The Actual Reason America Didn't Attack Iran

U.S. President Donald Trump promised the Iranian people that "help is on its way" — but the reality proved entirely different for reasons few people truly understand.

A U.S. Air Force plane in the Middle East (photo: U.S. Central Command/X)

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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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The most dangerous mistake people make when consuming news media, whether local or international, is believing that what they are being told is why events happened.

We are told that affairs are governed by rules, norms, and values. That nations act out of principle. That leaders are constrained by “international law,” humanitarian concern, and the moral outrage of the global community. When visible military action is avoided, we are invited to believe it is because compassion prevailed. When action is taken, we are assured it was reluctant, tragic, and unavoidable.

This is idealism, and it is almost always a smokescreen.

The events surrounding Israel, Iran, and recent reports that the United States was on the verge of taking military action against the Islamic Republic — amid Tehran’s extraordinarily violent crackdown on domestic protests — offer a near-perfect case study in the difference between how the world is narrated and how it actually operates.

According to the public-facing narrative, America’s decision not to strike Iran was framed in moral terms. President Donald Trump suggested that Iran’s alleged decision to cancel the planned execution of hundreds of protesters (figures as high as 800 were floated) played a decisive role in halting an American attack. The implication was clear: Restraint won, humanitarian concern mattered, moral pressure worked.

This story is emotionally satisfying. It reassures Western audiences that cruelty can be deterred by conscience, and that global power is still exercised with a moral compass.

But it is almost certainly untrue. The real explanation is far more cynical, and far more consistent with how the Middle East (and, by extension, much of the world) actually functions: what’s known as “realpolitik.”

Realpolitik is not about good and evil. It is about interests, leverage, risk, and power balances. And in this case, the most decisive factor was not Iranian mercy, but Arab fear. Saudi Arabia did not want its airspace used for a strike on Iran. Neither did Qatar. This was not an act of solidarity with the Iranian people, nor an endorsement of the regime’s brutality; it was self-preservation.

A U.S. or Israeli strike on Iran would almost certainly have triggered retaliation (directly or via proxies) against Saudi oil infrastructure, Gulf shipping lanes, energy facilities, and civilian targets. Riyadh has lived this reality before. It knows how vulnerable it is. So does Doha.

But the calculus goes deeper than fear of retaliation. Neither Saudi Arabia nor Qatar has any interest in a post-regime Iran that is stable, democratic, and outward-looking. As Amit Segal, one of Israel’s leading political commentators, wrote:

“Qatar is like a law firm that thrives on conflict — happy endings are bad for business. When the fight is between Hamas and Israel, they’re the mediators. And when it’s between the West and Iran, they’re still the mediators. Besides a sympathy born out of hatred for Israel and similar Islamist tendencies, they simply don’t want to see their role shoved into irrelevance by a thriving Iran.”¹

Should the current Iranian regime fall, a reformed Iran (which is no guarantee) would not be a weakened Iran; it would be reinvigorated. It would likely normalize relations with Israel, which was the case prior to the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s. In fact, after the modern State of Israel’s 1948 founding, Iran and the Jewish state began a period of quiet, pragmatic cooperation under Iran’s pro-Western Shah, viewing each other as strategic allies against shared threats.

A renewed Iranian-Israeli partnership would surely increase Israel’s leverage. Together, both countries would share strategic interests: countering jihadist movements, stabilizing trade routes, integrating into global markets, and reducing sectarian conflict.

In general, Iran could become one of the most powerful and legitimate states in the region — geopolitically, economically, demographically, and diplomatically. Authoritarian systems do not fear chaos alone; they fear competition, especially competition rooted in legitimacy. A brutal, isolated, sanctioned Iran is relatively predictable, while a reformed Iran is not.

Perhaps more than anything, a reformed Iran could upend the carefully managed balance of power that Arab regimes rely on to maintain internal control and regional relevance, because the current Iranian protests would present a serious example to other Middle Eastern populations: proof that public anti-government demonstrations can bring down autocratic, corrupted regimes (of which there is no shortage in the region).

So, while public statements may express concern for Iranian protesters, the private calculations are clear: Better the devil you know than a burgeoning rival you don’t. This is realpolitik.

Israel, more than most countries, understands this reality. It has no luxury of believing in fairy tales about idealism. Its existence has always depended on understanding power as it is, not as it is portrayed in Disney movies. Israelis also know that many of the same states condemning Iranian brutality have no interest in seeing Iranians free, if that freedom reshapes the regional order in Israel’s favor. This is not cynicism; it is survival instincts.

So-called “international law” offers us a great example. In theory, international law exists to restrain violence and protect the vulnerable. In practice, it has always functioned as a political instrument — created by powerful states, enforced selectively, and weaponized unevenly.

International law assumes something that has never existed: a world in which all actors agree to play by the same rules. Laws work inside, say, Western states because the vast majority of society agrees on the rules, the rules are regularly enforced, and formidable enforcement mechanisms have long been in place. Courts have power because someone can enforce their rulings. Police exist. Prisons exist. Consequences are real and unavoidable.

Of course, none of this exists at the international level. International law therefore functions only among those who already agree to be constrained by it, and collapses the moment a key player decides the rules no longer apply, creating an asymmetric battlefield. States and non-state actors that openly reject international norms — terrorist organizations, revolutionary regimes, militias, and authoritarian powers — gain an advantage over those that internalize legal and moral restraints. The more scrupulously a country follows the rules, the more predictable and vulnerable it becomes to actors who do not.

