A shadow looms over US-Israel ties despite joint action against Iran

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“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

That’s what Mr Joe Kent, an army veteran who ran the National Counterterrorism Center, the United States government’s primary body tasked with fighting global terrorism, wrote in his resignation letter handed to President Donald Trump on March 17.

Mr Kent is a decidedly odd individual. He is associated with far-right, racist white supremacist movements. He dismissed Covid-19 vaccines as “experimental gene therapy” and believes that the 2020 US presidential election was “stolen”. Mr Kent also claims that his wife, who served in the military and was killed in Syria by an ISIS suicide bomber, died in “a war manufactured by Israel”.

Still, he has now become the highest US official to have parted company with President Trump over the Iran war. While unleashing the war on the Iranians was very much Mr Trump’s idea, Mr Kent’s framing of the conflict as one imposed on the US by Israel is shared by many, in both the US and elsewhere in the world. It is also clear that the war will define US-Israel relations for many years to come.

Although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims that he “has created an alliance unlike any before with the United States”, the present war could well be the last one the two ever fight together. The long-term trajectory of US-Israeli relations is hardly favourable.

An alliance of interests

There is no doubt that Prime Minister Netanyahu dreamt for decades about the destruction of Iran’s nuclear and conventional military capabilities. It is clear, too, that he hoped to enlist the US to do Israel’s bidding. But that’s what every Israeli prime minister has tried to do since the 1980s, and US presidents weaker than Mr Trump have successfully fobbed the Israelis off.

Yes, Messrs Trump and Netanyahu have a special affinity for each other – both are right-wingers who disdain traditional politics, mix family interests with state affairs, and have little time for legal procedures – but there is no doubt that Mr Trump sees himself as the dominant partner.

He brushed aside Mr Netanyahu’s appeal to exempt Israel from trade tariffs and overruled Israeli objections on ceasefires in the recent Gaza war. More famously, he used an “f” expletive to order the Israeli Prime Minister to stop bombing Iran in June 2025.

So, why did Mr Trump decide to launch a high-intensity war on Iran after overruling Mr Netanyahu on so many matters?

Essentially, the war occurred because Mr Trump wanted it, not because the Israeli leader cast a spell on America’s “stable genius”.

Mr Trump gave the go-ahead for Operation Epic Fury because he believed in a quick win against a weakened Iranian regime. Because he frequently challenged received wisdom on Iran and was proven right, as he was when he ordered the 2020 assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the key operator of Iran’s Middle East proxies. Because he was intoxicated by the quick way the US decapitated the regime in Venezuela. But also because Iran has indeed been a menace to the US for almost half a century, killing hundreds of US soldiers in various operations and standing in the way of every US strategic design in the Middle East.

Mr Kent himself admitted in a media interview in January that although “most Americans aren’t aware of it, our (US) troops in Iraq and Syria have been attacked 150-plus times by Iranian proxies”.

None of this necessarily justifies the current US attack on the Iranians. Iran did not pose an immediate threat to the US. That said, Iran was and remains a long, enduring and serious threat not only to the US, but also to all the Middle East’s states, and to Europe.

There is no question that, for Israel, the current war is a strategic achievement. For the first time in Israel’s history, something resembling genuine joint warfare between the US and Israel is emerging. In the current war, the two have set up integrated command structures, joint planning, and fully shared intelligence capabilities. However, this has happened because the interests of Washington and Jerusalem coincide and not simply because the pro-Israel lobby in the US is particularly powerful.

Nor should one underestimate the broader and genuine security ties between the two countries. The annual US military aid to Israel has been fixed at US$3.8 billion (S$4.9 billion) under a deal signed by former president Barack Obama and is set to expire in 2028. This seems a lot, but most of the money goes to Israeli purchases of US military equipment, so it is, in effect, a subsidy given by US taxpayers to US defence industries, and it remains peanuts out of an annual US budget of US$7 trillion.

Israel’s military value to the US is significantly greater than this budget calculation suggests. Militarily, Israel possesses a unique combination of permanent readiness, real combat experience, and technological innovation. American fighter jets such as the F-15, F-16 and especially the F-35 form the backbone of these capabilities, not as standard systems, but in highly customised forms. Israel has developed its own software architectures, sensor fusion and electronic warfare systems, which are subsequently regularly incorporated into American versions.

While other US allies primarily use their US weapons in military exercises, Israel deploys them in combat conditions against modern air defences, ballistic missiles, drone swarms and hybrid threats. The Israeli military’s ability to conduct complex, state-of-the-art multi-domain operations provides the US with intelligence that cannot be simulated in any exercise.

A fraying link

Still, there are good reasons to believe that the war against Iran will come to be viewed by history as the high point in US-Israeli relations, to be followed by a steep cooling off.

The Gaza war, which raged from Oct 7, 2023, when Hamas militants struck at Israel, has deeply affected Israel’s reputation around the world, but particularly in the US.

A new Gallup poll released on Feb 27 – one day before the US and Israel started striking Iran – has found that 41 per cent of Americans now sympathise more strongly with the Palestinians and only 36 per cent support Israel. This is remarkable, for in all the opinion polls conducted over the past quarter of a century, Israel consistently held a significant lead in the Americans’ sympathies.

More interestingly, US public support for Israel seems to have a generational aspect as well. It began declining from 2019, several years before the Oct 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. And just as significantly, Israel’s support appears to be concentrated among Americans aged 55 or above. In every other age group in the US, Israel is regarded negatively; only a quarter of US voters aged 18 to 34 have a positive view of the Jewish state. In short, the future does not bode well for the current close bond between the US and Israel.

Global strategic developments don’t help either. The US security interests are shifting to Asia. Although Israel has forged close strategic bonds with India (Prime Minister Narendra Modi left Israel days before the latest Iran war erupted), the Indian-Israeli link is kept quite separate from the US.

And when it comes to China, Israel has traditionally been a hindrance rather than a help to the US; the Americans frequently had to intervene to prevent Israelis from transferring militarily relevant technology to Beijing.

Matters may change now, as China takes a more pro-Arab stance in the Middle East, and Israeli decision-makers no longer see China as just a land of business opportunities. Still, Israel is unlikely to prove particularly useful to future US global security needs, a fact which no pro-Israel lobby in Washington will be able to paper over.

The Democrats in the US are already critical of Israel, and cracks are beginning to appear among Republicans as well. As Mr Kent’s resignation this week indicates, the feeling of betrayal among President Trump’s electoral base is acute, and the blame has been primarily focused on Mr Netanyahu.

Republicans heading into the US midterm elections know that voters were promised no more “forever wars”, only to see the US military risking lives and money, allegedly for the benefit of a small American ally.

If the Iran adventure succeeds and Iran’s clerical government is either overthrown or collapses, most of the current tensions will dissipate, and Israel should be able to recover ground in Washington. But if it doesn’t, and if Mr Trump is forced to pull the plug on the operation, the criticism of Israel will reach new levels, and Mr Trump may also be tempted to join in, if only to deflect responsibility.

Either way, it is unlikely that any future occupant of the White House – whether Democrat or Republican – will be as accommodating to Israel as Mr Trump has been, or as financially generous.

Although Israel is now a highly developed economy with impressive achievements in science and research and an enviable military, it will find the decline of its alliance with the US a very painful experience.

The US is not just a supplier of weapons and military protection. It is also the only country protecting Israel from being ostracised in international organisations and shielding it from various economic boycotts.

The US has been and remains Israel’s ultimate security blanket. But the blanket is rapidly fraying.