By Gatestone Institute | Created at 2026-09-30 09:00:15 | Updated at 2026-09-30 09:47:50
47 minutes ago
The word was "subservient." It was chosen. Addressing the All-In Summit month in mid-September, US Vice President JD Vance said that the United States could not allow its Middle East policy to become subservient to the State of Israel.
Within a day, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee replied that not once, since Israel's independence in May, 1948, had any American ever put boots on the ground for Israel. He made a point of emphasizing that in confronting Iran, Washington was defending itself: "Israel is maybe the appetizer, but we're the entrée...."
Huckabee insisted that no one had nudged or deceived the president into confronting Iran, and that Israel "never begged anything" :
"A lot of what happened in that room I cannot disclose because it was classified. Someday maybe I'll write a book and tell the whole story, but I don't leak," he said. "Nobody pushed President Trump into anything. Nobody misled him into anything." Israel, he stressed, never pressured Trump to intervene. "He did it from his own volition."
Vance argued that America's most – perhaps only -- reliable ally, Israel, and every American relationship, must be rooted in American interests. He added that President Donald J. Trump has shown more willingness to break with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than any president in 40 years.
Vance actually said that after the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Australia, Estonia and Spain had all refused to help Trump even minimally in his effort to constrain Iran.
It was apparently Vance, as well, who had argued for the catastrophic April 8th ceasefire with Iran.
America, successfully using "shock and awe" once again, had been winning. Trump was at last ending a war that Iran's regime had been waging on America, Israel and Western civilization since the regime began. They have been chanting "Death to America" for 47 years -- and they mean it. "Death to America is not just a slogan," the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had said, "It is a policy."
Special Envoy Steve Witkoff in March had reported to President Trump that his Iranian counterparts had opened their meeting by announcing they had enough enriched uranium to build 11 nuclear bombs "in ten days maybe two weeks."
"You give them a nuclear weapon," Trump warned , "they"ll use it within the first hour – and we're not going to let that happen."
"If they had a nuclear weapon," Trump said later, "I'd be calling the Supreme Leader, and I'd be saying, 'Mr. Supreme Leader, how are you, sir? Is there anything we can do for you?' as opposed to bombing the crap out of him."
Unless one wanted to wait and see if Iran would make good on its threat, President Trump, prudently, evidently preferred to remove it.
Trump is the first president, out of seven, who actually decided to end the problem. There was only one hitch: Trump, Thessen stated, had run the ball "to the 20-yard line" – and then stopped!
The bewildering part to may onlookers is that President Trump, while sidelining the party most immediately affected by Iran – the "one-bomb country," Israel -- has nevertheless been courting Middle Eastern leaders -- such Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Syria, which is now demanding the return of the Golan Heights to Syria-- a request akin to Mexico demanding the return of the US Southwest – who also might not be inordinately distressed if Israel were eliminated.
Iran's quarrel with America predates Netanyahu's entire political career. Iran's belligerence began at its funding, with the new regime's seizure of the US embassy in 1979, then holding its residents hostage for 444 days until President Ronald Reagan's inauguration. Iran turned lethal in Beirut in October 1983, when a Hezbollah truck bomb killed 241 American servicemen, for which a federal court later ordered Iran's regime to pay $2.65 billion; and the regime was found guilty of participating in the 9/11 attacks -- among many others -- for which it was ordered to pay $6 billion.
After Hamas's attack on Israel October 7, 2023, Tehran's proxy network – Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and the Houthis, who seized Yemen by force in 2015 -- launched more than 170 attacks on American forces in Iraq and Syria before a drone fired by an Iraqi militia killed three soldiers at Tower 22 in January 2024.
This month, Iran's Revolutionary Guard fired ballistic missiles both at an American warship and at an American base in Jordan, prompting the US Central Command to destroy five Iranian tankers.
The Strait of Hormuz has recently been operating under US control. According to US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, more oil is is being exported from strait than before the war – just not to or from Iran.
"Death to America" has been chanted for 47 years by members of the regime -- and they mean it.
What Israel brings to this quarrel is something Washington has rarely found in the region: an ally that defends not only itself, but is sacrificing its youth to defend western civilization – including the counties that are now denigrating and undermining it.
Ambassador Huckabee's point is verifiable. In the 78 years since Israel was founded, Washington has never sent a single soldier to fight for Israel. The partnership rests on intelligence, weapons development, logistics and the cooperation of two outstanding militaries to operate together. The ten-year memorandum covering fiscal 2019 through 2028 provides $3.3 billion a year in Foreign Military Financing and $500 million for missile defense, $38 billion in all, signed in 2016 by the Obama administration as the largest pledge of bilateral military assistance in American history. Three-quarters of this allotment is dedicated to purchasing military equipment from the Unitd States. Military expert John Spencer points out :
Historically, approximately 74 percent of U.S. military assistance to Israel was required to be spent on American-made defense goods and services. Under a special arrangement known as Offshore Procurement, Israel was permitted to spend up to 26 percent of its Foreign Military Financing allocation within its own defense industry. That exception is being phased out.
By 2028, 100 percent of FMF assistance must be spent in the United States on American-made defense goods and services. No other major recipient of American military assistance operates under a similar arrangement. The money does not leave the American economy. It circulates through American factories, American supply chains, and American workers. In practice, much of what critics describe as foreign aid flows directly to American defense companies, American workers, and the industrial base that also equips the U.S. military.
