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One Of America’s Leading Neo-Cons Has Turned Against The Iran War And Israel

The Dissident | April 3, 2026

There are few American Neo-conservatives more influential than Robert Kagan.

In 1997, Kagan co-founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), the Neo-con think tank responsible for staffing the Bush administration with hawks such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, and played a large role in the Iraq War in 2003.

In 2010, Kagan founded a new think tank, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) which was instrumental in pushing for a new Cold War with Russia.

Kagan’s wife, Victoria Nuland was instrumental in the proxy war in Ukraine, playing a leading role in the maidan coup of 2014 ,as Assistant Secretary of State for the Obama administration, and again played a leading role in the proxy war in Ukraine as the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs for the Biden administration, including in blocking the peace deal in Istanbul in April of 2022 and in the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline.

However, Kagan has begun to change his tune since Trump launched a war on Iran for Israel, sounding more like a John Mearsheimer realist than the leading champion of American regime change that he has always been.

Kagan is still an American imperialist, but the Iran war has forced him to admit that the war is actually doing more to destroy the American empire and its ability to wage a new Cold War on Russia and China, and that Israel is a strategic liability- even for the U.S. empire.

In a recent podcast with his fellow neo-con, Bill Kristol, Kagan lamented that because of the war on Iran:

-the skyrocketing oil prices … are even before Trump took the action of lifting sanctions against Russia was going to increase Russian income

-American forces are … burning through major stocks of weaponry and particularly Patriot and other forms of interceptors on which Ukraine depends heavily because those are the interceptors that defend their major cities from constant Russian attacks

-very few countries in the world are more dependent on Middle East oil, including the oil that comes directly through the Strait of Hormuz, than Japan. Japan I think, depends on something like 95% of its oil supplies come from the Middle East and 70% of that runs through the Strait of Hormuz. So once again the Japanese were not consulted

-the Japanese will notice that the United States has sent significant forces that are dedicated both to the defense of Japan and are sort of critical to any response to a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Those forces are now being sent or some of them are already there, and some are being sent to the Middle Eas

-the bottom line for the Gulf States is that the United States undertook this war and then was not able actually to protect them

-I don’t think it’s hard to persuade certain Gulf states like the UAE and others that maybe China is also a pretty good partner or at least as much of a reliable partner as the United States has turned out to be

In other words, Kagan is lamenting that because of the Iran war, the U.S. is losing allies and losing its ability to wage a new Cold War on Russia and China, as well as its ability to use the Gulf States and proxies.

This is why Kagan was forced to admit that Israel is now a strategic liability-even for the U.S. empire- saying, “I find it a little bit it’s kind of a syllogism when people talk about what a great ally Israel is. It it is a great ally in defense of Israel, at the end of the day, Iran is a much greater threat to Israel than it is to the United States.”

Kagan doubled down on this in a recent article for the Atlantic, essentially saying that the war in Iran will be the death of the American empire, writing that it is “driving deeper wedges between the United States and former friends and allies; strengthening the hands of the expansionist great powers, Russia and China; accelerating global political and economic chaos; and leaving the United States weaker and more isolated than at any time since the 1930s.”

Kagan again reiterated that:

-Even before Donald Trump lifted oil sanctions on Russia, oil prices were skyrocketing—and filling Vladimir Putin’s war chest with billions of dollars, just as Russia’s wartime deficits were starting to cause significant pain

-the Persian Gulf states are burning through U.S.-provided stocks of air-defense interceptors, drawing on the same limited supply that Ukraine depends on to defend its largest cities from Russian missile strikes.

-Japan gets 95 percent of its oil from the Middle East, and 70 percent of that passes through the now-blocked Strait of Hormuz. Yet Japanese and other Asian diplomats in the first weeks of the war complained that they were ‘not receiving any communication from the Trump administration.’

-the United States has dispatched an aircraft-carrier battle group and other warships from the Western Pacific to the Persian Gulf, including elements of the Tripoli amphibious ready group, that would be needed for an American response to Chinese aggression, including an attack on Taiwan.

-Gulf state leaders are ‘privately furious’ with the U.S. for ‘triggering a war that put them in the crosshairs.’

Because of this, Kagan is forced to make some shocking admissions, including that supporting Israel is not in America’s interests, that no Middle East state poses a threat to America, and that “terrorism” is often just a backlash to U.S. foreign policy.

Kagan wrote that supporting Israel, “never had anything to do with American national-security interests” adding:

American officials from the beginning regarded support for Israel as contrary to U.S. interests. George C. Marshall opposed recognition in 1948, and Dean Acheson said that by recognizing Israel, the United States had succeeded Britain as ‘the most disliked power in the Middle East.’ During the Cold War, even supporters of Israel acknowledged that as a simple matter of ‘power politics,’ the United States had ‘every reason for wishing that Israel had never come into existence.’ But as Harry Truman put it, the decision to support the state of Israel was made ‘not in the light of oil, but in the light of justice.’

“One would be hard-pressed to find any nation in the world that has been reassured by the Israeli and American war against Iran, other than Israel itself,” Kagan added.

As if this wasn’t shocking enough, Kagan even admitted that Iranian anger at America stems from the U.S. backing the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh and supporting the brutal Shah dictatorship until 1979, writing:

Even the threat of terrorism from the region was a consequence of American involvement, not the reason for it. Had the United States not been deeply and consistently involved in the Muslim world since the 1940s, Islamic militants would have little interest in attacking an indifferent nation 5,000 miles and two oceans away. Contrary to much mythology, they have hated us not so much because of ‘who we are’ but because of where we are. In Iran’s case, the United States was deeply involved in its politics from the 1950s until the 1979 revolution, including as the main supporter of the brutal regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The surest way of avoiding Islamist terrorist attacks would have been to get out.

Kagan added, “No state in the Middle East (including Iraq in 2003 and Iran today) ever posed a direct threat to the security of the American homeland. Iran has no missiles that can reach the United States and, according to American intelligence, would not until 2035. Access to Middle Eastern oil and gas has never been essential to the security of the American homeland. Today, the United States is less dependent on Middle Eastern energy than in the past, which Trump has pointed out numerous times since the Strait of Hormuz was closed.”

Kagan has no doubt done major damage to U.S. foreign policy, and his role in the Iraq war and proxy war in Ukraine should not be discounted, but nonetheless, it is notable that even he acknowledges that the Iran war is crippling the U.S. empire, and being forced to admit that his critics were more or less correct about U.S. policy in the Middle East.

April 4, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Israel, Japan, Middle East, United States, Zionism