‘The Islamic Republic has been at war since its inception’

According to Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the US, the war in Iran didn’t really begin in February 2026, but in February 1979, with the founding of the Islamic Republic. Since then, Iran has incessantly threatened the United States and pledged to wipe Israel off the map. Indeed, since 7 October 2023, Israel has faced non-stop bombardment from Iran and its proxies. What is presented as a war of choice in the West, he argues, has long been inevitable.

Oren recently joined Brendan O’Neill on his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show, to discuss Iran, Israel and the future of the Middle East. What follows is an edited excerpt from that conversation. You can watch the full episode here.

Brendan O’Neill: It can be difficult for lay people to make heads or tails of the US-Iran war, because different sources keep telling us different things. How do you think things are progressing?

Michael Oren: Pete Hegseth – the US secretary of war, as he calls himself, not secretary of defence – announced earlier this month that America had won a stunning victory. He detailed the number of ships that had been sunk by the US Navy, the various nuclear and ballistic facilities that had been destroyed, the Iranian leaders who had been eliminated. He said that, by any definition, this is a victory and the war is over.

If you go out on to the streets of Israel – or on to any street in the Middle East – and ask whether the war is over and the US has won, I think you’d get a different response. What constitutes victory in the West is not the same as what constitutes victory in the Middle East. In the West, it is a matter of the assets, ships, tanks or even soldiers eliminated – which, of course, is important. Those of us old enough to remember the Vietnam War can remember the body counts, but North Vietnam’s reality was very similar to that in the Middle East, where all of those statistics are largely irrelevant. What matters is who is left standing at the end of the day.

Most people in Israel would say Hamas has won the war in the south. Hamas itself would certainly say it has won the war, even though 80 per cent of the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed and tens of thousands of people have been killed. All they really care about is that someone came out of one of those tunnels afterwards and declared victory. Iran has emerged from this doing more than that.

We shall have to see whether, after the negotiations, anything can be accomplished – whether the Trump administration will return to a military posture in the Middle East and the war will continue in one form or another. All we know now is what I have just told you: the Americans have their definition of victory, and people in the Middle East have another.

O’Neill: Can you see Israel making peace with a neutered Islamic Republic?

Oren: No, not with an Islamic Republic. We need to understand what the Islamic Republic is. It is, more accurately, an Islamist jihadist republic, and on a theological level it is not very different from Hamas, ISIS or the Muslim Brotherhood. It exists to recreate the medieval caliphate in the Middle East and, ultimately, to extend that across the globe. That is its raison d’être. Its modus operandi for realising that vision is terror, war and subversion. An Islamic regime that does not support terror, does not have a nuclear programme and does not build long-range ballistic missiles is simply not the same regime.

Can we make peace with Iran? Definitely – and we are desperate to make peace with the Iranian people. Just not with this particular government. We can make peace with the Palestinians, but not with Hamas. We can make peace with Syria, but not with ISIS. We can make peace with Lebanon, but not with Hezbollah. These movements don’t tend to make concessions, because concessions fly in the face of their theology – not their ideology, but theology – which is very rigid.

O’Neill: Does America have the stomach to do what many believe needs to be done in facing down the Iranian threat?

Oren: That is the central question. On the eve of America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, when I was a much younger historian, I was asked to testify before Congress about the impending invasion. It was very difficult for me, because I was with my professor at the time, who was strongly in favour, while I was against it. The reason I gave was precisely this: the British and the French already tried their hand at state-making in the Middle East, then they lost their stomach for it. They also left a mess. I said if you go into Iraq, the same thing will happen: you’ll pull out, and the Iranian border will move 800 miles towards my country, Israel. Unfortunately, that was very prophetic.

The question of whether any society has the will to stay the course is a crucial one. In this case, a large segment of the American people – the majority, according to polls – do not. Or rather, they do not see a reason why they ought to, which reflects a failure of the administration to make its case compellingly. Personally, I thought the case for going to war against Iran was, as they say in America, a ‘slam dunk’. It was the most clear-cut case I could think of. Here is a country that has declared war against the United States since the day of its inception in 1979, a government that has acted on that declaration again and again, killing many hundreds of Americans and launching thousands of attacks, each of which constitutes an act of war under international law. Here is a country that has lied about its military capabilities repeatedly. It may not have been an imminent threat at that precise moment, but neither was North Korea before it got a nuclear weapon. If you ask Bill Clinton whether he would go back and use military force to stop North Korea from getting a bomb, the answer would certainly be yes. The Trump administration should have told Americans: ‘This is an opportunity to make the world safer for your children and your grandchildren.’ But it didn’t.

In Israel, it’s a different story. We were actually being hit by missiles. Next door to where I am sitting now is my bomb shelter. I was running into it as many as 30 times a day, sheltering from missiles large enough not only to take down this building, but to take down the entire neighbourhood. Israelis have been willing to stay the course, because to us this is a once-in-a-generation – perhaps once-in-an-epoch – opportunity to bring about a strategic change in the Middle East. Whether that opportunity has now been lost remains to be seen.

Michael Oren was speaking to Brendan O’Neill. Watch the full episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show here: