Israel's Post-American Future, Part I : The End of Strategic Illusion

For decades Israel assumed America would always be there. That assumption is becoming the most dangerous weakness in Israeli strategy 

Nachum Kaplan 

 

Israel’s most urgent strategic task is not to persuade US President Donald Trump, flatter JD Vance, brief Steve Witkoff, court the State Department, or beg another collection of American grandees to understand the Middle East slightly better than a confused Labrador staring at a chessboard.

Its most urgent task is to grow up.

For decades, Israel has lived with the comforting strategic assumption that when the worst comes, America will be beside Israel. Perhaps late and grumbling, and maybe after issuing several idiotic statements about restraint, proportionality, and the sacred dignity of men currently building ballistic missiles under hospitals. However, eventually, America would come around.

That assumption is dying.

It may not die tomorrow, or even completely. America is not about to become Iran, Qatar, or Belgium with aircraft carriers. It remains Israel’s most powerful ally, the world’s indispensable military power, and the only country with the capacity to shape the international system at scale.

Israel should not indulge in childish anti-Americanism. America has armed Israel, protected it diplomatically, and stood beside it at critical moments when Europe was busy polishing its conscience and misplacing its spine.

Yet the Trump drama over Iran has revealed something more important than one man’s vanity. It has exposed the central weakness of Israel’s national security doctrine: too much of it still depends on the mood, ego, ideology, electoral needs, and attention span of America’s presidents.

That is intolerable.

Trump is not the whole problem. He is the loudest symptom. Obama believed Iran could be managed through diplomatic theatre. Biden tried to restrain Israel while support it at the same time. Trump, who once presented himself as Israel’s great friend, now appears perfectly willing to treat Iran as a negotiating partner, Israel as an inconvenience, and regional stability as a branding exercise. His supporters will explain this, as they explain everything, by insisting that the master strategist is playing seven-dimensional chess.

Israel cannot base its survival on such fanaticism.

America has its own interests, political cycles, exhaustion, demagogues, isolationists, progressive moral exhibitionists, realist mandarins, and voters who understandably do not wake up every morning asking how to secure the Galilee.

That is normal. Nations have interests, not permanent emotional commitments.

Israel must now do what serious countries do when the world changes. It must stop sentimentalizing old arrangements, and build a post-American strategy while preserving the American alliance for as long as it remains viable and useful.

The first step is intellectual sobriety.

Israel must stop confusing access with control. Having friends in Congress is not control. Having donors, evangelical supporters, sympathetic senators, and former officials on cable television is not control. Nor is a warm speech at AIPAC or a presidential candidate saying nice things about Jerusalem while campaigning in Florida.

Control is the ability to defend yourself when others hesitate.

Israel’s founders understood this. They did not build a state because they trusted humanity’s conscience but because they had studied humanity with appropriate suspicion. Ben-Gurion did not assume that liberal democracies would save the Jews. He assumed they might write moving editorials after the Jews were dead.

That was the entire point of Zionism. Jews did not regain sovereignty to become a dependency with a flag. Israel was not created so that its prime minister could spend every war waiting for permission from Washington. The Zionist idea was not that Jews would finally have the right to lobby foreign governments for ammunition. It was that Jews would regain the power to act in history rather than plead with it.

That spirit must now return.

Israel’s second task is military independence.

Not complete independence. That is impossible for a small state facing multiple fronts and a regional nuclear threat. Even great powers depend on supply chains, alliances, technology transfers, and industrial cooperation. Autarky is for North Korea and other countries that have traded poverty for purity.

Yet Israel needs far greater self-sufficiency in munitions, air defence interceptors, precision weapons, drones, spare parts, cyber systems, armour, fuel reserves, and critical battlefield technologies. Its stockpiles must be measured not in weeks of intense fighting but in years of strategic pressure. Its industrial base must be expanded with the understanding that supply chains are not friendships.

The lesson of Ukraine is obvious: the country that controls production controls the tempo of war against imperialist Russia.

The lesson of Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, and the wider Iranian proxy system is even more obvious: Israel may have to fight prolonged, simultaneous, politically inconvenient wars while its allies urge restraint from rooms very far away from the rockets.

No country can afford to discover during a war that its ammunition is hostage to another country’s election season.

This will be expensive. Good. Survival usually is. Israel has spent decades building one of the world’s most impressive technology sectors. It can build platforms that change the way humanity communicates, trades, navigates, farms, secures data, and fights disease. It can also build more shells, missiles, engines, interceptors, drones, and explosives. A nation that can produce genius on demand should not have to behave like a supplicant every time a warehouse in America becomes politically sensitive.

The third task is to assume that Iran is Israel’s problem.

This is the hardest psychological adjustment because Israeli leaders have spent years hoping, sometimes rationally and sometimes pathetically, that America would solve the Iran problem. That America would sanction, deter, bomb, negotiate from strength, and prevent enrichment. It would impose consequences and understand that a millenarian revolutionary regime with regional proxies and nuclear ambitions is not a misunderstood Rotary Club chapter.

Instead, America negotiated, withdrew, sanctioned, negotiated again, threatened, delayed, leaked, restrained Israel, and then rediscovered diplomacy with the enthusiasm of a man who keeps returning to the same casino because this time the roulette wheel is definitely his friend.

Iran has watched all of it.

Tehran understands Western psychology with exquisite contempt. It knows how to pocket concessions, stretch talks, divide allies, activate proxies, perform tactical moderation, and present temporary pauses as historic breakthroughs. It knows that Western diplomats are addicted to process because it allows them to mistake movement for progress. The demented Iranian regime has turned negotiation into a form of strategic anaesthesia. By the time the patient wakes up, the centrifuges are spinning.

Israel must draw the only serious conclusion. If Iran is stopped, Israel may have to do most of the stopping.

That does not mean reckless unilateralism or Broadway strikes for domestic applause. It means that Israel must no longer treat American action as the decisive variable. American participation should be welcomed when available but it should not be assumed. Israel’s red lines must be its own. Its capabilities must match its doctrine, and its doctrine must match its threats and their scale.

A nuclear-armed Iran would be a civilisational disaster. It would place a fanatical anti-Zionist regime under a nuclear shield, embolden Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, and every other franchise in Tehran’s empire of grievance, and trigger proliferation across the Middle East. Saudi Arabia would not sit quietly. Turkey would not abstain. Egypt would not meditate peacefully on the Sinai sunset. The whole region would become a nuclear bazaar run by men with historical grudges, apocalyptic vocabularies, and questionable beards.

Israel cannot outsource this to Washington’s latest mood.