shifting into what it’s called in other arenas its “mow the grass” strategy, where periodically it engages militarily to suppress a threat, to manage it, to keep it at bay, without being in the same kind of sustained combat that they’re in at the moment.

SHAPIRO: I don’t think there’s any request from Israel for US military involvement in Lebanon and frankly no need. In Iran, the size of the country and each military having its own areas of specialization and unique capabilities, there was a certain synergy to the combined nature of this campaign. But what Israel wants to achieve in Lebanon, it can largely do on its own.

SHAPIRO:Well, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not doing a great deal of discussion with the Israeli people. Maybe he’s held one press conference and done a few videos. It’s quite limited. Of course, there is broad support among the Israeli public for the war. All Israelis have lived with this really unacceptable reality for many decades of a major country in the region calling for its destruction and using terrorists and weapons buildups to try to achieve that. And they’re sick of it. So he may not need to use the bully pulpit, as it were.

There may be questions among Israelis about whether a ground campaign in Lebanon is the right thing after two-and-a-half years of a very exhausting period of conflict post-October 7. But at least as far as the Iran conflict goes, it has broad support.

SHAPIRO:President Trump is in a different situation. He, of course, has not engaged the American public in the way previous presidents have done before a major military commitment, with an Oval Office address and going to Congress and seeking support and explaining in some detail why we are engaged in this conflict, what the strategy is, what the objectives are, and how we’ll know when we succeeded.

Instead, he, like he always does, talks more or less nonstop to reporters, but he’s saying many very inconsistent things. Despite him having a lot more to say, I don’t think it’s done much to alleviate the confusion a lot of Americans are feeling about why we’re doing this, and frankly, we’re seeing an unusually low degree of public support for a major military conflict — in part because it’s a regime change war of choice in the Middle East. At least, that’s how it looks.

(Also) in part because it appears to be metastasizing and potentially creating major economic hardships for the global economy and for Americans in their own pocketbooks. And in part, obviously, because of the loss of life already of American service members. But mostly because no one has explained why we’re doing this.

SHAPIRO: I think Israelis are generally more willing to tolerate those kinds of disruptions in order to try to keep their biggest enemy weaker and less able to attack them, and more generally, they don’t have the same global reach or global responsibilities. Those kinds of global disruptions are of lesser concern to a small country that is really attending to its core security needs. Remember, most Israelis are hearing sirens several times a day and being forced to go spend time in shelters as ballistic missiles are shot at them, so they’re willing to tolerate a lot to bring that kind of threat to an end.

SHAPIRO: In general, there was probably an overly optimistic assessment by both Israel and the United States that the decapitation of the regime by killing the ayatollah and a number of other senior leaders on the first day, and then sustained pressure against many regime targets and power protection targets, could produce a crumbling effect of the regime, and also could inspire the Iranian people to return to the streets and put pressure on the regime internally. That was a shared overly optimistic assessment. And with that, probably there was a shared insufficient appreciation for how even a very weakened Iran still has cards to play.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, that’s something that the US military has planned for for decades, because it’s always been known that it was a potential Iranian strategy in moments of crisis.

So it’s not a new idea, but there was none of the political and diplomatic preparation that there should have been and that you would have expected if the United States saw that as realistic.

We’re seeing that now, as President Trump is calling on or insisting, and maybe even threatening NATO nations to send ships to help police the strait. It’s rather late to go to those allies, who were not consulted in any respect before the campaign began, and insist that they play this role, and, of course, after stoking tensions with them in many other ways, and imposing tariffs on them, etc., over the last year.

It speaks to a certain lack of realistic preparation for what options Iran had, even though they’re the weaker party, to cause pain, play some cards, perhaps even extend the conflict because they see that they’ve already endured most of the pain they will endure through the heavy air strikes, and that a longer campaign actually gives them more leverage and more opportunity to impose pain in the other direction.

SHAPIRO: I mentioned the different perspective of a small country like Israel addressing its most challenging regional threats, and the United States being a country with global interests and global responsibilities. Something that Israelis are going to be less likely to take into account in their calculation is, what would an extended conflict mean for US strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific and in Europe? How are China and Russia already, in some ways, benefiting strategically from this conflict?

If it goes for a long period of time, what if US resources — air defense resources, ship time afloat and extended maintenance schedules, extending munitions that are then therefore not available — what would that mean for the US ability to compete with China in the Pacific, to protect Taiwan, to protect other allies? What does it mean that Russia is benefiting from $100 a barrel oil, maybe higher, in terms of addressing its economic crisis and refueling its war machine for perhaps a much longer war in Ukraine? What does it mean that there may not be air defense assets for the Europeans to purchase for Ukraine, because they’ve all been used and it takes so long to produce new ones?

And those are things that affect the United States’ interests in ways they just don’t affect Israeli interests. And so we’re obviously going to approach those differently.