Israel routinely lives inside this asymmetry. It is judged as though it were fighting a conventional war against conventional actors, while its enemies operate outside every legal and ethical framework — embedding themselves in civilian populations, rejecting distinction between combatants and non-combatants, and openly celebrating violations that international law pretends can be deterred by condemnation alone. International law, in this context, does not restrain violence; it redistributes risk away from those who break the rules and onto those who follow them.

What’s more, the idea of “international law” assumes more than equal buy-in to the same rules; it assumes a mutual understanding of reality itself. And that is where the project breaks down.

Different civilizations do not merely disagree on policy; they disagree on first principles — on the nature of power, morality, legitimacy, and time. Consider three worldviews: the United States, China, and Iran.

The American worldview is fundamentally liberal and procedural. It assumes that rules, institutions, and norms can shape behavior over time. Power is meant to be constrained by law; legitimacy flows from consent; conflict is something to be managed, minimized, and ideally resolved. Even when the U.S. violates its own principles, it still feels the need to justify its actions within a moral and legal framework. Hypocrisy, in this sense, is not accidental; it is baked into the system.

China operates on a civilizational and hierarchical worldview. Stability outranks individual rights. Order outranks transparency. Rules are not moral absolutes but tools: useful when they reinforce strength, discardable when they do not. History is long, memory is deep, and patience is strategic. International law, to China, is not sacred; it is instrumental. It is something to be shaped, bent, or ignored depending on whether it serves national rejuvenation and regime continuity.

Iran’s worldview is revolutionary and theological. Power is not merely political but metaphysical. History is not linear but eschatological. Compromise is not a virtue; resistance is. International rules created by secular powers are not neutral frameworks but illegitimate constructs, extensions of Western dominance meant to restrain Islamic hegemony.

Now ask yourself: How do you enforce a single legal framework across actors who disagree on the source of legitimacy, the meaning of justice, and the purpose of power itself?

Fortunately or unfortuantely, you cannot.

This is why rule-based orders fracture under pressure. It is why agreements hold only until interests diverge. And it is why states like Israel, operating in a region where multiple incompatible worldviews collide, cannot afford to confuse theoretical morality with realpolitik. (At this point, neither can much of the West.)

Rules only work when the players agree on the game. In our world, they do not. In our world, “dog eat dog” and survival of the fittest still rule the day, as they always have and as they probably always will.

At the core of every serious approach to power is a discipline older than modern politics itself: seeing reality as it is, not as we wish it to be. The Athenian historian and military general Thucydides captured this with brutal clarity in “The Peloponnesian War,” where the Athenians tell the Melians that justice only applies between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Florentine diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli would later formalize the same insight in “The Prince,” warning rulers that governing according to imagined virtue rather than actual human behavior leads not to moral purity but to ruin. Their shared lesson was not that morality is irrelevant, but that moral aspiration untethered from power produces catastrophe.

The great English philosopher Thomas Hobbes gave this realism its structural foundation. In “Leviathan,” he described life without a sovereign authority as a condition of perpetual insecurity, where agreements are meaningless without enforcement. What Hobbes understood domestically applies almost perfectly at the international level: There is no global sovereign, no monopoly on force, and no neutral authority capable of compelling compliance. International order exists only where power sustains it. When that power erodes, so do the rules. Law, in such a system, is not abolished; it is conditional.

Modern realist thinkers restated these truths in contemporary terms. German-American political scientist Hans Morgenthau argued in “Politics Among Nations” that states pursue national interest defined as power, and that moral language in foreign policy often functions as post-hoc justification rather than causal explanation. American diplomat George Kennan, reflecting on his country’s role in the world, warned that moralism in diplomacy replaces strategic clarity with emotional satisfaction — and leaves nations unprepared for adversaries who do not share their moral framework.

This distinction between morality and mechanism is central. Realism does not reject ethics; it rejects the fantasy that ethics alone determine outcomes. Jewish sources, often caricatured as purely moralistic, are in fact deeply realist on this point. The Torah never assumes a utopian world. The Talmud teaches, “If someone comes to kill you, rise early and kill him first,” a stark recognition that moral responsibility includes self-preservation. The Hebrew Bible observes that “time and chance happen to them all,” rejecting the comforting belief that righteousness guarantees security. Even the prophets, often invoked as moral absolutists, speak constantly about power, alliances, and consequence — not as ideals, but as realities to be navigated.

More recently, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks repeatedly emphasized that Judaism is not naïve about human nature. In “Not in God’s Name,” he argued that moral clarity must coexist with an unflinching understanding of violence and rivalry, or it becomes dangerous sentimentality. Israeli-American scholar Yoram Hazony, drawing from biblical political thought, argues in “The Virtue of Nationalism” that sovereign states, not universal moral empires, are the most stable framework for limiting chaos in a fractured world.

And yet, chaos persists; the world is in perpetual war. Too many people consider war to mean “boots are on the ground,” but this framing is outdated and deliberately misleading. War today is constant and multi-dimensional: It is fought through cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, economic coercion, sanctions, proxy militias, and psychological operations. It is fought via traditional media, digital and social media, financial markets, energy grids, and university campuses. It is fought without formal declarations, soldiers in uniforms, or military equipment.

By that standard, we are not living in peacetime at all; we are living inside overlapping, permanent conflicts that most people are simply not trained to recognize. The statements we see in the media are not meaningless, but they are rarely decisive. The decisive forces operate quietly, outside of the public’s view, guided not by ethics but by leverage, fear, and advantage.

That is realpolitik. The rest is mostly just noise.

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1. “It’s Noon in Israel: Why Did Israel Delay the U.S. Strike?” It’s Noon In Israel.