I think you’re making a lot of very salient arguments and there’s been a great discussion already, but I just wanna point out that

And I don’t buy the ruling class would allow itself to “get dragged” into something it didn’t want or wasn’t actively trying to use

Isn’t necessarily true. The US ruling class consists of and people like Mitch McConnel and (before she died) Diane Feinstein, not to mention the Killdawg
They aren’t exclusively a competent elite, there’s a large amount of hapless dolts all fighting internally for power and control. They shouldn’t be underestimated, but they shouldn’t be thought of as infallible either.
Look at the war in ukraine for example. They managed to provoke a war, crush the EU economy and tie it to the US, which is an impressive feat. On the other hand the war itself has been full of blunders, failures and assumptions made on nothing. That same war has also caused previous client states to seek to split away from the US.

The ruling class is full of insane geriatric religious fanatics. Their MO isn’t based on pure rationality.

if the us loses israel, it loses most of its regional leverage and influence and, following that, a good chunk of the legitimacy that underpins its economic hegemony over the rest of the world. it’s not really a question of agency or intention, the reality of the situation is that israel has a game plan (the same one as 2006, as has been its mo since 67, i might add) and that game plan is part of a chain of events in the region that may or may not lead to its ultimate destruction. the us’ role and probable intention is to make judgment calls all along this chain of events to preempt the destruction of israel. many of those decisions involve direct intervention.

the apparent ‘dragging’ of the us lies primarily in the unnecessarily provocative and ultimately self-defeating nature of us/israel doctrine wherein they first target leaders, then civilian infrastructure and population centers, then ground invasion; they still live in an era where the use of violence is an exclusive western privilege that uniformly results in acquiescence wherever applied. this doctrine will only result in larger and larger backlashes against the entity and the associated american interests, resulting in an escalating spiral of conflict that can only end with the self destruction of regional hegemony in the middle east. obviously and objectively the wrong thing to do, but as far as we onlookers can tell, it is the only thing they know.

It is possible for a smaller ally to “drag” a larger superpower into a conflict. This is kind of what happened to the USSR in Afghanistan.

Like you, I don’t think this is the case regarding American complicity in zionism. They know what they’re doing, they have a plan. If I were to make a guess at what the plan is, it would be something along the line of picking off Iran’s allies one by one and finally Iran itself. By doing so they will not only directly push out a competitor, they are also going to send a signal to local compradors about how there is no alternative to American overlordship in the middle east.

There’s also the more prosaic argument. War is good for business and good for shutting up domestic opposition. The yanks need a new forever war. Engaging in direct war with Russia or China os too dangerous whereas middle eastern nations are unable to retaliate effectively against American aggression.

Supporting a powerful Israel probably supercedes all other directives for the Middle East. I think US leadership would prefer a war not happen, but they see it as inevitable and would rather heavily support Israel when things kick off.

I still think Israel is surprising them though. There’s no way US intel wasn’t involved in the assassination of Nasrallah but Biden seemed taken aback that Israel leveled a city block without asking

It’s possible that Israeli leadership think they can push those buttons while the US’ know they can do this whenever they want to.

The strategy is to make it look like the US doesnt want to enter when they are the instigator. Its a geopolitical move to give them license to enter without international condemnation

Trying to determine the extent to which the US and Israel actually differ has been a real headache for me. We can obviously ditch all the performative nonsense about how “Biden is VERY unhappy at Netanyahu who is using the bombs the US gave them, as Biden had been informed they’d instead be recycled into plowshares and fireworks!” but I haven’t yet seen a convincing angle for how the US benefits from a regional war.

It’s often stated that the US benefits from spreading chaos wherever it goes, but that’s only true if they don’t have more to lose from spreading that chaos - the deep state aren’t like, inciting riots every week inside Washington DC because they think it would be a bit of a laugh and they just love doing chaotic things like the goshdarned Joker, because there would be no point. Internal chaos, and chaos inside their allies (to a certain extent) is ruthlessly crushed. Losing Israel, naval resources (at a time where US shipyards aren’t exactly performing at their peak) and/or oilfields in friendly monarchies doesn’t seem like a worthy trade to potentially getting to bomb the shit out of Iran (I doubt that an invasion is possible - from where? Naval invasions are famously difficult to do even on a medium scale. How long will a land/sea invasion take to set up? Are the resources actually available? Is the manpower? etc) I don’t think the US is getting pulled into anything, I think it’s getting trapped and is struggling to find a way out of the situation that simultaneously keeps Israel intact and weakens their enemies, when both might not be possible and they’ll have to choose one or the other.

The best case scenario for the US is that most of the Middle East including Israel lies in ruins, Iran is destroyed as a political force for decades to come and/or is directly under a Western-backed dictatorship (how stable would that be?) after the whole Iranian army is somehow destroyed, oil markets are completely fucked but maybe domestic supplies and a quick deal with Venezuela and Russia means that things that require oil don’t entirely collapse, hopefully only a small part of your navy has been sunk, and hopefully it took only a few years and a relatively small number of men (and doesn’t follow in the footsteps of Iraq and Afghanistan) to destroy, invade, or otherwise “placate” Iran. Congratulations - the entire time, China has been getting stronger and, fuck, they’ve probably almost reached chip parity with Taiwan or something. You now have to recover from that war to try and take on an even more powerful China, your true enemy, with depleted resources. It’s not geopolitically viable.

“stumbling towards war” again

NATO is already starting to strip their armory bare from attrition in the ukraine campaign, idk if they have the industrial capacity to wage great power wars like this.