That money directly supports American workers and American manufacturing. Israel is the largest international operator of the F-35 fighter aircraft, purchasing the jets from Lockheed Martin's production facility in Fort Worth, Texas. Each aircraft supports a supply chain spread across more than forty-five states. Israel also purchases American helicopters, precision-guided munitions, communications systems, radar equipment, engines, and other military technology.
The relationship extends beyond simple purchases. Israeli firms participate in the production and development of systems such as the F-35, with Israel Aerospace Industries manufacturing wings for the global fleet and Israeli companies contributing technologies used throughout the program. The result is a deeply integrated defense-industrial partnership that benefits both countries.
By 2028, every dollar goes to American factories.
The money tells only half the story. David's Sling was built by Rafael with Raytheon as subcontractor under the joint supervision of Israel's Missile Defense Organization and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency. The Arrow 3 interceptor was developed by Israel Aerospace Industries with Boeing. Israel sold two Iron Dome batteries to the U.S. Army in 2019, and in May 2026 it delivered the first Tamir interceptors to the Marine Corps, interceptors that a Raytheon-Rafael joint venture now builds in Arkansas. These are integrated programs in which technology, combat experience and manufacturing travel in both directions, and in which the American taxpayer has acquired systems his own forces now field at a fraction of what developing them alone would have cost.
The same is true operationally. In 2023, Juniper Oak brought 6,400 American and 1,500 Israeli troops, 142 aircraft and a carrier strike group into the largest bilateral exercise the two countries had ever held, with B-52s dropping live ordnance in the Negev. Fifteen months later, when Iran fired more than 300 missiles and drones at Israel, the interoperability rehearsed there produced an interception shared among American, Israeli, British, French and Jordanian forces. In June 2025 Israel's penetration of Iran's nuclear and missile complex opened the way for American bombers to strike Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan eight days later, and on February 28 the two air forces went to war from the same first night. Central Command has built the partnership into its regional architecture because the intelligence and targeting it yields are American assets.
The relationship extends well beyond the battlefield. The 1985 free trade agreement was the first the United States ever signed, American exports to Israel have grown 473 percent since then, and two-way trade in goods and services reached $54.2 billion in 2025. The BIRD Energy program has put roughly $50 million of public money into more than sixty joint projects and drawn some $927 million in private investment behind them. The Qualifying Industrial Zones created by Congress in 1996 allow goods manufactured in Jordan and Egypt to enter the United States duty-free provided they contain Israeli inputs, a device meant to give former enemies a commercial stake in peace, which by Washington's own account it has done.
None of this has ever meant agreement. Washington and Jerusalem have quarreled over settlements, arms sales, Gaza and Lebanon since the relationship began. In March 2015 Netanyahu stood before Congress to attack the nuclear deal President Barack Obama was negotiating that would have let Iran have all the nuclear weapons it liked starting in October of 2023, and eighteen months later the same president signed the largest military aid package in American history.
In June 2026 Trump told reporters at the G7 that Israel had been fighting Hezbollah too long and killing too many people, and his administration is reported to be preparing $2.8 billion in munitions sales to Israel, including 2,000-pound bombs. Beneath the disputes, the institutional structure has nevertheless kept deepening.
If America First means, as parts of the American right argue, that every alliance must justify itself by American interests, Israel more than survives the test. The ledger shows intelligence on common adversaries, weapons developed and built jointly, a partner that fields its own soldiers, fifty-four billion dollars in trade, and a military relationship the Pentagon has written into its plans.
In 2014 a unanimous Senate endorsed a bond forged by shared interests as well as shared values, and Obama signed it. In the $38 billion the CBO counts for the current war, is being spent against a regime that has been killing Americans since 1983, as well as Jews, Israel did not create that.
Vance may have chosen his word out of a fantasy that if the US just closes its eyes to foreign threats and concentrates on building up America, the rest of the world, for good or ill, will somehow take care of itself. The vice-president seems unaware of what Europe, and later America, found out the hard way -- that what happens in Sudetenland (the Czech Republic) does not stay in Sudetenland. The thinking at the time was that if Europe just gave Germany's Adolf Hitler what he was asking for, Sudetenland, he would be happy and go away. Only Britain Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt saw at the time that Sudetenland would be just the "appetizer" and the rest of Europe the "entrée."
The original America First, was led by the lionized hero at the time, the aviator Charles Lindbergh,
a prominent spokesman for the America First Committee, a non-interventionist group formed in 1940. He believed that the U.S. should avoid entanglement in European wars, arguing that the country should focus on its own defense and avoid unnecessary conflict. Lindbergh's speeches suggested that aiding Britain could drag the U.S. into a costly war that didn't serve American interests. His views, however, were criticized for being too sympathetic to Nazi Germany, particularly after he made remarks suggesting that Jewish influence was pushing the U.S. toward war.
He sought to keep the U.S. out of World War II, believing that involvement would weaken American defenses, lead to economic instability, and result in unnecessary loss of life. They advocated for a policy of isolationism, reflecting widespread public reluctance to enter another overseas conflict after the devastation of World War I.,.. [H]e made remarks suggesting that Jewish influence was pushing the U.S. toward war.
The ledger behind this alliance has compiled for nearly 80 years. That Israel is America's only reliable "junior partner" in every season, absolutely yes; that America's policies are subservient to Israel's, definitely no.
