First posted on Instagram
United States Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has pushed back against critics of the war with Iran, arguing that America's role in the conflict is about defending the United States itself, not fighting a war on Israel's behalf.
Speaking on Newsmax, in a clip shared on X on November 12, Huckabee addressed Americans who question the U.S. role directly. "Iran is a threat to America. This isn't about Israel. And when Americans say, why are we fighting Israel's war? You're not. You're fighting America's war," he said.
Huckabee argued that Iran poses a direct threat to American interests and that confronting Tehran is in America's own interest, not simply a matter of defending Israel. In the clip, he went on to point to the 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and Americans killed by Iran and its proxies.
Critics, however, question why American lives and resources should be committed to a conflict so closely tied to Israel's security, arguing that the United States should prioritize its own interests and avoid another prolonged war in the Middle East.
Huckabee has made the same argument before. In an interview published on October 23 on The Anchor Podcast with Israeli commentator Amir Tsarfati, he said the threat from Iran "is not a threat to just Israel. It's always been a threat to the United States." Clips from that interview resurfaced on social media in early November, after the midterm elections.
The resurfacing drew a backlash over a separate part of the same interview, in which Huckabee described critics of the war as being in "spiritual darkness" and "spiritual blindness," saying "Satan has blinded the minds of those and has captured their thinking." Conservative commentators criticized the remarks, and some called for him to be removed from his post.
Huckabee, 71, a former governor of Arkansas, has served as ambassador to Israel since April 2025. Before the U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities in June, he sent President Donald Trump a text message urging him to act. Trump later shared the message publicly, calling Huckabee "a pastor, a politician, an ambassador, and a great man."