U.S. President Donald Trump and his key advisors have grown frustrated with Israel. Can you blame them?
Israel recently bombed Damascus, damaging Trump’s high-profile diplomatic effort to foster a stable, unified Syria and draw down U.S. troops there. Likewise, Israel’s bombing of Iran in June scuttled Trump’s efforts to negotiate a new nuclear agreement with Tehran, ultimately dragging the United States into Israel’s war of choice against Iran.
Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza is preventing the expansion of the Abraham Accords, a high priority in Trump’s second term. And in recent weeks, Israel ratcheted up pressure on Trump to restart wars in Iran and Yemen that Trump had just brokered deals to end.
Added to all that, Israeli forces and settlers shot up a pair of churches in Gaza and the West Bank in July, killing Christians in a war that is supposed to be about destroying Hamas.
It’s no wonder that Trump called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu twice last month to yell at him. But it’s also no surprise that Israel is acting at odds with Trump’s interests—in fact, many experts predicted this would happen. Why? The reason lies not just in a deep Israeli desire for retribution after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, but also in the structural dynamics at the heart of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. These dynamics are shielding Israel from the costs of its own behavior, enabling risky actions that run counter to U.S. interests.
In short, U.S. policy is to blame—at least in part—for Israel undermining Trump’s ambitious objectives in the Middle East. It’s time for Washington to shift the relationship with Israel from patron to partner.
Political scientists have a name—“moral hazard”—for this kind of problem. It tends to emerge when a great power makes a robust security pledge to a weaker, revisionist patron, meaning a state desperate to fix its security problems and/or alter the prevailing security order. Assured of great-power support, the ally becomes more risk-acceptant and less responsive to the demands of the great power, which often ends up paying the costs for the aggression of its weaker partner.
Moral hazard is a common problem in international relations—one that every post-Cold War U.S. president has faced with Israel. And while Israel is the bedrock of U.S. security relationships in the Middle East, adjustments are needed in the relationship to address this moral hazard problem.
Fortunately, conditions are ripe for positive, forward-looking change. Israel is no longer the weak, dependent patron it was when the United States established its ironclad pledge to ensure Israeli security in 1948. It’s now a powerful state, as important conservative voices in Trump’s orbit recognize—arguably the regional hegemon in the Middle East.
Given Israel’s geopolitical stature, Washington needs to upgrade its relationship with the country from one of client-patron to strategic partnership. In the process, it needs to add, as with other U.S. partners comparable to Israel, greater ambiguity to its security pledge to the country. Under this kind of arrangement, the United States will be able to continue to support and protect Israel while reducing the certainty of that support for any and all Israeli endeavors.
This will push Israel to step up and carry more of the burden of its own security. As the cost that Israel pays for its security rises, Israel will need to set priorities and, as with other healthy strategic partnerships in history, bargain more with the United States in ways that give Washington more leverage in the relationship. This will ultimately curb moral hazard to the betterment of long-term U.S. strategic goals.
There are two specific changes that the United States should make to upgrade Israel to a strategic partner. These changes should be the centerpiece of upcoming talks about the 10-year renewal of Israel’s memorandum of understanding with the United States, which is the backbone of the U.S.-Israel security relationship.
First, the current U.S. “ironclad” pledge to Israel is more robust and unconditional than U.S. Article 5 commitments to NATO allies, which allows member states to decide on their own when, how, and even if they respond to an attack on another member state. In the case of Israel, no such caveat or ambiguity exists, largely because Israel was, for decades, a weak state in an especially hostile neighborhood. As the centerpiece of the patron relationship, the ironclad or “steadfast” pledge was critical, then, to help stand up Israel as an independent state.
In upgrading Israel to a partner, Washington should update the nature of its commitment to partner status by making it more conditional—a move that makes sense given Israeli power today. Following the Taiwan model could be useful here, with Washington pledging support for Israel’s sovereignty with the caveat that it reserves the right to determine when and how it carries out that pledge in accordance with U.S. interests. That kind of commitment has worked for decades to deter China from attacking Taiwan and dampen Taiwanese moral hazard (specifically, moves by Taiwan toward independence). The same kinds of benefits would accrue to U.S.-Israel relations.
Second, in line with the suggestions in a recent report by the conservative Heritage Foundation, the United States needs to adjust its military aid transfers to Israel. It should end all military financing to the country and require instead that Israel purchase all hardware that it acquires from the United States.
As with Taiwan, the United States should also progressively switch to providing Israel with primarily defensive military hardware. Israel has a sizable military-industrial complex and is the ninth-largest exporter of arms in the world, meaning that it can adjust to a pivot to defensive hardware and sales rather than financing. To ensure, as required by law, that Israel maintains a qualitative military edge in the Middle East, the United States, which provides roughly half of all arms to the region annually, might need to reduce arms transfers to other states as it makes these changes. That’s nothing new—Washington regularly makes these kinds of adjustments.
These changes to military transfers will serve two purposes when it comes to curbing moral hazard. First, the move to defensive hardware will reemphasize that the U.S. pledge to defend Israel’s sovereignty centers primarily on protecting Israel’s current borders, and not necessarily, or certainly automatically, the country’s broader ambitions in the region. Second, without U.S. grant assistance, Israel’s security costs will rise as it alone will be on the hook for the expenses of its military hardware.
Along with less certainty about U.S. support for its regional endeavors, this should make Israel open to less costly, more cooperative pathways forward to secure itself. Relative to recent crises that have frustrated the Trump administration, that means more Israeli restraint in Syria, more accommodation at the negotiating table to end the war in Gaza, and an effort to fall in line with Trump’s preferences for a negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis.
Some might argue that more ambiguity and a pivot to defensive hardware will embolden regional foes to attack Israel. Arguments like these are all wrong, however. Israel will still be the dominant power in the Middle East with the moves suggested here. Furthermore, ambiguity has worked to protect Taiwan, so it should work with Israel, too. Though more ambiguous, the U.S. pledge to Israel will still be there; hence, by the logic of deterrence, there’s no reason that it won’t deter attacks by regional powers, such as Iran. Proxy groups—Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—may still occasionally launch missile strikes against Israel, but that’s nothing new. Strikes like these have been going on for decades, even with the ironclad U.S. pledge to Israel in place.
Finally, moderate Arab states will welcome the upgrade to partnership in the U.S.-Israel relationship, not because it opens the door to bully Israel more but because it will encourage Israel to look for more cooperative, less forceful ways to secure itself. That’ll be good for multilateral order-building in the Middle East, which is popular in U.S. policy circles, too, including among conservatives.
If that also leads, someday, to the creation of a Palestinian state, then proxy attacks on Israel would likely dissipate significantly as well, given the centrality of that issue to the proxies. Upgrading Israel to a U.S. partner will arguably make Israel more secure, therefore, than it is now as a patron.
Trump wants to be a transformative figure in the Middle East and readjust broader U.S. security commitments for a new era of great-power competition. Fortunately, with Israel’s maturation to major power status, history has given Trump an opportunity—if he’s willing to seize it.
Doing so will require Trump to once again buck the conventional. He’s done that before with Israel. Let’s hope he does it again by moving Israel from patron to partner, the consequences of which will likely be historic.