Analysis and updates

Israel is nearing the end of a remarkable, half-century-long arc of history in which it first established military dominance over its Arab neighbors and is now asserting the same degree of superiority over Iran, its one remaining regional threat. 

Yet despite that astonishing record of martial success, Israel still needs the United States, its chief geopolitical ally, more than ever. Indeed, it’s fair to say that only U.S. President Donald Trump can end this latest war and deliver the strategic stability the region so badly needs.

Israel is nearing the end of a remarkable, half-century-long arc of history in which it first established military dominance over its Arab neighbors and is now asserting the same degree of superiority over Iran, its one remaining regional threat. 

Yet despite that astonishing record of martial success, Israel still needs the United States, its chief geopolitical ally, more than ever. Indeed, it’s fair to say that only U.S. President Donald Trump can end this latest war and deliver the strategic stability the region so badly needs.

The only question now is whether Trump will stop the war or widen it.

Only Trump, in other words, can decide whether he wants to discard his entire campaign platform and jump into another Middle Eastern war—possibly by ordering the U.S. military to bomb Iran’s most hardened nuclear facility, Fordow—or whether he decides to stop the Israelis at what they deem the cusp of final success by negotiating a deal with the tottering regime in Tehran.

The problem: Trump doesn’t seem to know yet exactly what he wants to do and is grappling with a deep split within his own Republican Party on the issue. In only the last few days the Trump administration has shifted radically from seeking diplomacy and denying involvement in the Israeli attacks to proclaiming, in Trump’s words, that “we” have “total control of the skies over Iran” and the U.S. and Israel might even “take out” Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. 

It appears, once again, that Israel has managed to rope a reluctant Washington into a regional conflict—one that could potentially put the 40,000 U.S. troops scattered throughout the region at risk if Trump attacks Iran. 

This is nothing new. For decades, despite the steady advances in military technology, training, and intelligence gathering that have helped this tiny nation of fewer than 10 million people gain dominance over its much larger neighbors, Israel has depended critically on its alliance with the United States for much of its success.

This relationship began almost at the beginning of Israel’s existence in 1948, when it chose the right side in the Cold War: the United States. The Arab states, for the most part, became partners and allies of the Soviet Union—culminating in the supply of a large amount of Soviet weaponry to Egypt and Syria in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, including then-advanced systems such as T-62 tanks and SA-9 surface-to-air missiles. And Egypt and Syria came close to winning the war. 

But that near-loss for Israel also proved the last time it faced an existential threat........

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