The US-Israel Defense Treaty – The Strategic Dimensions that have been Ignored
The Saudi deal is in fact part of a multilayered package that includes peace, normalization, the nuclear issue, and a defense treaty. In my previous article, I analyzed the dangers and threats to Israel if the Saudi condition for uranium enrichment on its soil were to be accepted. This would be a dangerous nuclear precedent, a trigger for military high level enrichment that could lead to fissile material for a bomb, as well as the option to separate plutonium for nuclear weapons. And most significantly, there is the danger of opening a pandora’s box with more states joining a Middle East nuclear arms race. This article will try to analyze the strategic aspects of the defense treaty issue that has suddenly appeared on the sidelines of the Saudi discussion – a formal defense treaty between Israel and the US.
This is not a new subject for Israeli decision makers. Israel’s first prime minister David Ben Gurion considered it at the height of the cold war in the context of IDF “all eventuality” scenarios against a comprehensive Arab attack. The issue reappeared in recent decades in the context of peace agreements that would require significant territorial concessions. A defense treaty with the US was seen as the ultimate compensation for territorial withdrawal and as a written guarantee of the highest level for Israel’s security. This was the case in the peace negotiations with Syria in the 1990s which would have included withdrawal from the Golan Heights. The most recent time was in 2019 in parallel to Trump’s “deal of the century” that included withdrawal from territories in the West Bank.
The high value of a defense treaty is self-evident. It would make it clear to the world that an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on the US. It would serve as a deterrent against any enemy or coalition of enemies considering attacking Israel. The highest level of “special relations” that already exist between Israel and the US, to convey a clear message that US military power stands firmly at the edge of the Israeli deterrence. Nevertheless, for many years the conditions necessary for a formal mutual defense treaty, such as that between the US and Japan or the US and South Korea, have not materialized. The question is why not?
The answer lies in the defense community’s opposition, particularly on the part of the IDF planning and strategic bodies, to a formal defense treaty that would block the IDF’s freedom of action. It is not simply a question of the Israeli leaders and politicians’ theme of “Israel will defend itself on its own”, but is the core of the Israel’s security concept. Since Ben Gurion’s days, this military concept includes the ideas of both preventive war and preemptive strike. These ideas are not consistent with a formal defense treaty which is by definition mutual and would require cooperation and preliminary consultation with the US.
What has changed today? How did the idea suddenly appear in the discussions surrounding the Saudi deal? The answer can be found in the “Ron Dermer affect” - Netanyahu’s faithful envoy for special secret missions with the US. Dermer apparently proposed to add a defense treaty with Israel as a parallel to the Biden administration’s negotiations on a defense treaty with Saudi Arabia. He did this by putting back on the table drafts for a defense treaty with Israel (in which Ron Dermer had been involved during his tenure as Israeli Ambassador to the US) which were intended to soften IDF opposition and the fears of the higher military echelons of harming Israel’s freedom of action.
From partial reports circulating in the media, we can conclude that Dermer is trying to advance a written draft of a formal defence treaty that was written by a Jewish American conservative strategic institute JINSA (the Jewish Institute for National Security of America). The document’s title For a Narrow U.S. – Israel Defense Pact: Paper and Draft Treaty refers to a “narrow” mutual defense pact i.e. a limited one rather than a classic wide ranging defense treaty. According to the authors’ introduction, the pact would not harm the IDF’s freedom of action. In Article 3 which is the heart of the proposed defense pact, the authors emphasize that the pact would be activated only under “exceptional circumstances” of a threat to Israel of “imminent use or preparation for use of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons of mass destruction”. Exceptional circumstances would also include the case of “a major armed attack by a powerful regional or global Power such as Iran, or by a coalition of Powers, on the territory of Israel”. Iran is explicitly mentioned as it is the main purpose of the US-Israel defense treaty.
An examination of the draft defence pact that Netanyahu and Dermer are apparently trying to promote shows that it is a facade of a defence treaty. It is not exactly a case of mutual obligations to defend and deter, but of a new invention in international relations – a mutual defense treaty that in may ways would be one sided. It is intended to provide Israel with the best of all possible worlds – both a US defense umbrella and complete freedom of action for Israel especially in the Iranian arena. These two aspects do not really go together. Beyond the logical difficulty that I have noted, there are further obstacles in the strategic field that are generally ignored in the current Israeli discussion of a defense treaty. These are the forgotten strategic dimensions of a defense treaty. They are critical for the existence and feasibility of a defence treaty.
The first strategic dimension that has been forgotten is the NPT. We can assume that the US would only sign a defense treaty with a country that is a party to the NPT that has non-nuclear weapons state status (NNWS). Therefore, the example that is often made with NATO in which France and the UK, both of them nuclear states, are partners with the US is not relevant. NATO is a unique historical multilateral treaty. In the case of Israel, we are talking about a bilateral defense treaty. Israel is one of only four countries in the world that is not a signatory to the NPT. Therefore, a mutual defense treaty with the US would require a dramatic conceptual change regarding Israel’s traditional nuclear ambiguity policy.
The second forgotten dimensions is that a defense treaty is intended to protect a territory from a massive military attack. But which territory is covered by the proposed defence treaty with the US. Israel does not have borders that define its state territory. For the international community, the demarcation lines of the end of the 1949 Independence War (the 1967 “green line”) are the borders of the State of Israel. But for the last fifty years, this has not been the position of Israeli governments. Under these circumstances, the US would find it difficult to sign a defense treaty with the State of Israel that has not yet signed peace agreements that define its borders and sovereignty.
The third forgotten dimension is that Dermer and Netanyahu have completely ignored the fact that the US National Intelligence Assessment binds the President. According to the US National Intelligence Assessment, Iran’s nuclear program was closed towards the end of 2003, and today there is no nuclear weaponization program. Although its latest report Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Capability and Terrorism Monitoring Act of 2022 (updated in June 2023) notes an acceleration and expansion of Iran’s uranium enrichment program, it emphasizes already in its first sentence that “Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities that would be necessary to produce a testable nuclear device”. Last week’s Pentagon’s report Strategy for Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction writes that “Iran is not pursing a nuclear weapons program at this time, but has the capability to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear device in less than two weeks”.
The significance of these US intelligence community reports is that Israel would not have freedom of action or a green light to implement preventive attack scenarios on Iranian nuclear sites.
Shemuel Meir is an independent Israeli strategic analyst