Smoke rises from a location allegedly targeted in Israel’s wave of strikes on Tehran, Iran, on early morning of June 13, 2025. (Photo by SAN/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)
By Ron Kampeas
June 13, 2025
The last time Israel hit Iranian targets, in October 2024, the White House expressed understanding and conveyed that the attack had been coordinated.
This time, the statement issued by the U.S. secretary of state in the immediate aftermath of the attacks smacked of distancing.
“Tonight, Israel took unilateral action against Iran,” Marco Rubio said late Thursday in a statement.
“We are not involved in strikes against Iran and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region,” he said. “Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defense. President Trump and the Administration have taken all necessary steps to protect our forces and remain in close contact with our regional partners. Let me be clear: Iran should not target U.S. interests or personnel.”
The differences between the two responses underscore a question that has loomed since Donald Trump retook the White House in January: Will he come to Israel’s defense as Joe Biden did?
That question became pressing on Friday morning as Iran sent drones toward Israel in the first wave of its anticipated response. The IDF said it was successfully shooting down the drones.
Trump said shortly beforehand that the United States would respond to protect its own interests and Israel if Iran retaliated. Israeli officials said they believed that the United States was working to reform a coalition that helped defend Israel against Iranian missiles last year. But both the terms and tenor of the response were starkly different.
Back in October, Israel was planning a retaliatory attack after Iran sent missiles toward Israel, which U.S. forces helped knock out of the air. As signs of an imminent Israeli attack heightened, the Biden Pentagon posted photos of combat aircraft landing in Germany, and John Kirby, then the National Security Council spokesman, addressed them during a press conference.
“Our commitment to Israel’s security remains ironclad, and that means, as appropriate, making force changes posture that we think need to be made to help Israel defend itself,” Kirby said then.
After the attack, a senior Biden official made clear that the United States was not directly involved and warned Iran not to retaliate against U.S. targets — but the official also said that the Biden White House was pleased with Israel’s action. Instead of declaring Israel’s attack “unilateral,” the official emphasized coordination.
“The president and his national security team, of course, worked with the Israelis over recent weeks to encourage Israel to conduct a response that was targeted and proportional with low risk of civilian harm, and that appears to have been precisely what transpired this evening,” the official said then.
Trump offered little in the way of support before or after Israel’s attack on Iranian nuclear sites early Friday morning.
Beforehand, he conveyed openly that he did not want it to happen. He began pulling personnel out of the region, not sending them in.
“As long as I think there is [the prospect of] an agreement, I don’t want them going in because that would blow it,” Trump told reporters at the White House hours before the attack, referring to his negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.
Hours before the attack, he reiterated the position. “We remain committed to a Diplomatic Resolution to the Iran Nuclear Issue!” Trump said on Truth Social, the social media platform he owns, hours before Israel launched the attacks. “My entire Administration has been directed to negotiate with Iran.”
Even after the attack, he said he hoped Iran would return to the negotiating table.
The situations were different in key ways: October’s attack was a retaliation, and Friday’s was preemptive. Biden asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to target nuclear sites or oil refineries to avoid an escalation, and Netanyahu complied. Timing was also key: Vice President Kamala Harris, days away from an election in October, was eager to tamp down questions about her commitment to Israel.
Perhaps the biggest change, however, is in who occupies the White House. The Israelis preferred Trump in last year’s U.S. election, believing him to be a stauncher ally as support for Israel appeared to be on the declined in the Democratic Party.
Netanyahu started the second Trump presidency projecting public confidence in his belief that Trump would get out of his way in a way that Biden, who sought to moderate Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war, would not.
“When Israel and the United States don’t work together, that creates problems,” Netanyahu said in February at his first meeting with Trump this presidency. “When the other side sees daylight between us — and occasionally, in the last few years, to put it mildly, they saw daylight, then it’s more difficult.”
Such barely veiled digs at Biden infuriated Biden administration alumni. Biden flew to Israel in the days after Hamas massacred Israels on Oct. 7, 2023 – the first president who visited Israel in war time. He stood by the country as increasing numbers of Democrats recoiled at Israel’s war conduct.
Trump appears to have given Netanyahu much of the carte blanche in Gaza he had sought from Biden. But Iran is a different story.
Insiders recognized prior to the election that Trump’s famous fickleness and aversion to war could pose challenges for Israel, and signs of daylight between Trump and Netanyahu have piled up in the five months since Trump reentered the White House.
Netanyahu was visibly taken aback on April 7 at his second Oval Office meeting with Trump, when the president announced, “We’re having direct talks with Iran,” which were to commence a few days hence.
Trump loathes intervention: The Gaza conflict is one Israel can handle by itself. War with Iran, with multiple U.S. interests in the region susceptible to Iranian attack and with Israel’s expectation of U.S. backing, is not in his playbook.
Shira Efron, the research director of the Israel Policy Forum who has advised a number of Israeli ministries, said in an interview before the attacks that Israeli officials have genuinely been taken aback by Trump’s coolness on the Iran issue.
“This was the sentiment here when Trump was elected, when Netanyahu visited, when he came back from Washington visit number one,” she said. “I mean, this whole thing was like, ‘Oh, the Americans are with us, and that’s it. We’re going to do whatever we want.’ And slowly, we’re seeing that it’s not necessarily happening,”
Israeli officials would have been wiser to pay attention to how markedly different the second Trump presidency was from the first, Efron said. Gone were the hawks who guided his hand then, and those hawks who made it in this time around were out within months, chief among them his national security adviser, Mike Waltz. One factor in Waltz’s removal was a report — denied by Waltz — that he was coordinating closely with Netanyahu on Iran.
“Others who have listened carefully to what Trump said and to trends in the United States and MAGA, and clearly this idea that they don’t want a war,” she said. Trump’s vice president, J.D. Vance, is an isolationist. His director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, this week posted reminiscences of a visit to Hiroshima, the Japanese city devastated by a U.S. bomb widely believed to have ended World War II, with a thinly veiled warning.
“Warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers,” she said.
Tucker Carlson, who is close to Trump’s son, Donald Jr., and who has advised Trump on hiring, last week took aim at his fellow broadcaster, Mark Levin, who has been outspoken in advocating against any diplomatic concessions to Iran.
“Why is Mark Levin once again hyperventilating about weapons of mass destruction?” Carlson said on June 4 on X. “To distract you from the real goal, which is regime change — young Americans heading back to the Middle East to topple yet another government.”
Pro-Israel Trump acolytes say they believe he will at the end of the day stick by the country, recalling his far-reaching Israel policies in his first term: moving the embassy to Jerusalem recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, freezing out the Palestinians and pulling out of the first Iran nuclear deal.
“Trump has never identified with the isolationists,” Levin said on X just hours before Israel launched strikes. “Their projection changes nothing. He said repeatedly Iran must never get a nuclear weapon. Those who voted for him heard him. He was and is abundantly clear. What did the isolationists think he meant? He’s not one of them. He never has been. His first term further demonstrated this.”
But other Israel-watchers said Trump, who has clashed over the years with Netanyahu, whom he does not see as sufficiently loyal, could turn on Israel in a way Biden, with his decades of affection for the country, never would. Republican support for Israel is falling, polls show, but that might not even matter.
“For Trump, alliances really mean nothing,” said Barbara Slavin, a fellow at the Stimson Center who has written extensively on the U.S.-Iran relationship. “He has always seen Israel as a tool, for his own interests, political and otherwise.”
Trump is no longer seeking reelection, she said. “He doesn’t need Israel anymore, you know, he really doesn’t.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
