Israel has often been seen to function as a strategic outpost – or what some have called an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” – for US power in the region. In this view, Washington remains the centre and Israel the margin: the United States supports Israel as a regional instrument, while retaining the ability to restrain it when Israeli actions threaten broader US interests.
Political analysts and commentators often return to this argument whenever Washington and Israel appear to disagree. They did so, for example, after President Trump reportedly asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to bomb Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyah. They did so again when Vice President JD Vance defended the memorandum with Iran and told Israeli critics: “You’re a country of nine million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have”.
Yet such tactical disagreements obscure the larger transformation. Israel is no longer merely an instrument of US policy in the Middle East. Since Trump’s first term, it has become increasingly integrated into the centre through which US regional policy is formulated. Put differently, Israel has become so central to the making of US Middle East policy that it is now fair to ask whether Washington still has a regional policy independent of Israel’s.
Palestine as an Israeli Domestic Question
To trace this shift, one must distinguish between US policy toward the Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its broader policy toward the Middle East. For decades, Washington treated the Palestine question as an Israeli internal affair. This approach was established after the October 1973 war, when Henry Kissinger adopted “step-by-step” diplomacy under President Nixon. Rather than pursuing a comprehensive settlement that included the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the representative of the Palestinian people, Kissinger favoured bilateral negotiations between Israel and each Arab state separately.
This orientation took clearer shape in the 1975 US-Israeli Memorandum of Understanding, drafted by Kissinger during Gerald Ford’s presidency. In it, Washington pledged not to recognise or negotiate with the PLO unless it recognized Israel’s right to exist and accepted UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. Washington also committed to coordinate with Israel over the participation of any additional party in the proposed Geneva Peace Conference.
In this sense, Kissinger helped transform the Palestinian question into an “Israeli internal issue.” Palestinian political representation became conditional on Israeli approval, prior recognition of Israel, and acceptance of a US-led negotiating framework. This shifted the issue away from self-determination and national liberation, and toward questions of borders, security, and negotiations.
Successive US administrations maintained this approach. President George W. Bush, for example, refused to open dialogue with the PLO until it recognized Israel’s right to exist, accepted Resolution 242, and renounced terrorism. Even then, Israel refused direct negotiations with the PLO at the 1991 Madrid Conference, insisting that Palestinians be represented within the Jordanian delegation, a condition Washington accepted.
Congress reinforced this orientation. In 1995, it passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, which called for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and relocating the US embassy there, while affirming that the city should remain united and undivided under Israeli sovereignty. Successive administrations, including Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama, avoided implementing the law by using its presidential waiver clause. This allowed the president to postpone the embassy relocation every six months if implementation was deemed harmful to US national security. By repeatedly renewing the waiver, these administrations preserved the traditional US position that Jerusalem’s status was a final-status issue, not a matter to be settled unilaterally by either Washington or Israel.
Yet these same administrations also refrained from exerting serious pressure on Israel to withdraw from the Palestinian lands occupied in 1967. Instead, they sought to persuade Israel that peace with the Palestinians and Arab states would better serve its security, democratic character, and prosperity, while preserving its qualitative military edge and shielding it from criticism at the UN Security Council. This approach was reinforced by the appointment of Middle East peace officials who were often closely identified with Israel’s security concerns, leading even former US negotiators to criticize Washington for acting too often as “Israel’s lawyer.”
The US Margin of Independence
Despite this support for Israel, successive US administrations tried to balance two principles: giving Israel the upper hand on the Palestinian question, while preserving enough distance between Israeli preferences and broader US policy in the Middle East to protect American interests.
On the Palestinian issue, Washington maintained several formal principles: land for peace; the illegality of settlements, later softened into the claim that settlements were an obstacle to peace; and the position that Jerusalem and borders should be decided through negotiations with the Palestinians. US adherence to these principles varied. George W. Bush, for example, delayed $10 billion in loan guarantees to Israel in 1991 as part of his effort to pressure the Shamir government over settlements and bring Israel to the Madrid Peace Conference, but later treated major settlement blocs in the West Bank as a fait accompli.
