Yonatan Touval
There is a distinct, insidious strategic condition that can befall small states kept too long under the protective umbrella of global superpowers. When external protection is exceptionally generous, the client state can easily become both militarily formidable and strategically undisciplined. It grows fluent in the exercise of raw force but dangerously illiterate in its long-term political consequences. Such a nation eventually acquires the outward manners of sovereignty without any of its traditional, sobering restraint. This happens because the severe costs of that sovereignty are borne entirely elsewhere — in continuous arms shipments, bilateral strategic guarantees, international diplomatic covers, and the patron’s reliable UN Security Council vetoes. Over time, independent national strategy atrophies. In its place emerges a stubborn, unyielding belief that military might can permanently substitute for patient statecraft.
Israel currently suffers from this precise condition. Its recent military attack on Iran, carried out in close operational coordination with the United States, was intended to restore the country's absolute command and deterrence across the West Asian region. Instead, the offensive may well be remembered for exposing the structural limits of that very power.
Iran has been battered, certainly, but it has not been transformed. Its nuclear infrastructure was damaged, not dismantled, and the regime in Tehran endures. Instead of a newly stabilised regional order, Israel may now face something far worse: the old adversary, bloodied and hardened by survival. The recent MoU signed between the US and Iran seeks to halt regional hostilities on terms set by the two countries, revealing the strict limits of the agreement. Israel could fight a major war alongside the US, but it could not dictate the political endgame.
That is the quiet calamity resting beneath operational successes. Tel Aviv has shown that it can reach Iran and punish it, but reach is not resolution. What remains after the smoke clears is strategic drift, diplomatic sidelining, and a deep dependency on the United States that is far more profound than the country's political leaders can comfortably acknowledge, perhaps even to themselves.
For decades, the state has spoken in the proud, defiant idiom of self-reliance while living inside the secure architecture of American protection. Its leaders routinely repeated the grand promise that it would always be able to defend itself, by itself. Yet behind that national creed stood American weapons, deep intelligence cooperation, emergency wartime replenishment of arms, and $3.8 billion a year in direct US military assistance. The deeper the practical dependence became, the more fiercely the political leadership in Tel Aviv insisted it stood entirely alone.
The core problem was not the special relationship as such. It was the extent to which that relationship had become entirely unconditional. Because Washington historically absorbed the diplomatic costs, successive governments believed the occupation of Palestinian territories could be managed indefinitely rather than resolved. Palestinian national claims could be systematically deferred, diluted, and finally recast as an existential threat to be defeated rather than a legitimate political demand to be answered.
In the West Bank, settlements could spread and settler violence could terrorise Palestinian villagers, occurring not merely beyond the state’s reach but increasingly enabled by its formal institutions. Gaza could be sealed off, immiserated, and left without any viable political horizon because Washington could always help absorb the international blowback, even as that cost rose.
This flawed system could easily be mistaken for stability until the day it completely collapsed. On 7 October, the nation met atrocity with a devastating, total war. The unprecedented scale and character of the destruction that followed in Gaza made the charge of genocide part of the world’s formal indictment. Whatever the final legal judgment of international courts, the country can no longer dismiss the accusation as mere calumny.
The devastation has also accelerated a political rupture already underway in the US. The Washington consensus behind unconditional support had been weakening well before 7 October, under pressure from generational change, a skeptical left, and an isolationist right. The assault on Gaza made the break harder to contain. When a senior American official reaches for the ledger, reminding the ally who pays for its defence and warning it not to alienate its only powerful patron, he is not inventing a rupture. He is saying in public what Washington had long confined to closed rooms.
Until now, the risk in the relationship seemed mostly America’s: the danger of being drawn into regional wars that its client began, or being implicated in actions carried out under the cover of American arms, money, and diplomacy. But the liability runs both ways. For the client, the danger is that protection has spared it too long from the discipline that should come with sovereign power. Citizens are right to find the prospect of abandonment frightening. Their enemies are real, and solitude is not the same as maturity. American distance will not, by itself, make the state wiser or safer; it may initially deepen the siege mentality it is meant to alleviate.
The result of continuing this course is already in view — a fortress state, armed beyond measure, striking widely, trusted narrowly, leaning heavily on a patron whose own public is questioning the relationship. That is not sovereignty. It is dependency with a loud voice.
Zionism began in a longing to return to history, to make its people actors and not supplicants, answerable for power because they had at last acquired it. From the start, some critics raised the possibility that statehood, meant to abolish the ghetto, might reproduce it in national form. Contemporary reality has given that warning a tragic shape: a state armed like a regional superpower, yet increasingly unable to imagine a political future beyond force, has narrowed its foundational promise into a garrison and mistaken that narrowing for security.