To secure the next American century, the two countries need to build a joint venture based on tech and defense innovation.
To secure the next American century, the two countries need to build a joint venture based on tech and defense innovation.
I t’s time for a reset in the U.S.-Israel relationship. No, not because Israel did anything wrong. To the contrary, it’s because Israel is so essential to America and too many Americans don’t understand why.
For decades, U.S.-Israel ties centered around foreign aid. Washington gives, Jerusalem takes, and American policymakers defend the cost as an investment in a solid ally. That model, however, no longer reflects today’s multifaceted, interest-based alliance.
Fundamentally, the United States wants to win the century over the Chinese Communist Party. And we should expect Israel to fully commit to that victory as well. After all, America’s most powerful adversaries are the leading enablers of Israel’s most powerful adversaries.
But America will only win the century if it dominates super intelligence, quantum computing, critical supply chains, and defense technology. Israel is one of the world’s most important centers of innovation in every one of these areas — with both a capability and will to align its own strategic investments for the benefit of the United States.
Americans should want Israel to invest billions of dollars, both public and private, into SI and quantum research and development in full cooperation with the U.S. Department of Energy, national labs, universities, and corporations.
Last year, President Trump issued an executive order launching a national Genesis Mission — a new Manhattan Project for SI, quantum, advanced energy, and scientific discovery. This summer, the U.S. welcomed Japan as the Genesis Mission’s first international partner.
Israel should be the second to join the mission, bringing its own multiyear investment pledge and offering preferential U.S. access to Israeli innovations. The move would also build on last year’s U.S.-Israel SI and Energy agreement, which envisioned a joint working group to help make America energy and SI dominant with Israel’s help.
Notably, Israel’s innovation ecosystem also includes research and commercial activity in advanced chemicals, synthetic materials, critical mineral recovery and refining, and the development of substitutes for scarce raw materials. America’s victory this century will largely depend on whether it can regain control of the periodic table and a wide range of critical supply chains.
Israel is already a member of the State Department’s Pax Silica, a diplomatic alliance aimed at building out an American-led ex-China supply chain for critical minerals and more. The U.S. should ask Israel to commit billions more to Pax Silica research, development, and commercialization — once again with American preferential access to Israeli innovation.
Finally, the 2026 National Defense Strategy recognizes Israel as a “model ally,” already spending a higher percentage of its GDP on defense than any NATO ally. After the United States, it’s the most innovative country in the world when it comes to defense technology. It battle-tests American platforms and makes them better. It co-develops missile- and laser-defense systems that help keep both countries safe from threats beyond the Middle East.
As global demand for munitions puts unprecedented stress on the U.S. defense industrial base, Israel is investing its own money to rebuild its own manufacturing lines for ammunition, tank and artillery shells, and bombs. And as the U.S. military looks for more flexible basing options, Israel provides air and sea possibilities for ongoing and contingency operations.
The U.S. defense relationship with Israel is no longer a one-way street. More can be done to drive that message home. Preferential access to Israeli defense technology for American warfighters and continued co-development of missile defense systems should be included on the American side of the economic benefit ledger.
Moreover, if Israel agrees to expand its own defense industrial base on its own dime — particularly in the areas where the U.S. defense industrial base will be most stressed in a multifront war with great power competitors — the national security benefits for America would be extraordinary.
Since the total economic benefit of Israeli commitments to the United States would more than pay for continued financing of American-made jet aircraft sales to Israel, that financing should continue with two conditions. First, every dollar must be spent inside the United States, supporting American workers and strengthening the American defense industrial base. And second, the U.S. military should have immediate access to all lessons learned from Israeli use in combat.
America and Israel remain natural allies because we share some things deeper than a transaction: a common Judeo-Christian moral inheritance, a commitment to democratic government, and a conception of human dignity that stands against the forces seeking to destroy the free world. Radical Islamists want to destroy America and Israel, Christians and Jews.
For tens of millions of Americans, that reality is enough. For others, it’s not — which makes the evolving national debate over the U.S.-Israel relationship an opportunity more than a crisis.
Moving from a foreign aid paradigm to an interest-based joint venture will deliver massive economic and security return on investment and help guarantee another American century. That’s a U.S.-Israel relationship every American should support.