The U.S.–Israel Alliance Is a Strategic Bargain
Aid to Israel is not charity. It is one of the most profitable strategic investments the United States has ever made — and a prototype of Trump's vision for the rest of our alliances.
Normally, our Deep Dives are for Premium Members only, but this one is so important — and so controversial — that we’re making it free for everyone.
by Rod D. Martin
March 23, 2026
There is a small but vocal strain of “America Only” commentary that endlessly repeats a falsehood: “we get nothing from our aid to Israel.”
Au contraire, mon frère.
The truth is, America’s alliance with Israel is not a favor or a handout. It is a major pillar of American strength. It’s a strategic investment, an extraordinarily inexpensive way for the United States to buy intelligence, military innovation, strategic reach, regional leverage, and a reliable democratic ally in the most dangerous and unstable region on earth.
Even if you strip away every moral, cultural, religious, historical, and civilizational consideration — and there are many — the U.S.-Israeli alliance would make overwhelming sense on the coldest possible national-interest grounds.
Israel is not merely an ally. It is a force multiplier. It makes American power cheaper, smarter, and more effective than it could be otherwise.
And that points to something larger still. Israel is not just a valuable ally. It is the prototype of Trump’s vision for the rest of our alliances. A competent, heavily armed, technologically sophisticated regional partner that can handle the ordinary threats in its own neighborhood without direct American intervention. That allows the United States to support with depth, integration, and intelligence, while retaining the ability to apply decisive power when the threat is too large for any local state, or even several acting together, to handle alone.
This worked in the 12 Day War. Donald Trump wants to make it work in Europe and Asia as well, standing up our allies as partners, not dependents.
That is certainly how NATO should work, but too often has not. That is how Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia should work, and increasingly do. That is what a sane American alliance system looks like: not dependence, but partnership; not protectorates, but pillars. Pillars capable of securing their own regions under normal circumstances, so America doesn’t have to do all the lifting, defend everywhere at once, and spend itself into oblivion.
In a world like that, America becomes dramatically stronger. America can concentrate force. America can choose its moments. America can remain the arsenal, the backstop, the guarantor, and the finisher — without also serving as the “policeman of the world.”
Netanyahu’s Israel is the proof of concept.
Israel Handles Threats Before America Has To
America spends an average of $3.8 billion a year on Israel, or one-fiftieth (1/50) of what we’ve sent Ukraine. Hardly any of that leaves the United States: almost all of it goes to U.S. defense contractors for joint U.S.-Israeli projects. The critics speak as if America is “giving” Israel money. “Partnership” is the correct term, and we’re picking up our share of the bill.
In Washington terms, $3.8 billion is a rounding error, a fraction of our spending on Ukraine and barely more than one-third (1/3) of what we spend on Somali daycare fraud (“Learing Centers”) in Minnesota alone (and wait till you see Gavin Newsom’s California!).
By stark contrast, the money we send Israel actually buys something.
One of the least appreciated benefits is this: Israel often acts quickly where America would otherwise be forced to act later, but at a far higher cost.
When Israel destroyed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program in 1981, the whole world howled. But for America to do the same thing would have risked a global war with the Soviet empire. When Israel destroyed Syria’s reactor in 2007, it did the world a similar favor, as became even more apparent once the country fell into civil war. Israel’s repeated covert and overt actions against Iran’s nuclear program, weapons pipelines, terror networks, and proxy infrastructure have likewise delayed, degraded, or disrupted threats that otherwise would have required war ten to twenty years sooner.
The contribution is not theoretical. Israel kills terrorists. Israel degrades missile programs. Israel disrupts arms transfers. Israel penetrates enemy networks. Israel destroys strategic threats before they mature. And every time it does, America benefits.
The alternative is not some peaceful vacuum. There are no vacuums in geopolitics. There are only spaces one power controls until another power fills them.
When America retreats, Iran advances. When America hesitates, Russia probes. When America grows confused, China arrives with money, ports, telecom networks, surveillance systems, and diplomatic cover. That is the actual choice-set. The world does not freeze while Washington holds seminars and struggle sessions.
