Why the US–Israel Conflict with Iran Is Not a Religious War

By Vishal Arora

March 3, 2026

Among sections of the public in many countries, including India, the current U.S.–Israel attack on Iran is being framed as a Christian and Jewish attack on Islam. The language of civilisational war carries emotional force and clear political utility in mobilising domestic support, but a closer look at how states actually behave suggests a more grounded reading of the conflict as a typical strategic contest.

The reported killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in the U.S.-Israel attacks is likely to reinforce the perception that religion sits at the centre of the confrontation. That interpretation, however, confuses the clerical character of the office with the nature of the power it exercised. Khamenei was not only Iran’s highest religious authority. He also sat atop the country’s coercive and governing architecture, exerting decisive influence over the military and security apparatus, the judiciary, state media and foreign policy. In other words, he functioned as the ultimate political authority within the Islamic Republic.

To be clear, religious identity does feature in how the conflict is narrated to domestic audiences. It has particular value at moments when public backing for military action is thin and when the costs of escalation need to be justified in moral terms. But the drivers that recur most consistently in state decision-making lie elsewhere, in security doctrine, deterrence logic (the strategy of preventing an adversary from taking hostile action by convincing it that the costs of doing so will outweigh any possible gains), alliance commitments and regional power competition.

What’s Behind the War?

Historically, the roots of this confrontation lie in geopolitical realignment and rivalry, not theology.

The decisive rupture came after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, which defined itself against Western influence and, by extension, against the political order in the region that the United States was seen to underwrite. Many Iranians viewed the Shah as closely tied to Washington, particularly after the CIA-backed 1953 coup that restored him to power. For the revolutionary leadership, resistance to American influence became central to regime legitimacy and sovereignty. It believed the Shah’s alignment with the United States and Israel had made Iran dependent and vulnerable. Breaking from those ties was therefore not only ideological but also a strategic act aimed at building an independent regional role and insulating the new regime from external pressure.

From that point, Israel began to view Iran as a long-term security threat, especially as Tehran expanded missile capabilities and built ties with armed groups such as Hezbollah. The United States, already closely aligned with Israel, increasingly treated Iran as a “revisionist regional power,” or a state seeking to alter the existing balance of power, rules and security arrangements in West Asia to gain influence, security and status.

The U.S.–Israel alliance itself grew out of two main developments. Washington recognised Israel soon after its creation in 1948, in the shadow of the Holocaust and amid a larger Western consensus that a Jewish homeland required protection. Later, during the Cold War, as Moscow sought to shift the regional balance, Israel’s sense of vulnerability sharpened, leading it to align more closely with the United States against Soviet-backed Arab states. Over time, shared security interests, extensive military cooperation and strong political support for Israel within the United States turned early alignment into a durable alliance.

Religion gradually became part of how the confrontation was described and understood, through Iran’s post-1979 revolutionary ideology, and through religious currents within politics in Israel and the United States. At different moments, leaders and political movements in all three countries have used religious language to portray the conflict in moral and civilisational terms. Gradually, strategic rivalries acquired religious colouring in public narratives, making the confrontation appear more theological than the underlying patterns of state behaviour actually are.

Security and Strategic Concerns

Many historians and international relations scholars, therefore, locate the foundation of the conflict in Israel’s security concerns over Iran’s military capabilities, Tehran’s pursuit of deterrence, regime survival and regional influence, as well as the United States’ larger balance-of-power calculations (preventing any rival from becoming strong enough to dominate them or their region) in West Asia.

Kenneth Waltz, a leading international relations scholar, argued that in a world where countries must largely protect themselves without any higher global authority, those that strengthen their security tend to do better than those that neglect it. That framework helps explain why Israeli policy towards Iran has remained remarkably consistent across governments of differing ideological stripes. Israeli security planners are focused above all on preventing a hostile regional rival from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability and from entrenching military networks close to Israel’s borders. These priorities appear far more prominently in military planning, intelligence assessments, and diplomatic messaging than theological argument does.

Iran’s behaviour also fits this strategic pattern. Support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, backing for armed groups in Syria and Iraq, and the steady expansion of missile capabilities serve recognisable deterrence and influence goals. Stephen Walt, another scholar, argues that states try to protect themselves against rivals they see as dangerous, judging the threat mainly by how strong the rival is, how close it is and how much military damage it could potentially inflict. Iran’s regional posture aligns closely with this logic of balancing, regardless of the religious language used to legitimise it.

Role of Religion

None of this is to claim that religion plays no role. That would be analytically careless.

Israeli political discourse at times reflects historical memory rooted in Jewish experience, particularly the legacy of persecution and state vulnerability. Iran’s leadership frequently invokes Shia symbolism associated with resistance and martyrdom, embedding its strategic posture in the language of revolutionary faith. In the United States, strands of Christian Zionism, a movement that supports Israel based on biblical interpretations, have influenced segments of domestic political debate and advocacy. These currents influence coalitions, constrain leaders and supply moral narratives that can widen or narrow the political space for escalation. But this influence is not the primary driver of state behaviour.

History reinforces this distinction. Iran and Israel maintained quiet cooperation during the Cold War despite strong religious differences between a Jewish state and an overwhelmingly Muslim society, until the revolution fundamentally reoriented Iran’s domestic ideology and foreign policy.

Benedict Anderson, a political scientist known for his work on how national identities are built, argued that leaders often use familiar cultural symbols to rally public support for state actions. Religious language is especially effective for this purpose because it carries strong moral appeal and emotional pull. Governments, therefore, have clear incentives to describe conflicts in civilisational or religious terms even when their actual goals are strategic and material.

The result can be a widening gap between the story presented to the public and the calculations that actually guide policy, and this gap carries real risks. A civilisational framing can shrink a complex geopolitical contest into a simple story of faith communities locked in inevitable confrontation. It hardens identities, narrows the space for de-escalation and encourages the public to view compromise as betrayal.

Religion and Alliances

Global alliance patterns offer further evidence that religion rarely serves as the organising basis of state partnerships.

Sunni-majority Gulf states maintain close security ties with the United States, a predominantly Christian country, while several have expanded quiet or formal cooperation with Israel, a Jewish state. Iran, the world’s largest Shia-majority country, has built working relationships with largely non-Muslim powers such as Russia and China on the basis of shared strategic interests.

Similarly, India, a Hindu-majority country, maintains deep defence cooperation with Israel and strong economic ties with Gulf states, while also engaging closely with the United States. Buddhist-majority countries such as Thailand are treaty allies or security partners of Washington.

These patterns are not exceptions, but the rule. They show that, in practice, states align primarily around security needs, economic interests and geopolitical calculation, even when religious rhetoric dominates the public narrative.

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