U.S. Troops in Jordan Killed in Retaliation for American Support of Israel

When an Iraqi militant group killed three U.S. service members at a base in Jordan over the weekend, the militants were clear about their motives: It was retaliation for American support for Israel.

“As we said before, if the U.S. keeps supporting Israel, there will [be] escalations,” a senior official from an alliance of Iraqi militia groups said in claiming responsibility for the attack. “All the U.S. interests in the region are legitimate targets, and we don’t care about U.S. threats to respond.”

The statement is not new or surprising. While the need for U.S. troops to be stationed at the Tower 22 military base — a dusty outpost on the Syria–Jordan border — has a dubious, if any, relationship to U.S. national security, the U.S. presence has been very helpful to Israel. The U.S. military in the region serves to deter Iran as well as Israel’s many other enemies.

Now, establishing deterrence against Israel’s adversaries is threatening to suck the U.S. back into a broader, open conflict in the Middle East. Take, for example, the recent U.S. attacks against the Houthis in Yemen, which began after the rebels attacked ships in the Red Sea to force an Israeli ceasefire in Gaza.

Especially at a time when the U.S. is trying to pivot away from the region, Israel increasingly looks like a liability to U.S. interests in the Middle East. American officials are forced to expend significant economic, political, and military resources to shield Israel’s government from local threats and deflect international outrage over its campaign in Gaza. Israel, it turns out, extracts a tremendous cost from the U.S. — often in treasure but, as the world saw over the weekend in Jordan, sometimes in blood — with few discernable strategic gains for the Americans.

“Israel’s main selling point to its Western sponsors and allies has been its depiction as an omnipotent local gendarme, and the best bulwark of Western interests in the Middle East,” said Mouin Rabbani, a Middle East affairs expert and co-editor of the Arab Studies Institute’s online publication Jadaliyya. “But now that premise doesn’t really hold.”

Today, some Americans are questioning why the U.S. has become so deeply involved in Israel’s war on Gaza, which has inflicted a horrifying civilian toll and is now bringing U.S. troops into conflict across the region.

Yet an observer would be hard-pressed to find any acknowledgement of wavering commitment within Washington. Prominent American politicians have loudly professed the importance of Israel to U.S. strategic interests and values since October 7. In the days after Hamas attacked Israel, President Joe Biden proclaimed, “Well, the truth of the matter is, if there weren’t an Israel, we’d have to invent one” — a refrain he’s used for decades to make the case that supporting Israel is critical to U.S. interests.

Presidential candidates vying to take over Biden’s job have been just as effusive about the U.S.–Israel relationship. Robert F. Kennedy likened the state of Israel to the U.S. “having an aircraft carrier in the Middle East.” In a recent Republican presidential debate, Nikki Haley went so far as to say, “Israel doesn’t need us, we need Israel.”

“U.S. military and diplomatic protection has disincentivized the Israelis from pursuing compromises.”

Israel’s usefulness to the U.S. was arguably at its height during the Cold War. As neighboring Arab states built military and intelligence relationships with the Soviet Union, Israel fought these regimes and portrayed itself as a bulwark of U.S. influence in the region. Since then, the relationship has been almost entirely lopsided, as the U.S. has played a far more helpful role to Israel by helping it confront enemies like Iran and develop strategic ties with the Gulf Arab nations. Despite portraying itself as an ally during the U.S. occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan and counterterror campaigns against Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, Israel was mostly absent — likely because its involvement would provoke condemnation and retaliation, not to mention that few Middle Eastern governments crucial to the coalitions’ operations recognize Israel.

Without a national security rationale for maintaining relations with Israel, domestic political pressure appears to be the primary driver of steadfast U.S. support. The political gains for pro-Israel politicians have ultimately enabled Israel to reject solutions to end the political turmoil in the region, while forcing the U.S. to continue intervening on its behalf.

“U.S military and diplomatic protection has disincentivized the Israelis from pursuing compromises,” said Trita Parsi, co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “When we give unquestioned support and blank checks, we feed the worst behavior of countries that we consider allies.”

A U.S. soldier takes part in the Eager Lion multinational military maneuver in the Zarqa governorate in Jordan on Sept. 14, 2022.

Lopsided Relationship

For years, the Tower 22 outpost and other U.S. military bases in Iraq, Syria, and neighboring countries like Jordan have been criticized for making U.S. troops sitting ducks with no benefit to U.S. interests.

