The sight of President Donald Trump in Ankara, standing alongside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and signaling an openness to reinstate Turkey into the F-35 fighter jet program, is more than a diplomatic development. For the State of Israel, it is a stark, neon-lit indicator of a profound strategic bankruptcy. While the Prime Minister’s Office scrambles to issue belated warnings against empowering a regime that has openly championed Hamas and trafficked in grotesque anti-Israel rhetoric, the reality on the ground is far more damning: Benjamin Netanyahu’s singular, dogmatic approach to the United States has left Israel profoundly isolated, watching its regional influence erode in real-time.

The Bankruptcy of the “Special Relationship” Doctrine

For years, the Netanyahu doctrine has rested on the comfortable assumption that Israel could bypass traditional diplomatic infrastructure—bypassing the State Department, the intelligence community, and long-standing regional alliances—by tethering its entire strategic future to the personal whims of a single American leader. It was a strategy built on the vanity of “special relationships,” a gamble that personal optics could........

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