The ongoing war against Iran has raised a number of important issues: the ability of air power alone to achieve regime change, the ethics and effectiveness of targeting Iran’s leaders, the question of how much damage the war will cause in the region, and what its effects will be around the globe.

But largely overlooked has been a historic development: The rise of a full-blown warfighting alliance between Israel and the U.S.

That alliance has been a gradual, bipartisan achievement of U.S. policy. It may preview the future of U.S. alliance ties around the world. And by binding closer together a regional military hegemon and a global superpower, that alliance has put America and Israel in a commanding position to remake the Middle East.

Contrary to the common misconception, the U.S. and Israel haven’t always been so tight. Washington forced Israel to halt its first war against a Middle Eastern rogue state, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, in 1956. A strong partnership emerged only in the 1970s, when the U.S. needed well-armed regional sheriffs — Brazil, Iran, Israel, South Africa and others — to mitigate its global overreach.

U.S. weapons helped Israel survive the Yom Kippur War against Egypt and Syria in 1973. Washington’s security guarantees for Israel — and the legislatively mandated arms deliveries that accompany them — have only grown more robust since. But even so, fear of offending Israel’s Arab enemies, and Israel’s insistence that it be able to defend itself by itself, meant that the two countries mostly kept their distance when it came to military operations.

In 1991, the U.S. pushed to keep Israel out of the Persian Gulf War against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, lest intervention split a coalition that featured dozens of countries, including Arab states. Israel never joined America’s post-9/11 wars against Iraq or the Islamic State. Over the past decade, however, the threat posed by Iran and its regional proxies — and the improving climate between Israel and its one-time Arab antagonists — have reshaped the U.S.-Israel relationship.

During Trump’s first term, diplomatic normalization deals involving the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain paved the way for closer ties between Israel and the Pentagon’s Central Command. After the Oct. 7 attacks, President Joe Biden sent U.S. warships to bolster Israel’s deterrence at a moment of existential trauma.

The next year, U.S. forces helped defend Israel against Iranian drone and missile salvos, with cooperation from Saudi Arabia and other regional states. In Trump’s second term, the U.S. and Israel have taken the offensive.

The two countries smashed Iran in June 2025: Israel knocked down Iran’s command-and-control systems, air defense and missile capabilities, leaving Trump to finish the war with a raid on its nuclear facilities. But the current conflict has brought an entirely new level of cooperation.

U.S. and Israeli officials methodically planned a combined offensive meant to wipe out Iran’s leadership and cripple its military. Israeli and American agencies have reportedly shared sensitive targeting intelligence. U.S. planes and tankers fly from Israeli bases. An American carrier strike group, stocked with offensive and defensive capabilities, is parked off the Israeli coast. The Israelis have carried out targeted assassinations of Iranian leaders, which might contravene U.S. legal prohibitions. Other forms of cooperation are likely hidden from public view.

This war, then, is a coming-out party for a pact that fuses Israeli tenacity and risk-taking to American global reach. And like any alliance, this one has its tensions.

Over time, the Biden administration became more critical of Israeli conduct in Gaza. In early 2025, Israeli determination to strike derailed Trump’s drive for a nuclear deal with Tehran. The partnership could be tested in this war, too.

Israeli officials may prefer a longer conflict than even the several weeks Trump has threatened, meant to do more lasting —perhaps fatal — damage to Iran’s military power and ruling regime. Trump may yet seek an earlier offramp as the war’s costs — in casualties, economic damage, and the depletion of munitions stockpiles — rise.

Over the longer term, the politics of the alliance are uncertain, given critiques of Israel on the progressive left and the MAGA right. For now, however, the alliance represents a bipartisan achievement — and just the sort of friendship Trump has in mind.

Israel is a force multiplier, not a free rider. It possesses tremendous military, intelligence and technological strengths of its own. Little wonder that Trump’s administration has labeled Israel a “model ally,” an example to which other countries — not just in the Middle East, but globally — that seek U.S. support should aspire.

On the other hand, those same strengths give Israel the ability to go it alone even when Washington objects: The more capable the ally, the more independent-minded it is likely to be.

Israeli assertiveness sometimes unnerves Arab countries — witness its strike on Hamas leadership in Qatar last fall. But the U.S.-Israel alliance still creates a powerful pole of attraction: In an unsettled region, what team would you rather be on?

The fact that a wounded Iran has lashed out against its Arab neighbors with missiles and drones merely strengthens that argument. Once this conflict ends, Trump will surely seek deeper Arab-Israeli integration. If he’s successful, this powerful U.S.-Israel alliance could form the nucleus of a still-mightier coalition that sets the tone in the Middle East for years to come.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

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