The principle of land for peace was historically linked to UN Security Council Resolution 242, which affirmed the inadmissibility of acquiring territory by war and called for every state in the region to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries. The phrase “land for peace” appeared officially in the invitation to the Madrid Peace Conference as one of its guiding principles: Israel entered the conference knowing that peace with Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan would require relinquishing occupied land. Although the conference did not produce peace agreements on all tracks, the principle remained in place, and successive US administrations from Clinton to Obama continued to affirm it as the basis for peace with the Palestinians, Syria and Lebanon.
In the broader Middle East, Washington also maintained policies distinct from Israel’s, especially toward Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and the Arab Gulf states. It preserved leverage over Israel through the relative independence of its military and intelligence institutions.
This independence was clear during the war to liberate Kuwait, when Washington asked Israel not to respond to Iraqi missile attacks so that the US-led coalition with Arab states would not collapse. After the war, the United States built a significant military presence in the Gulf, partly to secure oil supplies and partly to protect the region from threats posed by Iraq and Iran. Although the US military presence in the Gulf, especially in Kuwait, later became central to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Washington did not present the war as a project of Israeli security. It justified the invasion primarily as an effort to disarm Iraq of alleged weapons of mass destruction, overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime, and later promote democracy in Iraq and the wider Middle East. Critics, however, argued that Israeli officials and pro-Israel neoconservative circles had encouraged the war and helped shape the political climate in which it became possible.
On Iran, the George W. Bush and Obama administrations rejected military confrontation despite Israeli pressure. In 2008, Bush reportedly refused Israeli requests for bunker-busting bombs and permission to overfly Iraq in preparation for a possible strike on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility; he also told Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that Washington would not support an Israeli attack. Obama, for his part, clashed openly with Netanyahu over the Iran nuclear negotiations and the 2015 nuclear agreement. The Obama administration initially kept its secret talks with Iran hidden from Israel, and later limited the information it shared with Netanyahu’s government amid concerns that he was trying to sabotage the agreement through Congress.
In the security and military spheres, too, the United States maintained a degree of independence despite close coordination with Israel. During the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, the United States arrested several people accused of spying for Israel, including Lawrence Franklin, Steven Rosen, Keith Weissman, Ben-Ami Kadish, and Stewart Nozette. Nozette, a space scientist who had worked on military satellite-related programmes, passed sensitive information to someone he believed was an Israeli officer. Militarily, previous US administrations also kept Israel outside CENTCOM, the US command responsible for the Middle East, placing it instead under US European Command, or EUCOM.
These policies made it possible to argue that, beyond the Palestinian question, there was still a centre – the United States – and a margin – Israel. The margin influenced the centre, but it did not fully determine its regional policy. That began to change with Trump’s first term.
The Trump Rupture
With Trump’s arrival in the White House in early 2017, two interconnected shifts took place: the United States began more openly to follow Israeli preferences in the Middle East, and it became less concerned with accommodating Arab states. In other words, the Palestinian question was no longer the only issue treated as an Israeli domestic matter; increasingly, the broader Middle East was treated through the same logic. Put more directly, Washington’s regional policy became harder to distinguish from Israel’s.
On the Palestinian front, Trump abandoned the principle of land for peace by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the US embassy there. His administration also reversed previous US policy by declaring that Israeli settlements in the West Bank were not, in themselves, inconsistent with international law. Trump then presented the “Deal of the Century,” a plan prepared by a US Middle East team led by Jared Kushner and widely criticized for adopting Israeli positions on security, Jerusalem, settlements, and refugees. Under that plan, Israel would have been able to annex large parts of the West Bank. When Palestinians rejected the proposal, Trump placed no meaningful constraint on Israel, leaving it free to determine the fate of the Palestinian people.
On the Arab front, Trump also abandoned land for peace by recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. He then moved aggressively to bypass the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which offered normal relations with Israel only in the context of full Israeli withdrawal from the lands occupied in 1967. Instead, the Abraham Accords normalized relations between Israel and Arab states through a logic drawn from Shimon Peres’s vision of regional peace through economic integration and Netanyahu’s formula of “economic peace.” In practice, normalization was pursued at the expense of longstanding US positions and, in some cases, US interests.
In Morocco’s case, Trump abandoned longstanding US policy on Western Sahara by recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over the territory in exchange for normalization with Israel. He removed Sudan from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list for the same reason. With the UAE and Bahrain, Trump brokered normalization agreements that promised economic, technological, security, and diplomatic cooperation with Israel. In the UAE’s case, this was accompanied by a major proposed US arms package that included the F-35.
