More ink has been spilled on the unique relationship between the United States and Israel than on perhaps any other geopolitical issue of the last century, save World War II or the Cold War. And yet many of the works produced have been either pro-or anti-Israel polemics, ideological treatments serving only to reinforce prior beliefs.

In The Arc of a Covenant, the eminent Bard College historian and think-tank denizen Walter Russell Mead gives us something else. He harnesses his prodigious understanding of foreign policy and American history and politics to a sensible and balanced exploration of a highly complex and fraught relationship. The book will surely become the definitive work on this special bond.

Adroitly weaving together the broader American foreign-policy movements that he identified in his 2001 masterpiece Special Providence with the specific contingencies of the Middle East, and displaying sensitivity to the powerful moral and material arguments presented by Israelis and Arabs alike, Mead advances three simple propositions: First, support for Israel in the United States derives from core American values and interests that form a strong, bipartisan consensus, not from a nefarious Jewish lobby. Second, those values reflect America’s self-perception as a confident nation determined to share its wisdom with the rest of the world, and those interests comprise energy, security, and maintaining a friendly toehold in a turbulent region. Third, as those values and interests have evolved, the relationship has ebbed and flowed, and the current sociopolitical moment has presented especially thorny challenges.

The special relationship was centuries in the making. “Long before the modern Zionist movement appeared among Jews,” Mead contends, “non-Jewish Americans for both religious and secular reasons found themselves looking toward the establishment of a Jewish state in the Middle East as an important signpost on the road to a better world.”

Not long after arriving on Plymouth Rock, early American colonists vigorously embraced proto-Zionism. “The time will surely come,” Increase Mather proclaimed in 1666 from the pulpit of the First Church of Boston, “when the body of the twelve Tribes of Israel shall be brought out of their present condition of bondage and misery, into a glorious and wonderful state of salvation, not only spiritual but temporal,” as they “recover the Possession of their Promised Land.”

And John Adams once wrote to a Jewish friend, “I could find it in my heart to wish that you had been at the head of a hundred thousand Israelites, . . . making a conquest of that country and restoring your nation to the dominion of it.”

As the nation expanded in the 19th century, this proto-Zionism matured along with it. “Americanism” is the label Mead attaches to the deeply ingrained notions that free markets and democratic institutions will change the arc of world history, that America’s rise reflects providential destiny, that Americans are obliged to spread their principles across the globe, and that the application of those principles will herald the culmination of history. As both Christianity and Americanism came to dominate, respectively, the religious and civic spheres, “both faiths contained elements that would make the United States a largely pro-Zionist country in the twentieth century.”

In 1891, the Chicago Evangelical minister William Blackstone presented President Benjamin Harrison with a petition, signed by luminaries such as J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and the chief justice of the Supreme Court, urging the White House to lean on the Ottoman sultan to allow Jews to migrate to and establish a national home in Palestine. “Why,” asked the petitioners, “shall not the powers which under the treaty of Berlin, in 1878, gave Bulgaria to the Bulgarians and Servia to the Servians now give Palestine back to the Jews?”

The State Department buried the so-called Blackstone Memorial, and the president never contacted the sultan, but its spirit was revived in 1922 when Congress voted overwhelmingly for a resolution endorsing the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British government declared that it viewed “with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and that it would use its “best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” President Warren Harding proudly signed the resolution into law. It was also heartily backed by former presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and future presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover because it reflected deeply rooted Americanist sentiment, even as many American Jews at the time (possibly a majority) disapproved.

Across the pond, Mead recounts, Theodor Herzl, the tribune of modern Zionism, managed to persuade Kaiser Wilhelm II to ask the same sultan in 1898 to accept untold millions from Jewish donors in exchange for ceding Palestine to the Jews. As a member of the Hohenzollern dynasty, the kaiser embraced Pietism, a sect of Protestantism that was positively inclined toward the Jewish people, and as a practitioner of realpolitik, he saw an opportunity to strengthen the Ottoman Empire, by rehabilitating it financially, at the expense of the Russians. While the plan failed when the sultan politely declined the kaiser’s offer, it demonstrated how “the Zionism that Herzl built into an important historical force was not a movement of Jewish power, but a movement that linked the preferences and passions of the gentile world to the needs of the Jewish people.”

