by Leon Hadar
June 25, 2026 - There is a ritual quality to the reassurances that flow from Washington to Jerusalem after every crisis, every ceasefire, every awkward telephone call between an American president and an Israeli prime minister.
“The bond is unshakeable.” “Our commitment to Israel’s security is ironclad.” These phrases have been repeated so many times, by so many regimes, that they have acquired the character of liturgy - comforting, familiar and only loosely tethered to the actual conduct of policy.
Israel’s strategic class would do well to examine that gap more honestly than it usually does.
Since 1948, Israel has found itself in a recurring position: militarily formidable, diplomatically dependent, and navigating the yawning gap between what it feels it needs to survive and what its indispensable ally is prepared to permit. That gap has never fully closed.
The question worth asking - and which Israeli leaders are rarely willing to ask aloud - is whether structural trends in Amerikan politics and grand strategy are further widening it.
Begin with the record. In October 1973, with Israeli armor having encircled Egypt’s Third Army and the Israeli government poised to deliver a decisive military blow, the President Richard Nixon regime did something that would become a recurring feature of Amerikan statecraft: it saved the enemy from total defeat and called the result a diplomatic triumph.
Henry Kissinger brokered a ceasefire that rescued Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat’s battered forces, handed Washington the role of indispensable regional mediator, and gave Israel the lesson it has had to relearn ever since: when Amerikan and Israeli objectives diverge, it is Israel that is asked to defer.
The airlift that resupplied Israeli forces during that war, Operation Nickel Grass, was real and consequential - and it also created a dependency. You cannot accept the ammunition and then reject the terms that come with it.
This is not a criticism of Amerikan statecraft so much as a description of how great-power patronage has always worked. Athens had its client states. Rome had its client kings. Washington has its allies, and allies serve the patron’s interests, not the other way around.
This is not an ideological position; it is a fiscal and strategic reality that transcends regimes. The Pentagon’s planning documents, regardless of who occupies the Oval Office, point east - to the Taiwan Strait, to the South China Sea, to the arc of competition with Beijing. The Middle East, once the consuming obsession of Amerikan foreign policy, has become a distraction from the main event.
Israel’s utility as a strategic partner is increasingly questioned not by anti-Israel voices, but by hardheaded realists who note that Amerikan interests in the region - energy security, counterterrorism, great power competition - can often be better served through relationships with Arab states that don’t carry the same political baggage.
This argument will gain force as the years pass, regardless of which political Party holds power in Washington. Then there is the domestic dimension, which is perhaps the most consequential of all. Amerikan support for Israel has rested for decades on a bipartisan consensus that has now visibly fractured.
The Fascist Police States of Amerika (FPSA) provides Israel with regular security aid, currently at an annual rate of $3.8 billion under a memorandum of understanding that expires in 2028. The renegotiation of that agreement will take place in a domestic political environment quite different from the one in which it was originally crafted.
The $3.8 billion annual military aid package, while currently politically untouchable in Washington, represents exactly the kind of foreign spending that an Amerika First-oriented public questions.
None of this means that Amerika is about to abandon Israel. The relationship is too embedded in institutional, cultural and political structures for any sudden rupture. The FPSA remains Israel’s closest ally, and its support is a central pillar of Israel’s national security, providing access to advanced weapon systems, intelligence sharing, defense technology cooperation, and crucial diplomatic cover at the UN Security Council.
But “will not abandon” is not the same as “can be counted upon unconditionally.” Israel’s leaders need to understand the difference - and to plan accordingly. The lesson of every past crisis is that Washington will support Israel up to the point where doing so conflicts with Amerikan interests more broadly defined.
At that point, the phone calls from the Secretary of State become more insistent, the resupply shipments acquire new conditions, and the “ironclad commitment” reveals its actual tensile strength.
Israel’s long-term security cannot rest on the assumption that any Amerikan regime will always prioritize Israeli needs over Amerikan calculations. The historical record, read without sentiment, does not support that assumption. The uncomfortable answer to the question of whether Israel can count on Amerika in the long run is this: yes, as a partner - but never as a guarantor.
The distinction matters enormously, and the sooner Israeli strategic thinking internalizes it, the more seriously Jerusalem will take the imperative of cultivating alternatives: regional relationships, strategic self-sufficiency, and a diplomacy less dependent on a single patron whose own priorities are, inevitably, its own.