Trump also withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, a step Netanyahu had urged by calling on Washington to “fix it or nix it,” and reimposed the sanctions lifted under the agreement. At times, Trump crossed red lines that risked direct confrontation with Tehran, most notably when he ordered the killing of Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force.
Finally, near the end of his first term, Trump surrendered one of Washington’s remaining sources of leverage by transferring Israel from US European Command to CENTCOM. This placed Israel inside the US military command responsible for the Middle East, giving it deeper access to regional security coordination and a greater role in the decisions that flow from it.
The Collapse of Strategic Distance
The Biden administration followed the same path. It did not reverse Trump’s Middle East policies; instead, it built on them. Although Biden had been Obama’s vice president when the nuclear deal with Iran was signed, his administration tightened sanctions rather than returning to the agreement. It also moved aggressively to expand the Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia, offering Riyadh a defence pact and a nuclear programme in exchange for normalization with Israel. Ironically, this effort faltered because Israel refused to commit to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
This did not stop the Biden administration from building an infrastructure that could eventually bypass Saudi hesitation over normalization. The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), announced at the 2023 G20 summit, would link India to Europe through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel. In practice, this would make Gulf-European trade more dependent on a regional architecture in which Israel is a necessary transit point.
After 7 October, the United States more fully adopted Israeli policy. During his visit to Egypt in the first week of the war, Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, reportedly tried to persuade Egypt to open its borders in order to transfer the Palestinians from Gaza, in line with Israel’s preference.
This collapse of strategic distance became clearer during Trump’s second term. On Palestine, Trump first pressed Arab states, especially Egypt and Jordan, to accept Palestinians from Gaza, at one point threatening to withdraw aid if they refused. Egypt and Jordan rejected the proposal, warning against the displacement of Palestinians and the liquidation of the Palestinian question. After that rejection, he turned to Israel’s declared objectives: separating Gaza from the West Bank, creating an administration for Gaza independent of the Palestinian Authority, and placing it under the so-called “Peace Council,” through which Israel would retain the upper hand. This also kept open the possibility of expelling Palestinians from Gaza if circumstances allowed.
In Syria and Lebanon, the Trump administration did not oppose Israel’s occupation of new territories to create a wider Israeli security belt. Instead, Washington pressured Syria to normalise relations with Israel and cooperate with it on security, while leaving the question of occupied land to be addressed only after normalization. In Lebanon’s case, the US-brokered Washington ceasefire track that produced the 3 June 2026 conditional ceasefire agreement with Israel reflects the same policy.
Institutionalizing Israel in US Grand Strategy
This structural shift in US Middle East policy is becoming increasingly institutionalized, particularly through national security strategy and defence technology. The December 2025 National Security Strategy argues that the United States has over-prioritised the Middle East for decades, in part, because of its dependence on oil. Now that the United States has become an oil-exporting country, the historical rationale for concentrating American forces in the region no longer applies.
This does not mean that the Middle East has lost its importance. Rather, the strategy redefines US interests in the region around three priorities: protecting Israel, keeping maritime corridors open, and preventing the export of terrorism from the region.
The strategy also points to two additional shifts: first, that the United States accepts the region as it is, meaning that it no longer seeks to promote democracy there; and second, that its interests now lie partly in expanding commercial relations with Gulf states in artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, and defence technologies.
To protect these interests, the strategy advances two intertwined principles: “burden-shifting” and “peace-building.” Burden-shifting would be achieved by empowering regional partners, especially signatories of the Abraham Accords, to play a greater role in deterring adversaries, containing crises, and maintaining regional stability. In practice, this means giving Israel a larger role in the Middle East’s security architecture. The statement by US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, directed at the Gulf states, that America wants partners rather than protectorates reflects this strategic orientation.
The same logic of institutionalization appears in Section 224 of the draft National Defence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2027, titled the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative”. The section aims to deepen defence integration between the United States and Israel through joint research and development, weapons co-production, military testing, industrial cooperation, licensing, and the exchange of defence technology, including artificial intelligence, cyber systems, autonomous systems, quantum computing, and directed energy. This places Israel closer to the centre of US defence technology and further weakens Washington’s leverage over it.
