If, as parts of the American right argue, America First means that every foreign alliance must justify itself by American interests, Israel more than passes the test.
By Pierre Rehov, Gatestone Institute
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 “cannot let our Middle Eastern foreign policy be subservient to the State of Israel.”
Within a day, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee replied:
“America has never defended Israel. Not one time since [Israel gained independence in] 1948 has America ever put boots on the ground for Israel…. When we are partnering against Iran, we’re not defending Israel, we’re defending the United States…. 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… Nobody pushed President Trump into anything. Nobody misled him into anything…. 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, adding:
“Donald Trump is the one president of the last 40 years who’s been willing to say, ‘You know what, yeah, Bibi’s a good partner, but also Bibi and I have a different opinion on this,’ or ‘Bibi’s wrong about this,’ or maybe ‘Bibi’s right about this from the perspective of Israel, but the American people need us to go in a different direction.’”
Incredibly, Vance actually said that after the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Australia, Estonia, and Spain had all refused to help America even minimally in its effort to constrain Iran.
It was apparently Vance, as well, who had argued for the catastrophic April 8 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 Islamic Republic was established in 1979.
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 said. “It is a policy.”
US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, tasked with negotiating with Iran, in March reported in March:
“In that first meeting, both the Iranian negotiators said to us directly—with no shame—that they controlled 460 kilograms of 60% [enriched uranium] and that they’re aware that could make 11 nuclear bombs.”
Trump warned in June: “You give them a nuclear weapon, 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 this month, “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, Trump, prudently, evidently preferred to remove it.
Trump is the first president, out of seven, who actually decided to end the threat from Iran.
There was only one hitch: Trump, Washington Post columnist Thiessen stated, had run the ball “to the 20-yard “line”—and then stopped!
The bewildering part to many onlookers is that Trump, while sidelining the party most immediately affected by Iran—the “one-bomb country,” Israel—has nevertheless been courting Middle Eastern leaders, such as Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, which is now demanding the Golan Heights from Israel — a request akin to Mexico demanding 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 the founding of the Islamic Republic, with the new regime’s seizure of the US embassy in 1979, then holding its residents hostage for 444 days until President Ronald Reagan entered office.
Iran initiated lethal violence against the US in Beirut in 1983, when a Hezbollah member murdered 241 American servicemen in a truck bombing, for which a US federal court later ordered Iran’s regime to pay $2.65 billion; and the regime was found guilty of participating in the 9/11/2001 attacks—among many others—for which it was ordered to pay $6 billion.
After Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, Tehran’s proxy network of Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria launched more than 170 attacks on American forces in the region.
A drone launched by an Iraqi militia killed three soldiers at Tower 22 in January 2024.
This month, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps 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.
What Israel brings to America’s side in this fight is something Washington has rarely found in the region: an ally that defends not only itself but is also sacrificing its youth to defend western civilization—including the countries that are now denigrating and undermining it.
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 US ten-year memorandum covering fiscal 2019 through 2028 provides $3.3 billion a year in Foreign Military Financing and $500 million for missile defense, for a total of $38 billion, signed in 2016 by the Obama administration.
Three-quarters of this allotment is dedicated to purchasing military equipment from the United States. Colonel John Spencer (ret.), who serves as the chair of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, 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.”
The money tells only half the story. The David’s Sling missile defense system is built by Rafael with Raytheon as a subcontractor under the joint supervision of Israel’s Missile Defense Organization and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency.
The Arrow 3 missile defense system was developed by Israel Aerospace Industries together with Boeing.
Two Iron Dome batteries were supplied to the U.S. Army in 2019, and in May 2026 the first Tamir interceptors were delivered to the Marine Corps, missiles 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 taxpayers acquire cutting-edge systems US 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 Israel’s Negev Desert.
Fifteen months later, when Iran fired more than 300 missiles and drones at Israel in one day, the interoperability rehearsed in the exercise produced interceptions shared among American, Israeli, British, French, and Jordanian forces.
In June 2025, Israel’s penetration of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile complexes opened the way for American bombers to strike Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan eight days later, and on February 28, 2026, the two air forces went to war side-by-side starting from the first night.
The US Central Command has built the partnership with Israel into its regional architecture because the intelligence and targeting it yields are American assets.
The relationship extends well beyond the battlefield. The 1985 US-Israel free trade agreement was the first the US ever signed.
American exports to Israel have grown 473% 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 60 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 total lockstep agreement between the two allies. Washington and Jerusalem have quarreled over settlements, arms sales, Iran, Gaza and Lebanon since the relationship began.
In March 2015, Netanyahu stood before Congress to attack the nuclear deal then President Barack Obama was negotiating that would have let Iran have all the nuclear weapons it could acquire starting in October 2023.
Eighteen months later, the same president signed the largest package of military aid to Israel in American history.
In June 2026, Trump told reporters that Israel had been fighting Hezbollah too long and killing too many people, while this month, the 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, as parts of the American right argue, America First means that every foreign alliance must justify itself by American interests, Israel more than passes the test.
The ledger shows the sharing of intelligence on common foes, weapons developed and built jointly, a partner that fields its own soldiers, $54 billion dollars annually in two-way trade, and a military relationship the Pentagon has written into its plans.
In 2014, the US Senate unanimously passed the US-Israel Strategic Partnership Act, a bond forged by shared interests as well as shared values, and Obama signed it into law.
The $38 billion the Congressional Budget Office counts as the cost of the current war against the Islamic Republic of Iran is being spent against a regime that has been murdering Americans since 1983 and uses “Death to America” as both an official slogan and an official policy.
Vance may have chosen his recent words as part of a fantasy that if the US just closes its eyes to foreign threats and concentrates on building up America domestically, 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 does not stay in Sudetenland.
The thinking in 1938 was that if Europe just forced Czechoslovakia to give Germany’s Adolf Hitler the territory he was demanding from them, he would be happy and go away.
Only Britain’s Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt accurately foresaw at the time that giving the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany would be just the “appetizer,” and the rest of Europe would be the “entrée.”
The original “America First” movement was led during that era by the lionized hero at the time, the aviator Charles Lindbergh.
After touring Nazi Germany several times in 1936-1938 and being personally awarded the Service Cross of the German Eagle on behalf of Adolf Hitler by Luftwaffe chief and Reichstag President Hermann Göring, Lindbergh returned to the US in 1939 and became a prominent spokesman for the “America First Committee,” a non-interventionist group formed in 1940.
He argued that the US should avoid entanglement in European conflicts, and claimed that aiding Britain could drag the US into a costly war that didn’t serve American interests and that Jewish influence was pushing the US toward war.
The ledger behind the US-Israel alliance has been compiled for nearly 80 years. That Israel is today America’s only reliable ally in every season? Absolutely yes.
That America’s Middle Eastern foreign policy is subservient to Israel? Definitely no.
The post America first does not mean Israel last appeared first on World Israel News.