Either President Donald Trump’s administration is playing mind games with Tehran — again — or it’s drawing a line in the sand that puts Iran’s leadership (such as it is) in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t scenario.
According to a Monday report from Axios, the United States has told its allies that it won’t be joining Israel’s attacks on Iran as long as Iran stays away from hitting U.S. targets.
That’s specifically the retaliation that Iranian Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh promised if Israel struck it, according to reports in the week leading up to Friday’s hit on Tehran’s nuclear enrichment facilities, top scientists, and military brass.
If “a conflict is imposed on us,” Nasirzadeh warned, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would “target all U.S. bases in the host countries.”
Whether or not this has been stymied by operational concerns — the IRGC’s head, Gen. Hossein Salami, was among those killed in Friday’s attack — or the United States’ insistence that Israel act in a “unilateral” fashion and not to attack U.S. targets, it’s clear that this is still the “red line” for the Trump administration.
Two sources told Axios the administration “told several Middle Eastern allies on Sunday that it doesn’t plan to get actively involved in the war between Israel and Iran unless Iran targets Americans.
“The U.S. has helped Israel intercept missiles, but made clear Israel is acting alone in attacking Iran. The U.S. message is that if Iran attacks Americans in response, it will be crossing a red line,” the outlet noted.
One Arab diplomat close to the leadership in Tehran said that the “Iranians are very careful so far not to do anything that can push the U.S. to get involved.”
“Israel has asked the Trump administration to join the war in order to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program. A U.S. official told Axios on Saturday that the Trump administration was not actively considering it,” Axios noted.
“U.S. officials also claimed that over the weekend, Israel had an operational window to assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, but President Trump made clear to Israel that he opposed that step.”
“We will welcome any U.S. contribution,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted.
However, he added during an interview with ABC News, “I understand ‘America First.’ I don’t understand ‘America Dead.’ That’s what these people want.”
However, there’s a real question as to whether or not this ambivalence is strategic on the part of both the president and the administration, both to protect America’s own interests as well as to allow Israel operational freedom.
As Axios noted in a report after the Friday attacks, while team Trump was actively downplaying the possibility of an attack and stalling for further negotiations that were scheduled to take place this past weekend, it was effectively green-lighting Israel’s attacks on Iranian targets:
Two Israeli officials claimed to Axios that Trump and his aides were only pretending to oppose an Israeli attack in public — and didn’t express opposition in private. “We had a clear U.S. green light,” one claimed.
The goal, they say, was to convince Iran that no attack was imminent and make sure Iranians on Israel’s target list wouldn’t move to new locations.
Netanyahu’s aides even briefed Israeli reporters that Trump had tried to put the brakes on an Israeli strike in a call on Monday, when in reality the call dealt with coordination ahead of the attack, Israeli officials now say.
Axios is reporting that Netanyahu and Trump pulled off a great deception as part of Israel’s preparation to strike Iran. If true, this would go down in history books. pic.twitter.com/R4L5azriC8
— Marina Medvin ???????? (@MarinaMedvin) June 13, 2025
This raises, again, the specter that this might be a strategic move on the part of the Trump administration to keep the war in the Middle East limited and focused on hobbling Iran’s capabilities to make a nuclear weapon or make war, period.
Iran might not buy that the United States hasn’t crossed the line into allying with Israel to make war against it or that the Jewish state acted unilaterally, in other words — but it also may have no choice but to pretend, lest the wrath of the U.S. military come down upon it.
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