The Iran War as Culmination
The clearest indication that Washington no longer has a Middle East policy distinct from Israel’s is the latest war on Iran. The war, which began on 28 February 2026, was politically instigated and strategically shaped by Israel, while the United States was drawn into it despite the damage it caused to American interests and to the interests of Washington’s Arab Gulf allies. Statements by current and former US officials point in this direction.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Washington “knew there would be Israeli action against Iran” and acted pre-emptively because it expected an Iranian response against American forces. House Speaker Mike Johnson likewise said that Israel was prepared to act “with or without American support,” placing Trump before a “very difficult decision.”
Democratic officials made the same point more explicitly. Mark Warner, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned against “allowing the United States to be effectively dragged by Israel into another war.” Senator Jeff Merkley asked whether the United States had become “such an enfeebled nation that Israel decides when we go to war.” Congressman Joaquin Castro argued that Rubio’s statements showed that Israel had endangered American forces by attacking Iran, and that the administration had joined Israel’s war instead of deterring it.
Kamala Harris, Biden’s former vice president, said that Trump “was dragged into it by Bibi Netanyahu.” Republican Congressman Thomas Massie was even more direct, arguing that Israel did not need American taxpayer money to defend itself because it had “enough to start offensive wars.”
The war was not a limited military operation in which the United States simply assisted an ally. It quickly became a regional war, spilling into the Gulf, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and Jordan, while also affecting Turkey, Cyprus, and Azerbaijan. Its scale and cost should have led Washington to restrain Israel, as previous administrations had done under George W. Bush and Obama. Instead, the United States subordinated its own interests to Israel’s war aims.
The costs were substantial. Beyond the damage inflicted on US military infrastructure across the Middle East, Pentagon estimates placed the cost to the US Treasury at around $29 billion by mid-May 2026, up from $25 billion in late April. Earlier reports suggested that the first six days alone cost at least $11.3 billion, excluding the full costs of deployment, repairs, and equipment replacement.
For the Arab Gulf states, the direct and indirect costs were also severe, including damage to infrastructure and energy facilities, disruptions to navigation, shipping, aviation, and tourism, and declining business confidence. Gulf sources and analysts described the economic cost as “horrendous,” while Reuters reported that airports, hotels, ports, military facilities, and oil installations had been hit.
The global economic cost is harder to quantify, but it was visible in the sharp rise in shipping, insurance, and aviation costs. War-risk insurance premiums in the Gulf surged, with seven-day cover reportedly rising around tenfold; for some high-value tankers, this translated into premiums reaching several million dollars per voyage. Jet fuel prices also climbed sharply, rising from roughly $85–90 per barrel before the US-Israeli strikes on Iran to between $150 and $200.
The planning of the war also bore Israel’s imprint. It began with extensive assassinations of Iranian military and political leaders, a tactic Israel had previously used in Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen. Israeli and US officials also acknowledged close coordination over Iran. Netanyahu said he was in near-daily contact with Trump to ensure full coordination, and later said Vice President Vance had briefed him directly after US-Iran talks. In that sense, the negotiations were not simply between Iran and the United States; Israel remained an influential party in them.
Conclusion
The above suggests that Israel is no longer merely an influential actor in US Middle East policy. It has become part of the very centre through which that policy is formulated. The shift is not limited to Palestine, which has long been treated as an Israeli internal affair, nor is it confined to moments of personal alignment between particular US and Israeli leaders. It has moved into the structures of Washington’s regional strategy, military coordination, defence technology, and the wider architecture of US security policy in the region.
This does not mean that US interests have disappeared. Rather, it means that those interests are increasingly redefined through Israeli priorities. Protecting Israel, integrating it into the region, expanding normalization with Arab states, containing Iran, and reorganizing Gulf security around Israeli-Arab partnerships have become treated not as Israeli objectives requiring US support, but as US objectives in their own right.
For this reason, public disagreements between Washington and Tel Aviv should no longer be read as evidence that the United States has an independent Middle East policy. They are better understood as tactical disputes within a shared strategic framework. The question, then, is no longer whether Israel influences US policy in the Middle East. It is whether Washington still possesses a regional policy that can be meaningfully distinguished from Israel’s.