When on May 14, 1948, it came time to recognize the nascent State of Israel, President Harry Truman serendipitously proved to be the right man in the right place at the right time. Buffeted by progressives on the left agitating for the new world order supposedly ushered in by the United Nations and by isolationists on the right determined to never again send GIs overseas to fight someone else’s war — and confronted by Secretary of State George Marshall, who threatened resignation if Truman endorsed the formation of the Jewish state — the stubborn haberdasher from Independence, Mo., stood his ground.

Mead punctures several myths surrounding this seminal moment. First, in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, it was not the American Right that favored Zionism, but the Left, led by Eleanor Roosevelt and spurred by sympathy for the post-Holocaust plight of the Jews, by support for the beleaguered underdog in the Arab–Israeli conflict, and by appreciation of the rigorous socialism of the kibbutz movement. Only after 1967, when Israel conquered the West Bank, Gaza, and the Sinai, and the country’s ethos began to drift away from its socialist roots, did progressives’ ardor fade.

Second, Marshall’s opposition to recognizing the Jewish state stemmed less from the traditional Arabist orientation of Foggy Bottom than from an aversion to encouraging the Jews in Palestine to continue prosecuting a war that Marshall doubted they could win. Days before Truman’s fateful decision, Marshall warned Moshe Sharett, who would later become Israel’s second prime minister, that Jewish leadership was “taking a gamble” because “there was no assurance whatever that in the long-range the tide might not turn against them.”

Third, a fateful Oval Office meeting between Truman and Chaim Weizmann, then the head of the World Zionist Organization, desperately brokered by Truman’s childhood Jewish friend Eddie Jacobson, was likely less consequential than originally thought. Mead notes that the following day, the United States actually withdrew its support for the United Nations Partition Plan, which had proposed awarding the Jews a state. However, while the discussion at the meeting wasn’t recorded, it stands to reason that Weizmann’s report on the strength of Jewish forces instilled in Truman sufficient confidence in their ultimate victory to overcome Marshall’s strenuous resistance.

The goodwill didn’t last long, though. With the Soviets and Czechs arming the new Jewish state, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations telegraphed wariness toward it. “Washington policymakers,” Mead contends, “believed that Egypt was the key to the Middle East and that good relations with Arab nationalists and military rulers offered greater promise for American Cold War strategy than an alliance with Israel.” But following the young country’s near-annihilation in 1967 and its survival of another brutal onslaught in 1973, amid Soviet retrenchment from the region and a vicious energy crisis, the Johnson and Nixon White Houses reversed course, embracing both Israel and the Gulf states in a balanced approach that sought to shake off the post-Vietnam doldrums. “The development of America’s special relationship with Israel enabled the special relationship with the Arab oil producers without which the American political, economic, and foreign policy revival from the crisis of the early 1970s could not have taken place,” writes Mead.

The same logic has driven the seemingly monomaniacal — and still unfulfilled — American push for peace in the Middle East. As Mead puts it, “never in American history have so many presidents of so many points of view expended so much effort and political capital on a single objective — and never has so signal a failure in American foreign policy led to so little meaningful reflection and change.”

Both idealism and realism have motivated this utopian desire on the part of U.S. leadership to arrange for the Levantine lion to lie down with the lamb. “American public opinion liked peace and it liked Israel,” Mead writes. “Negotiating with Israel’s neighbors to help make Israel safe, while reducing the chances of war in a region still vitally important to the nation’s oil supply, struck many American voters as an excellent use of a president’s time and reassured them that his foreign policy comported with their personal values and goals.” The peace process became a sort of pressure-release valve for American diplomatic efforts around the world. It enabled the United States to maintain friendly relations with a wide variety of global actors with divergent interests by reassuring jittery European partners and the Gulf sheikhdoms that the U.S. remained committed to and engaged in bringing about a two-state solution.

As his chronology shifts into the 21st century, however, Mead’s analysis drifts toward the conventional, describing well-worn trends of increasing support for Israel among the Evangelical Right in the U.S. and abroad and the growing disillusionment with the Jewish state on the part of European elites and American leftists alike. And his rehearsing of events such as the Iraq War, the Arab Spring, and the Libyan intervention, while eloquent and informative, distracts from the main thrust of his argument. Throughout the book, he sometimes overindulges his desire to delve into details of American foreign and domestic policy that blur his otherwise sharp focus.

Those quibbles aside, Mead’s masterly examination of an immensely complex subject has yielded a sensitive treatment. While the attention devoted to the special relationship may occasionally appear outsized, that’s a reflection of its deep roots in the American tradition. As Mead puts it: “The state of Israel is a speck on the map of the world; it occupies a continent in the American mind.”