How is This Ally Different From All Other Allies?

Simple. In every formal U.S. military alliance, the motive of our allies is painfully clear. If they get in trouble, we will fight their battles.

Israel, with which we have no formal alliance, fights our battles. And it fights them better than we do ourselves.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Iran has been by far the most relevant and potent enemy of the United States, seething with an irrational hatred that makes its pursuit of a nuclear bomb the most frightening prospect we have faced in decades. Iran has brought piracy back to the Red Sea, disrupting one of the world’s most important trade routes by backing the Houthi. Iran threatens the Sunni population in the Middle East, which otherwise is increasingly integrated into the Western economy, not merely as a collection of petrostates but as important sources of capital and innovation.

Iran is the primary support of Hezbollah and Hamas, both dedicated to the destruction of Israel, which among many other crucial roles, is the frontal lobe of the U.S. semiconductor industry. From Intel’s Israeli design centers and wafer fab in Kiryat Gat, to Nvidia’s crucial ownership of Israel’s Mellanox switch fabric communications chips, Israel’s genius lies at the heart of the U.S. tech economy. Without Israeli innovations, U.S. companies (with the United States merely 4.23% of global population) would command nowhere near their current amazing 70% of world’s global corporate market cap.

American performance vs. Iran has been dismal, starting with the elder Bush’s bizarre decision to go to war against Iraq, at that time Iran’s most dangerous enemy. When enforced, sanctions have been damaging but ineffective in pushing Iran toward peace and away from nukes.

All told, in the 45 years since Iran declared itself by seizing the U.S. embassy and 66 American hostages, the United States has not done anywhere near the damage to Iran that Israel has done in the past six months and especially the past two weeks.

The complete repulse of the massive Iranian missile and drone attack against Israel in April, during which Israel warded off some 170 Iranian drones, more than 30 cruise missiles, and more than 120 ballistic missiles, and sustained no fatalities, changed the world. The feat exemplified a massive shift in the balance of power toward defense and against aggression. As important in the near-term, Iran was humiliated after more than four decades of being the humiliator of the United States.

Then came the great pager caper, followed by the walkie-talkie terror and now pinpoint Israeli air strikes into Lebanon that eliminated essentially the entire command structure of Hezbollah. Iran spent more than $10 billion, decades of effort, and enormous political capital building up Hezbollah and Hamas as proxy armies. Both stand on the brink of ruin today, thanks to Israel. Israel strikes against Houthi bases in the past few days have been many times more effective than any U.S. action.

Once America’s ineffectiveness against Iran seemed mostly a matter of will. Today, Israel exceeds us not only in will but in skill. Not in all its history has the U.S. intelligence apparatus pulled off anything like Mossad becoming the supplier of those pagers and walkie talkies to Hezbollah or locating dozens of the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah in real time to facilitate their destruction with so little collateral damage. Not to mention packing an Iranian safe house with explosives two months in advance to assassinate Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh the moment he was confirmed to be in his room. That was one well-hidden bomb.

As we write, Iran’s “supreme leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is in hiding in a secure location out of fear that he is high on Israel’s target list. No “supreme leader” has ever gone into hiding for fear of the United States.

For many decades, American supporters of Israel rather condescendingly referred to that country as “our closest ally in the Middle East.” Damning with faint praise. Today, Israel is unquestionably our most important and capable ally in all the world. It is also our most underfunded ally considering the value we get.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, we’ve sent some $85 billion in aid to that country. Exclusive of aid to Ukraine, we spend more than $100 billion a year on U.S. forces deployed in Europe in support of NATO.

Israel traditionally gets a mere $4 billion a year in U.S. aid.  It will get an extra $3.5 billion to alleviate the costs of the current wars. Much of U.S. aid, however, is in support of manufacturing the elements of Israel’s world’s best missile defense systems including Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow, and laser weapons under development. In exchange, the United States gets  to share all the Israeli intellectual property behind those systems. Another $5 billion has recently been authorized for R&D to advance those systems. Compared to the maddeningly inefficient U.S. weapons development system, these are piddling sums.

As deplorable as the Russian invasion is, and however horrifying Russian conduct of the war, the United States  has no strategic interest in whether Ukraine remains independent. The $85 billion and counting we’ve gone through buys us essentially nothing and less than nothing if Russia ultimately prevails. It is heartbreaking to contemplate what Israel could have done with such an investment.

Israel is no longer a pet. It is more effective on behalf of U.S. interests than the United States. As I show in “The Israel Test,” (Encounter Books, 2024), of all the world’s nations it is the ally we can least afford to lose. It is now nothing less than the leader and the spearhead of Western Civilization against the forces that would destroy it.

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