Martin Jay – Strategic Culture March 4, 2026

Did Marco Rubio just admit that Israel dragged the U.S. into the war with the first strike? The whole world is just waking up and realizing that the war is based on no strategy whatsoever. How very Trump.

Churchill’s comment about history being kind to him, because it will be him (Churchill) who will write it, isn’t going to apply to Donald Trump, who is the first U.S. president to succumb to Israel goading America into a war with Iran.

Things aren’t going very well for Israel and the U.S. in the war with Iran. Even though Iran is pounded by missiles daily, it would seem that no real effect has been felt on its military infrastructure which, itself, continues to have significant success against its enemy. While the GCC countries quickly run out of U.S. air defence missiles, many of their citizens are waking up to a new reality: that many of the missiles and bombs exploding are, in fact, not even coming from Iran but have been placed by Mossad agents whose objective is to drag these countries into the war. Despite days passing now and rumours of this happening on social media, it is unlikely this will happen, though, as those leaders are afraid that Iran’s main ace – an obliteration of the oil infrastructure – has yet to be played, which would wipe out those countries’ economies within hours. And yet there is some cruel poetic justice being played out here, as those same GCC countries went to great lengths before the war kicked off to underline their lack of support, on a practical level, for Israel and the U.S. It has transpired that at least one leader, Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, did at least goad the U.S. on to go ahead with the attack. The Iranians didn’t need to read this in the British broadsheet Daily Telegraph, as their own intelligence probably tipped them off about such a discussion, but it is hardly surprising now that they still consider the GCC countries as potential enemies and retain the threat of destroying their oil fields.

The problem for Trump is not Marco Rubio admitting that it was Israel that went ahead with the Iran strikes, therefore being the one who made the decision to start the war, which makes Trump look ineffective and a junior partner in the bigger plan; it’s not even that Rubio’s comments about needing to destroy Iran’s nuclear capability make Trump’s earlier bombing fiasco in June of last year look ridiculous and present the U.S. president as a liar and a fraud. The real problem for Trump is not even the constant, repetitive nature of a chaotic communications strategy where someone like Rubio seems to be working from a different set of messages.

Trump’s real problem is two-fold. One, he is not in command, but Bibi is. And two, even if he was in command or had some influence over the outcome or the methodology, he doesn’t have a strategy. For Israel, having no strategy is not a problem, as American lives are ten a dime for the Zionists. All Bibi wants to do is to go to war with Iran, with or without a strategy, and use American money and lives in the process. The foaming-at-the-mouth zeal of these Zionists overrides reason and rationale, and by the time everyone realizes this, it’s too late. Yes, Israel showed great capability on the battlefield twice in ’67 and ’73, but that was in a regional war with only Egypt and Syria to contend with. Iran is a different case altogether, and the plain truth is that Mossad’s impressive intelligence gathering, which tracks individuals and located Iran’s leader at his home compound, has not been put to good use to work out the realities of how long the country can sustain bombing. Israel and the U.S. have seriously underestimated Iran’s military capability and overestimated their own. The fact that the U.S. is already taking THAAD and Patriot missile systems from South Korea and shipping them to the region is an indication that despite Trump talking of weeks, in reality the truth is that he was probably told by Bibi that it would all be over in a couple of days. America’s own bases in the Middle East have also proved to be woefully under-protected, and the anger by local people in many of these GCC countries that they have been left so vulnerable and that they are often victims when those bases are struck is boiling over now and giving elites there a new problem to contend with, as a political uprising is now a reality.

It would seem almost all of the planning was ill-advised in the first place and based on wishful thinking and ignorance. The greatest example of this is the assassination of the Supreme Leader. The Israelis no doubt told Trump that this would be a critical factor in the regime collapsing, but they couldn’t have been more wrong. It has galvanized support even more behind the regime to fight this war once and for all and to reset history. Iranians are tired of being a convenient enemy for successive U.S. presidents and the Zionists who don’t even follow their own script on why they want to go to war with Tehran in the first place. Of all of Trump’s blunderings in his second term, this one will be remembered for generations to come. The worry, of course, is that the same miscalculation will be mulled over for the nuclear option, probably by the Israelis first, when they see that slowly but surely Israel is being erased from the map. The astonishing takeaway from the last few days, though, is not the buffoonery of Trump but the sombre strategizing by Iran and in how much it holds back.

—

Martin Jay is an award-winning British journalist based in Morocco where he is a correspondent for The Daily Mail (UK) who previously reported on the Arab Spring there for CNN, as well as Euronews. From 2012 to 2019 he was based in Beirut where he worked for a number of international media titles including BBC, Al Jazeera, RT, DW, as well as reporting on a freelance basis for the UK’s Daily Mail, The Sunday Times plus TRT World. His career has led him to work in almost 50 countries in Africa, The Middle East and Europe for a host of major media titles. He has lived and worked in Morocco, Belgium, Kenya and Lebanon.

Source