Israel helps prevent that outcome in the Middle East by being the one country in the region both willing and able to confront the West’s enemies on a daily basis. And because Israel does so with its own soldiers rather than ours, the United States spends far less blood and treasure.
This is the point the anti-Israel Right keeps missing. They speak as if support for Israel “drags” America into war. In fact, a strong Israel is essential to keep America out of unnecessary wars. Indeed, in all of history, only in the last year have U.S. and Israeli forces felt the need to fight side by side in any offensive war.
Israel handles threats locally, with local knowledge, local stakes, and local force. It absorbs pressure that would otherwise move outward. It is not a drag on American power or wealth: it costs less than a single U.S. submarine every year. It is a substitute for American power in precisely those contingencies that should be handled regionally if at all possible, and without an American footprint.
That alone is worth the investment.
Israel Is an Irreplaceable Weapons Laboratory
Now add the military-technological side, which is sure to prove even more important in the decade ahead.
America’s defense-industrial base is formidable, but it has too often suffered from sclerosis: bloated procurement, slow acquisition cycles, doctrinal lag, bureaucratic caution, and peacetime assumptions in a wartime age. Trump and Hegseth are making a difference. But it’s a big aircraft carrier to turn.
Israel has the opposite problem. It lives under immediate threat. Missiles actually fall there, as much in peacetime as not. Drone swarms are not hypothetical. Electronic warfare is not a panel discussion. Interception economics are not an abstraction.
That pressure produces innovation. And America benefits immensely.
Iron Beam, Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow, Trophy, advanced drone warfare, cyber-defense architectures, signals intelligence integration, electronic attack, layered missile defense — these are not merely Israeli assets. They are part of the U.S. strategic ecosystem. Some feed directly into American capabilities. Others offer combat-proven lessons American planners would be fools to ignore.
And — a bit louder for those in the back — all these technologies are joint projects with the United States and essential to U.S. defense.
Iron Beam and related directed-energy systems are revolutionary. The historic problem of missile defense has always been cost asymmetry: the attacker spends little; the defender spends much. Israel is helping crack that equation. Once the cost per intercept falls from hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to $2 or $3, the entire offense-defense balance changes: indeed, every modern missile or drone becomes obsolete. The risk of nuclear war drops to nearly zero.
That is certainly good for Israel. It is even better for the United States, because America has vastly more territory, infrastructure, population centers, and critical nodes to defend than any target set on earth.
For decades I have argued relentlessly for missile defense, and more recently for Golden Dome. America should not be trapped forever in the obscene moral logic of Mutual Assured Destruction, where civilian vulnerability is treated as “sophistication,” and national helplessness as strategic wisdom. Reagan was right to want a shield. Trump is right to revive that vision.
No country on earth has done more than Israel to prove that missile defense can work in the real world. Perhaps not perfectly. But decisively.
Real-world combat data beats theory. A thousand think-tank papers are not equal to one real campaign under actual missile fire. Israel has lived through precisely the sort of layered attack environment America must now prepare for: hypersonic missiles, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, drone swarms, proxy barrages, saturation attacks, electronic warfare, and the brutal economics of interception under sustained stress.
That experience is priceless. It’s shaping the future of American defense.
Again, notice the alliance model at work. Israel does not merely consume American weapons. It improves them. It does not merely ask for protection. It helps invent the next generation of it. That is what a real ally does. It expands American capacity instead of merely drawing on it.
The Larger Contest with China
The central strategic contest of the first half of the 21st century is with China. And in that contest, America’s greatest structural advantage is not merely its GDP, its navy, or its geography, but its alliance system. China has clients, dependencies, intimidated trading partners, and temporary fellow-travelers. America has allies. Those are not the same thing.
Israel is one of the most capable of those allies.
Some people still speak as if the U.S.–Israel relationship were a narrow Middle Eastern matter. That is obsolete thinking.
Israel has become a world-class technology power, thanks in no small part to the capitalist revolution launched twenty years ago by Benjamin Netanyahu. That is especially true in cybersecurity, sensors, AI-adjacent applications, communications, autonomous systems, semiconductors, and dual-use defense technology.
American firms know this, which is why so many of them have major R&D operations there or have acquired Israeli companies outright.
