Israel’s Expanding Alliance

Many Israelis woke up this week with a sense of strategic vertigo. The emerging agreement between the United States and Iran has landed not as a surprise, but as a shock. The outlines are still murky, but the direction is unmistakable: Washington appears to have moved significantly toward Tehran’s position, conceding ground in pursuit of closure. For Israelis, that closure feels premature.

And yet, if we are honest, none of this should be entirely unexpected. The United States is acting like the United States. American policymakers are accountable first and foremost to American voters, not to allies, however close. A prolonged confrontation in the Middle East is deeply unpopular domestically. Energy prices have surged. Political capital is finite, and elections loom large. When viewed from Washington rather than Jerusalem, the incentive to “declare victory” and move on is not a betrayal. It is a political imperative.

The dissonance lies not in values but in geography. The United States and Israel still share a deep reservoir of common principles, the kind that have underpinned their alliance for decades. But alliances are not sustained by values alone. They are sustained by shared perceptions of threat, and here the gap is widening. For the United States, Iran is a distant challenger, one among several global concerns competing for attention. For Israel, Iran is not distant. It is proximate, persistent, and existential.

This divergence creates a strategic asymmetry that cannot be ignored. Israel cannot outsource its definition of security to a partner whose threat calculus is fundamentally different. That does not mean abandoning the alliance with Washington. It means recognizing its limitations with clarity rather than disappointment.

There is, however, another path quietly taking shape. Across a wide arc stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Indo-Pacific, a number of countries are converging around a shared concern: the destabilizing influence of radical Islamist regimes and movements. These states are not identical. They differ in culture, politics, and priorities. But they increasingly share something more concrete than abstract values. They share a threat.

The outlines of this emerging alignment are already visible. The Gulf states, particularly the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, have deepened both economic and security ties with Israel in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Morocco has joined this trend, reinforcing a broader regional shift. To the west and north, Greece and Cyprus have become important partners, both strategically and militarily. Further afield, India represents a massive and growing power with both the capability and the incentive to cooperate on defense and technology. Even in Europe, countries such as the Czech Republic and Germany have shown a willingness to engage more robustly with Israel on shared concerns.

What makes this constellation of relationships particularly compelling is that it is not confined to the military domain. It is equally, if not more, about economic synergy. Israel brings technological innovation at a pace and scale disproportionate to its size. The Gulf states bring capital and ambition. India brings manufacturing capacity and human capital. Europe brings industrial depth and regulatory stability. Together, this is not just a coalition. It is an ecosystem.

Imagine what such an alignment could produce if it were given deliberate structure. Joint development of advanced defense systems is an obvious starting point. The next generation of military platforms, the successors to today’s flagship systems, need not emerge solely from traditional transatlantic partnerships. The successor to the F-35 could just as plausibly emerge from a network that combines Israeli ingenuity, Gulf investment, and Asian production. That is not speculation. It is a logical extension of capabilities that already exist.

The same logic applies to energy, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and infrastructure. These are domains in which cooperation is not only possible but mutually reinforcing. Each partner addresses a gap in the others. Each benefits from the collective resilience of the whole.

To be clear, this is not an argument for replacing one alliance with another. Israel’s relationship with the United States remains a cornerstone of its security and diplomatic posture. But cornerstones do not preclude additional pillars. Redundancy in alliances is not weakness. It is prudence.

The quiet warming of ties among these countries suggests that the foundation has already been laid. What is required now is not a dramatic declaration but a gradual, deliberate deepening. Less rhetoric, more integration. Less assumption, more planning.

Strategic shock has a way of clarifying what routine obscures. The current moment is unsettling, but it is also instructive. It reminds Israel that while friends are invaluable, they are not immutable. Interests evolve. Threats diverge. The responsibility for national security ultimately rests at home.

Israel does not need to look for new friends so much as it needs to recognize the ones it already has – and to think more ambitiously about what those relationships can become.

Good things,

Ari Sacher