Victor Davis Hanson offered pointed commentary this week on the imbalance between what Israel provides the United States strategically and what European allies provide, noting that Israel’s destruction of Chinese-supplied Iranian air defense systems last June enabled the American bombing campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities, something no European ally offered to assist with, and that Italy, France, the UK, and Spain all refused to allow the use of their bases for the operation.
Jon Hoffman, research fellow in defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to offer a sharply different assessment, arguing that the US relationship with Israel is imbalanced in Israel’s favor and that American engagement in the Middle East is driven more by path dependency and special interests than by concrete national security needs.
Hoffman said when he examines what the United States actually needs from the Middle East, the list is inherently limited to three things: the free flow of oil, no terrorist attacks against the American homeland, and preventing the emergence of a regional hegemon. He said the dynamics that prevent regional hegemony in the Middle East, including political fragmentation, economic diffusion, mountainous and desert terrain that resists conquest, and the rarity of historically successful hegemonic consolidation in the region, exist independently of American involvement. He said this assessment applies not only to Israel but to the Gulf states as well, arguing that many American partnerships in the region are justified primarily by their own continuation rather than by concrete American interests.
On the question of whether Iran would use nuclear weapons if it acquired them, Hoffman said no. He said nuclear weapons are inherently defensive in nature, that their primary utility is deterrence rather than coercion, and that the history of nuclear-armed states from the United States to the Soviet Union demonstrates that threats of nuclear action lack credibility when a second-strike-capable adversary like Israel exists in the same region. He acknowledged Iran’s rhetoric about destroying Israel and America is not comforting but said he is concerned with what Iran can do and is likely to do rather than what its rhetoric suggests, and that the regime’s defense doctrine is rooted in offsetting conventional disadvantages against stronger regional adversaries rather than pursuing offensive nuclear war.
Proft pushed back, noting that Iran backs its rhetoric with material support for terrorist proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas, making the death to Israel and death to America declarations more than empty words. Hoffman maintained that nuclear weapons are still fundamentally about deterrence and that the regime’s interest in threshold nuclear status, maintaining the capability to develop a weapon without actually doing so, serves the defensive purpose of discouraging the kind of military campaign the United States conducted over the past year.
On the JCPOA, Hoffman made what he acknowledged is a controversial argument: that the agreement was working on its core nonproliferation objective before the United States scrapped it in 2018. He said during the period the JCPOA was in effect, there was no evidence Iran was enriching uranium beyond the 3.67 percent cap required for civilian nuclear energy. He said Iran’s progression to twenty percent enrichment and then to sixty percent, the highly enriched uranium that has been the focus of the current crisis, only occurred after the United States withdrew from the agreement. He said the roughly one thousand pounds of sixty percent enriched uranium that Trump refers to as nuclear dust materialized as a direct consequence of the JCPOA’s termination, not as evidence that the agreement was failing.
Proft cited documented cases from 2004, 2012, and 2016 in which Iran bragged about fooling IAEA inspectors, and Jim Geraghty’s recent National Review piece detailing those violations. Hoffman pushed back, citing US intelligence community assessments that Iran was in compliance during the JCPOA period and that Iran’s nuclear weapons program, suspended in 2003, had not resumed as recently as one month before Operation Midnight Hammer was launched. He acknowledged the disagreement is genuine but maintained the weight of evidence supports his position.
On the Strait of Hormuz, Hoffman argued that Iran’s ability to use the strait as sustained strategic leverage is somewhat overstated for two reasons. First, Iran closed the strait in direct response to the American attack and has historically treated closure as an option of absolute last resort rather than a routine tool. Second, roughly ninety percent of Iran’s own exports transit the strait, meaning repeated closures become a self-inflicted wound on an economy already in severe distress. He said he does not consider a tolling regime ideal but distinguished between tolls that allow oil to flow, which he suggested may be tolerable, and an actual blockade that prevents the free flow of commerce, which he said Iran cannot sustain over time without destroying its own economic viability.