The same is true in cyber-defense. Israel faces relentless cyberattacks from Iran, Russia, criminal networks, and others. That has produced a defensive ecosystem of extraordinary sophistication. American firms, infrastructure operators, and institutions benefit directly from it. In an age when cyberwar can cripple pipelines, logistics, hospitals, power systems, and finance, that is not peripheral. It is central.
There is also a negative case the critics refuse to consider. If America ever truly abandoned Israel, Israel would not vanish. It would adapt. It would survive. It would innovate. But it would also hedge. States do that. Serious governments do not base their future on sentimental assumptions, no matter how many liberal internationalists and neoconservatives want them to.
No matter how it played out, the beneficiary of that recalculation would be Beijing.
There’s nothing “America First” about that.
Israel Helps Anchor American Influence in the Crossroads of the World
America can’t just stop caring about the Middle East because it feels like it. Ignoring it won’t make it go away.
Yes, America is vastly stronger because of shale. Yes, we are no longer dependent on Middle Eastern oil as we were in the 1970s. But global markets are global. Our allies in Europe and Asia still depend heavily on Middle Eastern energy flows. And it’s not just energy: it’s global trade in general. The Strait of Hormuz still matters. The Red Sea still matters. Suez still matters. The Eastern Mediterranean still matters.
The Middle East sits at the junction of Europe, Asia, and Africa. It remains the cockpit of great-power competition, jihadist ideology, shipping vulnerability, nuclear risk, and proxy warfare. If America loses serious influence there, others gain it. Iran. Russia. China. Turkey. Perhaps all of them at once.
If that sounds paranoid, you clearly didn’t live through the Cold War.
Israel is America’s strongest local anchor against that outcome. Not the only one. But by far the most dependable.
The Middle East is full of regimes that are unstable, duplicitous, weak, hostile, or some combination of all four. Israel is different. Israel is stable. Israel is competent. Israel fights. Israel wins. It does not take our support and then harbor our enemies. It does not play a double game with Beijing or Moscow when pressure rises. That is rare anywhere. In the Middle East it is priceless.
The Abraham Accords underline this point. Sunni Arab states have finally made peace because they recognize the obvious. Israel is not the problem: Iran is, directly and through its funding, arming, and direction of Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and the Iraqi militias. The de facto military alliance between Israel and the GCC countries against their collective enemy is not just foundational for regional peace but prosperity as well.
This is exactly the sort of regional architecture Trump wants to take global: allies should do more, carry more, risk more, and become stronger because America is allied with them, not weaker because America coddles them. The whole should be greater than the sum of the parts, not merely the burden of one of the parts.
Such a global reordering creates strategic possibilities for the United States that simply did not exist before.
The Moral Point Matters
Unlike every other country in the region, Israel is a real democracy, with real elections, real courts, real civil society, real dissent, and real rights. That’s true for all who wish to live in peace with it, as its Arab citizens — one-fifth (1/5) of its population — can attest. It is a civilized, productive, innovative society built under extraordinary pressure and constant threat.
Against that, its enemies are terrorists, theocrats, dictators, proxies, and ideological movements that glorify murder, sexual barbarism, hostage-taking, and the extermination of a people whose central offense is existing. The same jihadist currents that target Jews also target Christians, Westerners, dissidents, and any Muslim unwilling to submit. In Iran’s case, the Islamist regime actually executes girls for getting raped.
Moral clarity on this point is good in itself. But we also must be clear that the regimes and movements that hate Israel hate us even more. The same Iranian regime that chants “Death to Israel” chants “Death to America.” It calls Israel “the little Satan”, but America “the Great Satan”.
These civilizational forces attacking Israel are part of the wider assault on the West. The red-green axis that demonizes Israel for its Critical Theory-based “sin” of “settler colonization” seeks to destroy the United States with the same argument. Look no further than Britain, France, Germany, or Columbia University to see their gains.
People who don’t see this aren’t being hard-nosed, or even hard-headed. They are being blind.
The Bottom Line
America does not support Israel out of pity, or because some “Jewish cabal” secretly rules the world. America supports Israel because it’s a force multiplier and a great investment. Doing so yields an astonishing rate of return.
