Tablet
The Not-So-Special Relationship
The widening divide between the U.S. and Israel is not only inevitable, it’s for the best
by Jacob Siegel
August 04, 2026
Illustration by Mike McQuade
The wild swings in the U.S.-Israel alliance over two Trump administrations belie a clear trend. Half a century after being formed against the backdrop of the Cold War, the “special relationship” is coming apart. The Israeli and American military establishments are closer than ever, yet the estrangement between their countries’ political elites grows. Despite the great hopes many Israelis had for his presidency, Donald Trump’s unusually strong ties to Israel have not reversed this trend. Support for Israel remains strong among Trump’s base, but a rising faction of Republicans that includes Vice President JD Vance, is converging with the baseline position of Democrats who see Israel as a political liability and are at pains to distance themselves from the alliance.
This is what supporters of Israel who see Donald Trump’s Iran deal as a betrayal have to bear in mind. The special relationship has run into the hard limits of America’s interests and political will. People refusing to face this reality imagine that if only the right adviser got into Trump’s ear or if only Marco Rubio became the next president all would be right again. Desperately casting about for an American savior, they have misread the moment.
A greater degree of separation between the United States and Israel is not only inevitable, it is desirable. Many supporters of Israel seem to be aware only of the significant challenges that this will create for the small country. They overlook the significant opportunities it presents for Israel’s growth.
Some of those opportunities are bound to cause strains with the U.S. as Israel cultivates closer relations to India and China. Those are problems that can be managed by smart Israeli leadership and a robust defense-tech sector that continues producing goods that Washington and the world want. The point is that sometimes allies have divergent interests, as Vice President Vance has repeatedly emphasized. Israel has an interest in maintaining good relations with the U.S. But that is in addition to other interests, including reducing its dependency on Washington, gaining greater freedom of action, rebuilding its domestic defense industry, and diversifying its alliances.
Benjamin Netanyahu placed two bets on Israel’s alliance with the United States.
One bet was on Donald Trump. The two leaders’ past feuds and the American’s erratic temperament looked like minor points compared to Trump’s record as the president who recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and Jerusalem and ordered the airstrike that killed Iran’s terror chief, Qassem Soleimani.
From his first term, Trump broke with many of the dysfunctional norms that had governed U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East for decades. Washington’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment had approached the region’s conflicts as a management problem. Their goal was to lower the intensity of conflict by engineering a rough equilibrium that would prevent any party, including Israel, from getting too strong. Attempts to balance the interests of existential foes were supposed to produce stability. Instead, they ensured the periodic reeruption of war between actors like Israel and Hamas who proved unwilling to adopt the norms of Western bureaucrats.
Trump initially rejected this path by enforcing clearer lines between friends and enemies. His approach was to pick winners and take tributes, rather than to work through State Department offices and NGOs to build complex subdivisions of imperial administration.
Siding with Trump promised Israel not only greater external support, but a freer hand to pursue its own war aims after Oct. 7. In return, Netanyahu offered something that he believed Trump wanted: a powerful ally to project power in the Middle East on behalf of U.S. interests. If Netanyahu’s first bet paid off, Israel stood to be promoted from first among American client states to U.S.-backed regional hegemon in the Middle East.
The problem for Israel was not necessarily that Trump decided to end the war with the Iranian regime still in power. Rather, it was that he was bribing the Iranians by bartering with Israel’s vital security interests.
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At the same time as he was drawing closer to Trump, Bibi placed a second bet to make Israel less dependent on Washington. In January, he vowed to wean Israel off U.S. military aid over the next decade (the aid Israel receives comes in the form of credits that it’s required to spend on U.S. weapons companies). Last December, Netanyahu told a graduating class of the Air Force Academy that he had approved an investment equal to $108 billion over the next decade to build up Israel’s domestic munitions industry. “I don’t know if a country can be completely independent but we will strive to ensure our arms are produced as much as possible in Israel,” he told the new pilots. His goal was “to build an independent arms industry for the State of Israel and reduce the dependency on any party, including allies.” When U.S. officials tried to dictate Israel’s war plans, for instance by demanding that the Israeli army not enter the Hamas stronghold of Rafah, Netanyahu proved that he was willing to defy Washington.
When Israel and the U.S. launched their joint war against Iran in February, it looked initially like both wagers were paying off. Israel was demonstrating its independent capabilities while acting in concert with the global superpower to defeat a common enemy. The American and Israeli militaries operated with an unprecedented level of cooperation. Pilots from the two countries flew side by side to strike precoordinated target packages. Intelligence-sharing, planning, and rehearsals took place in joint command centers.
But we know how this story ends. After enduring the devastation of their top leadership and military infrastructure, the Iranians brought the war to a halt by shutting down maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Fearing the costs of a prolonged closure and unwilling to risk the escalation necessary to reopen the strait by force, Trump offered the Iranians a deal. Effectively, the U.S. would pay Iran a ransom. In return Trump would extricate America from a broadly unpopular war before the midterm elections. By the terms of the deal, hundreds of billions of dollars would be released to Iran. The U.S. made other promises to restore Iran’s military capacity and deterrence, including a pledge to force Israel to call off its operations against Iran’s Lebanese terror proxy, Hezbollah. In return the Iranians would reopen the strait. At a later date, American and Iranian officials would reconvene to negotiate terms of a broader agreement.
