The Revolutionary Regime

Kurilla’s nomination to lead CENTCOM came at an auspicious moment. The US military’s “central region,” whose purview spans Northeast Africa to Central Asia and everything in between, had left out Israel, largely because of its frosty relations with Washington’s Arab partners. But as those relations warmed, in part thanks to the signing of the Abraham Accords, Trump in January 2021 transferred Israel to CENTCOM’s area of responsibility, ensuring that Kurilla — described as “a very pro-Israel figure” by a member of Israel’s defense ministry — would be in charge of integrating the country into its overall military strategy for the region.

That military strategy in large part centered on Iran, especially under Kurilla. “Central Command was formed to counter the influence of the revolutionary regime that had seized power in Tehran,” Kurilla later said. “That mission remains essentially unchanged to this day. Iran remains the focus.”

From his February 2022 confirmation hearing, where he described Iran as “the number one destabilizing factor in the Middle East right now with their malign behavior,” to this month, Kurilla has stressed the threat Iran poses.

“The Iran of 2023 is not the Iran of 1983. In fact, Iran today is exponentially more militarily capable than it was even five years ago,” he warned at one point. “For us, our greatest risk is with Iran right now. That is why it is our number one priority to deter them.”

In particular, it was Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions that posed the greatest threat.

“An Iran with a nuclear weapon would change the Middle East overnight and forever,” Kurilla was fond of saying. It would kick off a regional nuclear arms race and turn the country “from a regional concern to a global menace.” But even simply “being a nuclear threshold state” would be destabilizing by emboldening Iranian leadership. “We must not allow a nuclear-armed Iran,” he stressed.

In the process, Kurilla has often gone further than US military and intelligence assessments in describing the nuclear threat posed by Iran. He told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2023 that it could “produce sufficient fissile material for a nuclear weapon in less than 14 days.” Yet five months earlier, the Pentagon’s own National Defense Strategy — which Kurilla has repeatedly referenced in his testimony over the years — and its Nuclear Posture Review had both concluded Iran was not pursuing a weapon.

This June, Kurilla claimed that Iran was “mere steps from reaching the 90 percent threshold for weaponization,” and that it could “produce its first 25 kg of weapons-grade material in roughly one week” and “enough for up to ten nuclear weapons in three weeks” — a quote that the White House later excerpted and tweeted out to justify its backing for Israel’s war last week.

Yet months earlier, the US intelligence threat assessment again concluded “that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003,” a conclusion reiterated by intelligence officials in the days since Israel’s attack, who said it would take as long as three years for it to produce a nuke.

In his confirmation hearing in 2022, Kurilla took a carefully ambiguous line on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran nuclear deal. When given the chance to endorse a return to the deal, he said only that he was “supportive of any enforceable agreement that limits Tehran’s ability to gain nuclear weapons.” But when Republican Sen. James Inhofe brought up then president Joe Biden’s push to reenter what he termed “the flawed Iran deal” and the supposed risk that the resulting “billions of dollars in sanctions relief” for Tehran could carry, Kurilla didn’t similarly dodge the question but instead restated Inhofe’s question back to him:

Senator, there is a risk with sanctions relief that Iran would use some of that money to support its proxies and terrorism in the region, and if it did, it could increase risk to our forces in the region.

Kurilla has demurred when asked about possible military options against Iran’s enrichment program, asking to save those conversations for a classified setting. But he has tended to argue that regular military attacks on Iran are needed to keep it in line. He explicitly endorsed Trump’s 2020 assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani (“I would have taken the strike”), which very nearly started a US-Iran war, agreeing that it “was a deterrence.”

“The key to establishing deterrence is Iran has to understand there are consequences to their actions,” he argued last year, even as he has cautioned that “deterrence is always temporal.” “There has to be cost imposition on Iran for them to be able to cease their malign behavior,” he has said, pointing to strikes in early 2024 on eighty-five targets across Iraq and Syria “that caused them to pause, and a period of deterrence has been established in Iraq and Syria.” Kurilla continued to argue this at the start of this month, when he wrote that “sustainable deterrence with Iran requires complementary military and interagency efforts that demonstrate the will to hold Iran accountable.”

Israel is a key part of that demonstration of will.

Love and Partnership

Numerous reports have it that Kurilla has developed a personal affinity for Israel and its military officials. According to Israel Hayom, the pro–Benjamin Netanyahu daily paper owned by billionaire Trump donor Miriam Adelson — Kurilla visited the site of the October 7 massacre and been deeply affected by the horrors he saw there, immediately offering Israel whatever support it needed for what it planned to do next.

But the paper also reported that Kurilla had forged a strong bond with one Israeli in particular, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, with whom he had developed a close friendship since the attack that one source described to the paper as “love.” The two worked closely in the year and a half that followed, speaking nearly daily until Halevi’s resignation in March this year.

