History does not wait for historians. Sometimes, one knows, in the moment, that something fundamental has shifted. Feb. 28 was such a moment.
Iran was targeted—the “head of the snake,” as it has long been called. But the real significance of that day was not the strike itself. It was what it represented: After decades of hesitation, the United States acted in full strategic alignment with Israel against the core source of regional instability. That is the story. Everything else is detail.
For more than 50 years, Israel has asserted that its conflict was never simply an Israeli-Arab affair. The deeper divide, running underneath all the others, was always between those who want a functioning regional order and those who have a vested interest in preventing one. From Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arab nationalism to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayataollah Ali Khomeini’s revolutionary theocracy, the destabilizers have changed their face but not their logic.
Washington understood this only partially and late. Through most of the Cold War and well into the post-Cold War period, America’s Middle East policy was shaped by oil, the need to manage great-power competition, and the constant balancing act between Israel and the Arab capitals. Israel was an ally—sometimes, a vital one—but not yet understood as a structural element of regional stability.
Kissinger moved the needle in the 1970s. His reframing—moderates versus radicals, rather than Arabs versus Jews—was one of the most consequential intellectual contributions to American foreign policy of that era. Intelligence cooperation deepened. Military ties grew. The relationship matured. Yet there was still a ceiling.
The United States and Israel could agree on the diagnosis. They could coordinate on many things. What they had not done until now was confront directly, together, the ideological and strategic epicenter of regional radicalism: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Feb. 28 dispensed with that distinction.
What changed is not just operational. It is cognitive. For years, Washington saw Israel as a small, embattled democracy requiring support and occasional restraint. That framing is now obsolete. Israel is increasingly understood as a capable, reliable and technologically sophisticated strategic partner—not a ward of American policy, but a pillar of regional equilibrium. The shift is not subtle.
Iran’s project, after all, was never about Palestine, Lebanon or Yemen. It was about building an empire of chaos—a network of proxies, militias and client movements designed to ensure that no regional order could coalesce against Tehran’s interests. Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Iraqi factions, the weapons pipelines; these are not separate problems. They are a single architecture, and it took decades for Washington to finally grasp this. Now it has.
Europe is a different matter.
India has recalibrated toward this new reality without much fanfare. Gulf States that once refused to acknowledge Israel publicly now coordinate with it openly. The United States has moved from managed ambiguity to explicit commitment. Meanwhile, Europe is still operating from a playbook written in the 1990s.
Its position has long rested on the assumption that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root cause of regional instability and that resolving it—or at least pushing Israel toward concessions—is the key to a more peaceful Middle East. This view was always more comforting than accurate. Today, with Iran’s four-decade project of regional subversion laid bare, it is simply untenable.
European governments that sanction Israeli ministers while providing funds to organizations linked to Iran’s proxies are not being balanced. They are being incoherent. They have chosen a framework and stuck to it long after the evidence demanded a rethink.
This matters for Europe itself, not just Israel. The instability that Tehran cultivates feeds directly into Europe’s most pressing security concerns: migration, terrorism, energy vulnerability. A Europe without strategic clarity on who is generating that instability is a Europe that cannot effectively address its consequences. Disagreeing with specific Israeli policies is entirely legitimate; however, failing to identify the primary engine of regional disorder is not.
Europe has a significant interest in understanding what happened on Feb. 28. Not because it is obligated to applaud, but because its own security environment has changed, and adjusting to that reality is long overdue.
