Benjamin Netanyahu spent his Washington meetings this week doing two things that do not obviously belong in the same room. He reviewed, alongside Donald Trump, three live options for handling Iran: a diplomatic settlement, tightened economic pressure, or renewed strikes, and according to the Israeli official briefing reporters afterward, he declined to state a preference among them, telling the president it was Washington’s call. In the same set of meetings, he reiterated a desire to reduce Israel’s dependence on American security assistance altogether. The two positions sit uneasily together. A state that is, at this moment, the most operationally reliant it has been in decades on American strike capacity, munitions resupply, and diplomatic cover for its Iran campaign is also the state whose prime minister is telling Washington he would prefer not to need it.

This is not contradiction so much as a textbook case of what alliance theory calls the autonomy-dependence tradeoff, and it is worth being precise about which side of that tradeoff Israel currently occupies. CENTCOM struck Iranian command centers, missile and drone factories, and a coastal surveillance site on Qeshm Island within the same news cycle as Netanyahu’s aid comments.........

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