But it’s also true that Israel’s role is of practical military importance for Kurilla. CENTCOM works “through our partners to be the regional constructs to deter Iran,” Kurilla has explained, and he has been effusive about Israel’s addition to this set of partners. It’s been a “net positive across the board,” he has said, praising its “world-class air power” and “tremendous capability,” marveling at its technological prowess, and envisioning its contribution to an integrated missile defense for the region — the fruit of which was the United States and Israel’s successful repulsion of Iran’s massive missile attack in April 2024.

Israel’s addition presented “many collaborative and constructive security opportunities,” he said in March 2023, since CENTCOM’s Arab partners “largely see the same threats and have common cause with Israel Defense Forces” when it comes to “defending against Iran’s most destabilizing activities.” Two years later, as he prepared to leave, Kurilla told Congress that “CENTCOM’s deep military-to-military partnerships have proven a catalyst for these wide-ranging opportunities that now lay before us” following Israel’s violent reshaping of the Middle East over the previous twenty months — opportunities that included “prevent[ing] a nuclear-armed Iran.”

In practice, opening up that particular “opportunity” had reportedly seen Kurilla frequently maneuver behind his own president’s back to approve risky Israeli operations in surrounding countries that went beyond what the Biden White House was comfortable with. In one case, Kurilla advised his “good friend” Halevi how to sell Israel’s October 2024 ground incursion into Lebanon to Washington, Israel Hayom reported. Israeli officials then dutifully downplayed the scale and battle plans of the operation in line with Kurilla’s advice, to avoid spooking US officials.

In another, after the Israelis were warned that their planned September raid on an Iranian missile factory in Syria could prove fatally poisonous to relations with the White House, Kurilla again got the call. The right-wing paper reported that, without telling Washington, Kurilla prepared CENTCOM forces for the Israeli operation in case it went sour, and informed the White House and defense secretary about it “only at the right moment,” persuading them not to put the kibosh on Israel’s plans.

Kurilla has been pleased by Israel’s wars on both Hezbollah and Hamas, in spite of the staggering human cost, legal violations, and international condemnation they’ve entailed. “Israel’s — the doctrinal term — ‘disintegration’ of Lebanese Hezbollah should be studied by every military the world over,” Kurilla told House Armed Services this June, a smile creeping over his face. “It was brilliant. What they have done to Hamas.”

Last March, he defended Israel’s planned ground invasion into the Gaza city of Rafah — officially opposed by the White House at the time to the point of threatening to withhold bomb shipments to Israel — stressing it was aimed at Hamas’s leaders and “strategic tunnels,” and insisting Israeli forces would not go in unless they were sure civilians were protected. Kurilla later admitted his only rationale for that was “verbal and written assurances” that they would follow the laws of war. (Israel would quickly bomb a hospital and a tent encampment upon starting the Rafah operation, burning children and others alive.)

Kurilla was also an ardent supporter of opening up a direct (and illegal) US war with Yemen and its ruling Houthis, who, despite overwhelming evidence, he insisted were not genuinely motivated by Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians. “They say it’s about Gaza, the Houthis have not provided one loaf of bread to Gaza,” he said in that same hearing, later sparring with House Armed Services vice chair Rob Wittman over his question of whether the Biden policy of using $3 million missiles to shoot down drones one-hundredth of that cost was sustainable.

“What we need is for Iran to quit supplying the Houthis for attack,” Kurilla answered.

“Listen, you are great at talking around the question,” Wittman replied.

Four months later, Kurilla pushed for stepped-up US military involvement against the Houthis.

But at the end of the day, it all comes down to getting tough on Iran. “The other thing we need to do is impose costs on Iran,” Kurilla said last March when asked if he had the tools to deal with the Houthi blockade. “And that’s a whole-of-government effort to be able to do. Because they’re the ones who are providing the weapons.” When Rep. Michael Waltz — soon to serve alongside Kurilla in the Trump administration, where he would likewise push for war with Iran — put to Kurilla that “the best way to stop the Houthis is to dry up the supplies from Iran,” the general agreed.

“We Were There for Seventy-Five Years”

Kurilla’s laser-focus on neutering Iran is about more than Iran. Looming behind all of its malign actions, in his telling, is the shadow of Russia and, especially, China.

“What we see is Iran is reliant on China, and Russia is reliant on Iran. Iran sells 90 percent of its oil, all US-sanctioned, to China,” he said last year. “So, in effect, China is funding Iran’s subversive and malign behavior in the region.”

While CENTCOM’s mission to combat Iran may not have changed since 1983, he explained at one point, what had changed is that “the Soviet Union has been replaced with China and Russia as strategic competitors,” a competition that, “extends into the CENTCOM area of responsibility.” In fact, he said later, “I believe that CENTCOM is literally and figuratively central to competition with China and Russia.”