And yet thousands of troops are stationed throughout the Middle East, some for the protection of maritime shipping or counterterrorism operations, but many for fighting a proxy war against Iran. The U.S. has made huge efforts for years to deter Iran on Israel’s behalf — owing mostly to hostile and frequently antisemitic rhetoric from Iran — while hawkish Israeli leaders have sabotaged efforts at détente like the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

U.S. military officials periodically criticize the impact of uncritical U.S. support for Israel on American interests in the region, where Israel remains unpopular for its policies against Palestinians. These complaints, even from U.S. military officials, have often been walked back under political pressure. Despite repeated vows by American leaders to reduce the country’s footprint in the Middle East, the U.S.’s commitment to Israel has turned into military involvement across the region. There are strikes against the Houthis in Yemen, aircraft carriers in the eastern Mediterranean to deter Hezbollah in Lebanon, and skirmishes with Iranian-backed militias in Syria and Iraq.

The costs for the U.S. from this new era of conflict are rapidly adding up. According to a recent report in Politico, an estimated $1.6 billion has already been spent on unanticipated U.S. military expenses in the region since October 7 — a price tag Pentagon officials say they cannot pay without a new budget from Congress. Global ammunition shortages are also forcing the U.S. to scramble to replenish its depleted supplies at a time when it is also struggling to contain threats in Europe and East Asia.

For Israel, however, the U.S.’s presence only fortifies its strategic initiatives. “The Israelis view the American presence in the region as very important, because it creates a backstop for them,” said Parsi. “The U.S. presence gives Israel greater maneuverability to carry out strikes in places like Syria and Lebanon, but also a sense of deterrence against those who would like to retaliate against them, since it may mean that the U.S. is dragged into the conflict as well.”

It is increasingly clear that the longer the U.S. maintains a lopsided relationship with Israel, not only will it remain stuck in the region, but also the less likely that Israel will compromise with its neighbors to achieve peace.

Over seven decades after its creation, Israel has failed to come to terms with most of its neighbors and refused many diplomatic opportunities that could have ended much of the violence in the Mideast. Arab governments have recently proposed a new plan that would end the war and create a Palestinian state in exchange for regional recognition of Israel, which Israeli leaders have already rejected.

The Israelis themselves had been clear about these dynamics. Despite progress on limited agreements like the Abraham Accords, which would normalize Israeli relations with Gulf Arab monarchies, Israeli officials have reiterated that they are averse to any more significant deals that would allow the U.S. to draw down its presence in the region. That will make it much harder to leave a part of the world where the U.S. has few interests, yet continues to lose much in terms of resources, reputation, and lives.

“As more and more people have come to the conclusion that the U.S. doesn’t need to be in the Middle East at the same level militarily,” Parsi said, “they will begin to question what the purpose is of having this military alliance with Israel.”

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched on Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Jan. 15, 2024, in New York.

Domestic Interests

Absent a compelling foreign policy rationale, the strongest advocacy for U.S. support for Israel largely comes from the American political establishment. Powerful pro-Israel lobby groups in the U.S. like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee use a combination of money, political messaging, and coercion to push for uniform pro-Israel support in Congress. Their fight has only become fiercer as public support for the U.S.–Israel relationship declines among younger Americans and liberals.

“The routine description of the U.S.–Israeli relationship as a close alliance is mostly a function of American domestic politics, and how Israel fits into those politics, rather than an apolitical consideration of U.S. interests overseas or national strategy,” said Paul Pillar, a former CIA analyst and expert on the Middle East.

After two decades of bloody and fruitless conflicts in the Middle East, Biden may find himself between Iraq and a hard place. A strong military response to the drone strike against U.S. troops in Jordan that risks triggering a broader war is unlikely to be popular among Americans, many of whom have made no secret of their clear desire to end U.S. involvement in the region. The escalating crisis is revealing U.S. and Israeli priorities to be mismatched.

“Recent events, particularly the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, underscore the substantial gulf between our interests and the policies being pursued by the Israeli government,” Pillar said. “It is plain for all to see that these differences are substantial, even as the Biden administration has bent over backwards to support the Israeli government, despite the enormous horror taking place in Gaza.”

U.S. intelligence and political officials are currently trying to engineer a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel in Gaza, an agreement that would be in the U.S.’s interest toward an end to the war and deescalation of regional conflict. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, has suggested that those discussions may run counter to his own interests.

“As long as the war continues, he will retain his position, power, and political coalition, while fending off the day he will have to face a political reckoning,” said Pillar. “From his point of view, expanding the war and dragging the U.S. in deeper, even beyond what is going on in Yemen and the Red Sea, would be in his interest, even as it would be against U.S. interests.”

And so it is that, with little choice left, the Biden administration promised to retaliate forcefully for the deaths of the three troops in Jordan. With growing anti-war sentiment in the U.S., however, it is not clear how far its response will go. Biden is left facing a situation where domestic politics, particularly the influence of pro-Israel groups and politicians, continue to pull the U.S. military into a region where it is losing precious lives and resources, all with little to show in return.