Pro-America or Pro-Isra

There is a moment in every negotiation when the mask slips and the real hierarchy of loyalties reveals itself. It happened again recently, in the quiet grammar of a policy condition. If a deal with Iran is good for America, if it stops a war, secures a region, spares American blood and treasure, then it should be pursued on its own terms. It should not need to be laundered through a second question, but what does Israel get out of it? The moment that second question enters the room, the first one has already been answered, and not in America’s favour. This is not a rhetorical trick. It is a structural tell. A foreign policy genuinely organised around American interests does not require the ratification of an ally before it proceeds. It calculates costs, weighs risks, and acts. The insertion of an Israeli veto, soft, implicit, but unmistakable, into decisions that are framed as being about American security is not an alliance functioning normally. It is a client relationship wearing the costume of a partnership, and increasingly, the costume does not fit.

I do not say this as someone hostile to alliances. Alliances are the ordinary furniture of statecraft, and no serious analyst begrudges Washington its relationships. What I begrudge, what any honest observer of the last two decades of American foreign policy must eventually begrudge, is the peculiar one-directionality of this particular relationship, in which American strategic autonomy is perpetually available for negotiation, but Israeli strategic autonomy is not. Successive administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, have discovered that the fastest way to kill a sound policy is to let it wander anywhere near Jerusalem’s objections. The Biden administration played this game with a kind of practiced fluency, dressing subservience in the language of “shared values” and “unbreakable bonds.” That the current administration appears to be playing the identical game, merely with a different set of talking points, should trouble anyone who once believed that a change in party might also mean a change in posture. The deeper dishonesty, though, sits beneath the day-to-day theatre of negotiation. It is the elephant that everyone in the room has agreed, by unspoken consensus, not to see. Iran is treated as the singular proliferation emergency of the Middle East, the country whose enrichment levels must be monitored down to the percentage point, whose every centrifuge is a matter of international alarm, whose nuclear ambitions justify sanctions regimes, covert sabotage, and the standing threat of military strikes. And yet a few hundred kilometers away sits a state that has possessed nuclear weapons for more than half a century, has never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, has never submitted to an inspection regime of any kind, and whose arsenal is discussed in Western capitals only in the passive voice, if it is discussed at all. Israel’s bomb is an open secret that everyone has agreed to keep.

This is not a minor inconsistency. It is the load-bearing hypocrisy of the entire non-proliferation architecture in West Asia. You cannot credibly claim to be pursuing a weapons-of-mass-destruction-free Middle East while exempting, by unspoken convention, the one state in the region that actually has the weapons in question. Every argument marshalled against Iran’s nuclear programme, that a nuclear-armed state destabilizes its neighbors, that it invites arms races, that it holds regional security hostage to the judgment of a single government, applies with at least equal force to Israel, and applies to a country that has, unlike Iran, already used overwhelming force against multiple neighbors within living memory. The asymmetry is not a technical oversight. It is a choice, made and remade by every administration that has declined to place Israel’s arsenal on the table. What this reveals, I think, is that the “Iran obsession,” as it might fairly be called, was never really about proliferation at all. If it were, the conversation would begin with disarmament architecture applied evenhandedly across the region, inspections offered and demanded in both directions, and a serious reckoning with the double standard that has calcified into policy over fifty years. Instead, the Iran file functions as a proxy for a different question entirely, whose security calculus gets to define American Middle East policy. And on that question, the answer has been remarkably consistent regardless of who occupies the Oval Office. None of this is a case for indulging Tehran’s own record, which carries its own list of grievances worth prosecuting honestly, its human rights abuses, its regional proxies, its own history of destabilizing behavior. Clear-eyed criticism of Iran is entirely compatible with clear-eyed criticism of the double standard applied to Israel; the two are not in tension, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of evasion. But a foreign policy that claims the mantle of principle while practicing this degree of selective vision is not principled. It is theatre, and increasingly unconvincing theatre, performed for a domestic audience that is growing visibly tired of the script.

The unpopularity of this arrangement is no longer a fringe sentiment. It shows up in polling, in generational splits within America’s own political coalitions, in the rising discomfort even among constituencies that have historically been the most reliable defenders of the relationship. People are noticing the pattern: that policies justified as serving American interests keep bending, at the last moment, toward a different set of interests altogether. They are asking, reasonably, who is actually driving the car. There is also a historical dimension to this that deserves more attention than it usually receives. The pattern of conditioning American policy on Israeli comfort did not begin with Iran, and it will not end there. It runs through decades of vetoed resolutions at the United Nations, through arms transfers that continued uninterrupted even amid documented humanitarian catastrophe, through the quiet understanding that certain questions simply are not to be raised in polite Washington company. Each individual instance can be explained away with its own set of justifications, security concerns, historical debts, domestic political realities. But taken together, across administrations of every ideological stripe, the pattern stops looking like a series of coincidences and starts looking like a structural feature of how American foreign policy is made. That is precisely why the language of “America First” rings so hollow when applied selectively. A doctrine that claims to subordinate every other consideration to the national interest, yet somehow always discovers an exception for this one relationship, is not describing a doctrine at all. It is describing a blind spot, inherited and passed down, that has become so familiar it no longer registers as unusual. If a deal is good for America, that should be sufficient reason to make it. The moment a government needs a second, unstated justification, one calibrated to the comfort of an ally rather than the security of its own citizens, it has already told you which flag it is really flying. The question of the hour is not a difficult one. It is only, at long last, being asked out loud.