But while Russia merely “acts as a spoiler” in the region — and was increasingly irrelevant following Bashar al-Assad’s ouster in Syria — China had made real inroads, he repeatedly warned: nineteen of the twenty-one countries in CENTCOM’s area of responsibility had signed Belt and Road agreements with Beijing, while also fulfilling its massive appetite for energy imports and buying its military equipment.

“They want to be able to replace the US as the — as one of the dominant forces in the Middle East,” he warned last year.

Kurilla was particularly “concerned” by the fact that China had brokered Saudi-Iran rapprochement in March 2023. What was to much of the world a welcome lowering of the temperature between two rivals in a notoriously flammable part of the world was for Kurilla a worrying sign of “China’s penetration into the region.”

“Not only do they have their economic information and military instruments of national power being — coming into the region, we are now seeing really for the first time their diplomatic instrument of national power,” he warned two weeks later. “China has chosen to compete on a global scale. And, this is an area where they’re choosing to compete.”

These are some of the reasons that Kurilla warned that events within CENTCOM’s area of responsibility were most likely to derail the 2022 National Defense Strategy. That document set its crosshairs on China as the Pentagon’s “pacing challenge,” and put forward a strategy “focused on the PRC [People’s Republic of China]” and that “seeks to prevent the PRC’s dominance of key regions.”

“China’s goal to serve as the world’s leading superpower by 2049 puts this region squarely in its crosshairs,” Kurilla warned. “Beijing’s willingness to take on higher-risk projects threatens American preferential ties and unfettered access. On its current trajectory, the increased technological and military presence serves as a growing strategic challenge to US partnerships, access, force presence, and security in the region.”

Many analysts argue that the US-Israeli relationship, rather than ideology, cultural ties, or the power of the pro-Israel lobby, is based on cold hard power; that “were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region,” as Biden once said. There are signs that this is Kurilla’s view too.

“Our partners are the nation’s comparative advantage against competitors like China and Russia,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 16, 2023. “What we bring is long, enduring partnerships. We’ve been there in the past; we were there for seventy-five years; we are there today; and we’ll be there in the future,” he told its counterpart committee in the House one week later, pointedly using the length of time that had elapsed since the year of Israel’s founding: 1948.

Those partnerships may soon be expanding. In March, Syria’s post-Assad leadership signed an agreement with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a US-backed armed coalition, that integrated them into the new government’s military, viewed as key to ensuring Syria’s future stability — just three days after Kurilla traveled to the country and met with the SDF and its commander.

“The opportunities I think are significant. I see a lot of upside. I see little downside for engaging right now,” Kurilla told the House Armed Services Committee this June, when asked about Syria’s future. “We waited a little too long to come to the table. . . . We’re now there, and we’re able to engage and able to shape the way forward.”

What is that way forward? In his written statement that day, under the heading “Opportunities for Competing Strategically,” Kurilla pointed to “leading a peaceful reconciliation with the various warring factions and demonstrating a willingness for broader regional integration.” We may be seeing the process of what Kurilla talked about years earlier, of Washington being “in a race to integrate with our partners before China can fully penetrate the region.”

The stakes aren’t just abstract bragging rights for who gets to be the Middle East’s top dog. As Kurilla explained to the House Armed Services Committee in 2023, half of the oil and more than a third of the natural gas that China consumes comes from countries in CENTCOM’s purview, and nearly all of it arrives by ship, through the Strait of Hormuz. “That makes them vulnerable,” he said. “God forbid there’s ever a conflict with China, but we could end up holding a lot of their economy at risk in the CENTCOM region.”

Incidentally, Iran controls the northern side of the Hormuz Strait, giving whoever controls its government the power to choke off trade through the vital route. US partners Oman and the United Arab Emirates control the southern side.

All Options on the Table

Just weeks out from his retirement, Kurilla’s vision may prove to have been a victim of its own success. Unleashing Israel has certainly eliminated almost every US and Israeli adversary in the Middle East and opened the door to placing more of the region fully under the US security umbrella — a staggering achievement, if you can look past the orgy of indiscriminate violence that made it possible.

But most people living in the actual region cannot look past that violence. This military-first approach has had the side effect of devastating US standing among the actual people who populate CENTCOM’s “partner” states, and made them far more favorable to China. Kurilla has favored expanding the Abraham Accords as a way to deepen Arab states’ military and economic cooperation with Israel and so stiffen the US foothold there; but popular rage at Israel’s US-backed wars has foreclosed any more such agreements, while jeopardizing the ones already signed.

“As our partners continue to navigate the emerging multipolar world, they will consider all options; and the consequences of American action, or inaction, will reverberate across their decisionmaking process,” Kurilla wrote in his June statement.

As US backing for Israel continues to cause chaos in the region, Kurilla may be more right than he knows.