At the Turning Point USA conference in Phoenix last week, the mood was combative.
MAGA strategist and organizer Steve Bannon accused Ben Shapiro of being “Israel First” and of pushing a “Greater Israel” agenda that “drags the United States into wars.” He called Shapiro “a cancer.” This exchange typified the conflict within the MAGA movement between those that see Israel as an ally and those that see it as a liability.
No media figure has done more to advance the idea of Israel as a liability than Tucker Carlson. Speaking at the Qatari-government-funded Doha Forum earlier this month, Carlson dismissed Israel as “a completely insignificant country” with “no resources,” and argued that the United States has “no overriding strategic interest” in the relationship, asking, “What are we getting out of this?”
Carlson’s question has several answers.
One of them is already very familiar to Americans: Iron Dome. Developed by Israelis under constant rocket fire and co-funded by the United States, the Iron Dome demonstrated how civilian populations can be protected at scale from barrages of rockets from Lebanon and Gaza.
For decades, the U.S.–Israel partnership has delivered significant returns: providing the United States with world-leading defense innovation and access to intelligence from across the Middle East.
President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome is the latest—and most consequential—expression of that same partnership. Announced by executive order at the end of January, Trump’s signature homeland defense initiative is a layered architecture designed to protect the American heartland from ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons, cruise missiles, and emerging aerial threats.
Golden Dome is not a theoretical exercise. Its purpose is to ensure American survivability under attack. In building such a system, the United States is drawing directly on Israeli technology, Israeli expertise, and Israeli combat experience.
Israel contributes to the Golden Dome in three decisive ways. It provides mature, combat-tested interception technologies. It supplies real combat data generated under sustained missile and drone assault—data no test range or simulation can replicate. And it offers a strategic framework forged under existential pressure. Together, these contributions accelerate development, reduce risk, and close gaps the United States has struggled to address on its own.
The roots of this partnership lie in a strategic division of labor that began in the Cold War. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan invited Israel into the Strategic Defense Initiative at a moment when American missile defense development was effectively frozen.
The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty constrained deployment, research, and political imagination. Missile defense became legally fraught and politically radioactive inside the American system, and serious development stalled.
Israel faced no such constraints. It was not bound by the ABM Treaty. It was not immobilized by arms-control orthodoxy. It confronted real missiles from real adversaries. After the 1991 Gulf War, when Iraqi Scuds fell on Israeli cities, interception became a survival requirement rather than an academic debate. Reagan’s decision allowed Israel to develop capabilities the American system could not pursue at the time. Those gains were shared fully with the United States and continue to be shared to this day.
The Arrow missile family—jointly developed by Israel Aerospace Industries and Boeing—anchors the upper tiers of emerging homeland defense architectures. Arrow 3 is one of the most advanced exo-atmospheric interceptors in the world and has already proven itself against Iranian and proxy threats. It employs hit-to-kill technology designed to defeat complex salvos under real combat conditions.
Israel is also developing Arrow 4, a system designed to intercept hypersonic and maneuvering reentry vehicles. These weapons represent the most acute vulnerability in current American missile defenses. Once again, Israel is advancing capabilities under pressure that the United States needs but cannot rapidly generate within its own political and institutional timelines.
Below the exo-atmospheric layer, joint programs such as David’s Sling address medium-range missiles and cruise threats and integrate seamlessly into U.S. command-and-control networks. At the lowest tier, Israel’s work on directed-energy weapons may prove transformative. Iron Beam, a laser system that has entered combat service in Israel, promises interception costs measured in tens of dollars rather than hundreds of thousands. Adapted for homeland defense, such systems address the core economic problem: attacking with missiles is cheap; intercepting them is expensive.
Israel also provides something equally valuable: real-life combat experience at scale. During the June 2025 war with Iran, the Islamic Republic launched hundreds of ballistic missiles and more than a thousand drones at Israel, the largest coordinated missile assault in history. Israel intercepted most of the incoming ordnance, but the conflict exposed limits. Interceptor stockpiles ran low. Some missiles penetrated defenses.
Those lessons now shape Golden Dome’s design. Israeli experience informs decisions about stockpile depth, threat prioritization, and the integration of kinetic and non-kinetic defenses. Refinements in electronic warfare demonstrate how threats can be defeated without firing a shot. No simulation can substitute for this data.
Israel’s broader strategic approach also matters. Its defenses are designed to protect population centers and critical infrastructure while imposing prohibitive costs on attackers. They do not seek perfect coverage. Golden Dome adopts the same logic at continental scale, prioritizing resilience and sustainability over theoretical completeness.
Golden Dome also reveals a deeper truth missed by critics of the U.S.–Israel relationship. Israel functions across multiple domains of national security as an operational component of American power. It helps the United States develop, refine, and validate capabilities that cannot always be generated domestically. When Israel innovates under fire, American cities become safer.
The campaign to portray Israel as a strategic liability corrodes American power. In an era of great-power competition, adversaries test the United States by eroding alliance cohesion and legitimacy. They reframe proven assets as burdens. Weakening the partnership behind Arrow and Iron Beam directly degrades American defensive capacity.
The implications extend far beyond the Middle East. In its rivalry with China, the United States holds a decisive structural advantage, namely, its web of global alliances. China has few genuine allies. The durability of American alliances under sustained pressure will shape the outcome of the 21st century’s defining strategic contest. Israel plays an outsize role within that system. It fields advanced capabilities under real threat, accelerates innovation at lower cost, and absorbs regional shocks that would otherwise consume American attention and resources. Efforts to weaken the U.S.–Israel relationship therefore advance Beijing’s interests by narrowing America’s coalition and degrading the mechanisms through which U.S. power is generated.
Critics who argue for distancing the U.S. from Israel implicitly assume that the strategic environment would remain unchanged. International politics does not work that way. It operates less like a balance sheet and more like a game of chess. Moving a major piece does not affect only a single square. It changes the configuration of the entire board and creates opportunities for alert competitors. That pattern is already visible across the Middle East, where Gulf partners increasingly hedge toward China to manage risk. Israel has behaved differently. A small state with unusually concentrated capabilities, it aligned with the United States by choice rather than necessity. Treating Israel as a liability would alter that alignment. Israel would be forced to hedge as well.
China would benefit directly. Through calibrated cooperation, Israel would place intelligence access, cyber expertise, advanced defense technologies, and operational military experience at Beijing’s disposal. Preventing that outcome is a core American interest. Severing ties with one of America’s most capable partners reflects a failure of strategic realism. It would leave the United States more isolated in the contest that will determine its position in the international system.
What critics miss is that Golden Dome does not make the United States dependent on Israel; it reflects a partnership in which American security is strengthened precisely because innovation is forged where missiles actually fall.
The United States does not defend itself by turning inward. Israel’s critics argue that being America First requires disengagement beyond U.S. borders. But America’s partnership with Israel is mutually beneficial and will only make Americans safer.