Instead of neutralizing the Iranian threat and crowning Israel the dominant power in the Middle East, the first of Netanyahu’s gambles went bust. With Iran on the ropes, Trump’s deal revived the regime’s fortunes. The agreement was loose enough that its terms could easily be nullified or rewritten, but its immediate impact was a win for Tehran. For the Arab leaders who pay careful attention to even subtle power shifts in the region and had endured Iranian missile barrages during the war, the message was clear. American security guarantees were provisional at best. The Iranian regime, whose survival had been in question, was reestablishing its claim to be the region’s dominant actor.
Yet this outcome is less surprising than the furious allegations about Trump’s betrayal suggest. Trump, who once decried the weakness of bribing terror states, calculated that it was now in his interest to do so and simply reversed course, albeit with the implicit understanding that he might abruptly reverse again at some future date. There was a clear precedent for both his personal inconsistency and the substance of his policy. He was reverting to the standard U.S. approach to the region, which aims to manage conflicts within a concert of powers.
The problem for Israel was not necessarily that Trump decided to end the war with the Iranian regime still in power. Rather, it was that he was bribing the Iranians by bartering with Israel’s vital security interests—namely the freedom to aggressively deter Hezbollah.
The point was made clearly when Trump told a reporter at the Financial Times that Netanyahu “won’t have any choice” and would be forced to accept whatever deal Trump made because “I call all the shots.” In other comments, Trump accused the Israeli leader of nearly sinking the deal by carrying out counterattacks inside Lebanon. Bibi, whom Trump had once praised, was now attacked as a bloodthirsty warmonger; an obstacle to peace just as Democrats had always accused him of being.
Simply put: Bibi’s two wagers proved incompatible. Taken as far as it could go—to joint operations aimed at toppling the regime in Iran—the bet on Trump stopped short of Israel’s strategic goals. Moreover, it did so in its final act by threatening Israel’s freedom to act as a sovereign power in defense of vital interests on its own borders.
That leaves the bet on independence as Israel’s path moving forward.
Some of Israel’s supporters seem to believe that their task is to rally Western leaders to reembrace a shared civilizational mission. But by claiming to speak for the West’s “true, forgotten values,” they come across as pleading and desperate for friends—exactly the wrong message for a strong nation seeking to cultivate partnerships. What Israel needs is a sober assessment of its own strengths, limitations, core interests, and ultimate goals for the future. Those factors should determine the shape of its alliances.
Israel has a set of strategic, territorial needs for the country to be livable over the next 20-30 years. It has to maintain control over the high ground in Judea and Samaria that can target Ben-Gurion Airport and Jerusalem. It has to strengthen control over the strategic Golan Heights that guards the country’s borders with Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.
MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP via Getty Images
Crucially, Israel must de-internationalize the security situation within its own borders and with its neighbors. Arrangements that rely on third parties to guarantee the country’s defense, whether that party is the U.S. or the United Nations, are dangerous traps. Israeli soldiers are currently fighting and dying to clear Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon because the 15,000-person international peacekeeping force authorized by the U.N. in 2006 for precisely that purpose failed to deter it in the slightest. Instead, the U.N. and Lebanese Armed Forces acted as accessories to the terror group, providing cover for Hezbollah’s soldiers to reoccupy and fortify positions that they used to attack Israeli civilians. It is up to Israel alone to keep Hezbollah north of the Litani River where the group’s short-distance missiles and drones cannot reach its population centers. Just as it is up to Israel alone to demilitarize Gaza and prevent the Sinai from being remilitarized.
All of these needs are existential. All of them contradict current U.S. policy. All of them require Israel to exit the terms of its current alliance.
With the chapter closing on its role as an outsize client state, Israel needs to develop itself as an independent regional power that is a desirable partner by virtue of its ability to innovate technologies and project force. Neither the U.S. nor Europe want to see Israel play that role. However, that does not mean that Israel cannot continue trading and coordinating with Europe and America as opportunities arise. America is currently allied with Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, and Qatar—all countries actively hostile to Israel—yet Israeli leaders manage to overlook this as they pursue matters of mutual interest with the U.S. The point isn’t to pick fights with the U.S. or coerce Washington into adopting Israel’s strategic priorities—an impossible task. It is to pursue common interests at a safe distance.
At the same time Israel should be developing closer ties to India, Russia, and China while strengthening its relations with the United Arab Emirates and looking to bring other receptive Sunni Arab states into trade and defense agreements.
After three years of war, the Israeli cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and air defense markets continue to grow at an impressive rate. A recent report by the Israel Innovation Authority, a government office, identified Israel as the world’s fourth-largest fundraising hub for high tech and the only entry in the top five that is not an American city.
Israeli intellectual property rights alone are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Under the current aid agreement with Washington, much of that value is shared by the U.S., which gets rights to technology developed under joint innovation agreements and can prevent Israel from exporting certain technologies to other countries.
In the future, more of that technology can go to India, in the framework of a partnership that would see Israel share high tech innovations in return for strategic access to India’s massive manufacturing base and its consumer markets.
But the primary beneficiary of Israel taking its considerable wares to the market would be China. What the Chinese want most of all is access to Israeli technologies, including through direct investment. At the moment those opportunities are mostly closed off, but they should begin to open more.
Given how unbalanced its current trade agreement with the U.S. is, Israel has the luxury of replacing it with new unbalanced arrangements that prioritize strategic partnerships over maximizing immediate monetary returns.
Around the world, the dominant U.S.-led security frameworks of the postwar era are collapsing or being rewritten by the Trump administration. Rather than viewing itself as an exception to this rule and clinging to the past, Israel must prepare for the future.
Jacob Siegel is Tablet’s special features editor. His new book The Information State is out from Henry Holt and can be ordered here. He co-hosts the Manifesto! podcast.
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