For a relatively tiny annual expenditure, the United States gets a stable ally, a regional anchor, a first-rate intelligence partner, a technology powerhouse, a combat laboratory for the weapons of the future, a barrier to Russian and Chinese encroachment, and a democratic friend that actually pulls its own weight.
That’s not a burden. It’s a bargain. It’s one of the best strategic deals America has ever made.
Indeed, Israel is the prototype for the kind of alliances Trump wants elsewhere: partners strong enough to handle ordinary threats in their own neighborhoods without direct American intervention. From Europe to East Asia, American force should not be needed unless the worst happens. And when the worst does happen, an America that’s no longer overstretched can apply decisive force wherever it will count the most.
That is not isolationism. It’s hegemony. It is also America First.
After the Six-Day War, Bill Buckley commented--somewhat tongue-in-cheek--that "...maybe we *should* sign that mutual security pact with Israel...if only for our own protection!"
I was all-in for that, but it never happened. Still...maybe he was a prophet before his time on that.
👏👏👏 A tremendous deep dive into why Israel is an essential ally to the United States, Dr. Martin you made the case masterfully here! We’ve been aligned with Israel since 1967 and formal allies with them since the 1980s for good reason. First off, Israel deals with threats America can not and the rest of the West is too skittish to. Like in 1981 when they bombed and demolished Ba’athist Iraq’s nuclear facilities and denied Saddam the bomb. Iraq was a Soviet client state so America doing this would’ve meant World War III, but Israel doing it meant it could be demolished without any serious news tube repercussions. They then did the same to Syria’s nuclear program in 2007. Obama simply didn’t have the guts to do it. Israel did and Bashar Al-Assad was also denied the bomb. Israel also is at the frontline of fighting Jihadist groups so we don’t have to. Israel has badly damaged Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Furthermore, they are a bulwark against the Islamic Republic of Iran. True, we give them aid. But that aid mostly goes to defense contractors for joint U.S.-Israel projects that benefit both nations. Plus, this aid is invested back in America and it creates millions of jobs for Americans.
Their defense technology is state of the art and a very handy tool in countering China. Their weapons, defense systems and military vehicles are the best and everyone knows it. They also help keep American influence in the region alive and well so Russia, China, Iran, or Turkey can’t move in and take control of the region. Their defense systems like the Iron Dome, Iron Beam, David’s Sling, Arrow-2, Arrow-3, and other defense systems are essential to U.S. security. Going back to my point about their technology, what would the critics have us do, but from China instead? That hardly seems like America First! Israel is the only successful democracy the region has ever had. It has free speech, a free press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. It’s the only place in the Middle East Christians are actually safe. Muslims, Bahai’i, Atheists, Agnostics, Druze, and others can practice their respective faiths in safety and security and free from persecution. Israeli Arabs have more rights and freedoms, more economic and educational opportunities, higher living standards, and a better quality of life overall than Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East especially Arab women who have doors opened to them in the Jewish state that would be closed to them anywhere else in the Middle East.
Women in Israel have full equal rights and women in the IDF are models of female empowerment and emancipation. LGBTQ+ people have almost all the rights they deserve and Israel recognizes same-sex marriages performed abroad. Disabled people are cared for, loved, valued, and are fully integrated into society. There are even affirmative action programs for them. If you are black, Bedouin, Palestinian, Kurdish, Berber, or a member of any other minority group, you live is a living h*** in any Arab country or Iran. I think people forget that Palestinians are literal second-class citizens in the Arab world. In Israel, Palestinians can become citizens. So much for being an apartheid state! You don’t see Israelis enslaving black Africans, killing women for getting raped, throwing gay people off buildings, performing child marriages, throwing acid in women’s faces, wiping or caning people in public, or kidnapping Yazidi girls and making them sex slaves. Israelis don’t tolerate exploitation of foreign workers, making women fully cover up, raping young boys, beheading people, stoning women for adultery, abusing animals, doing female genital mutilation, or bombing churches for the h*** of it. They are a little slice of western and liberal values in a very primitive, backwards, illiberal, and medieval region.