Chuck Freilich & Eldad Shavit
Self-reliance and strategic autonomy have always been fundamental tenets of Israel’s national security strategy. Nevertheless, Israel’s founding father, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, sought a defense treaty with the United States as early as the 1950s, as a means of further augmenting its security. Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak gave serious consideration to a defense treaty in the 1990s and 2000s, both to offset the significant military dangers stemming from the territorial concessions that were part of the dramatic proposals for peace they made with the Palestinians and Syrians, and to assuage the deep and even existential fears these concessions engendered among Israel’s public. Counterintuitively, perhaps, Israel’s defense establishment has long opposed a formal defense treaty.
Until recently, Bill Clinton was the only president to give serious, if reluctant, consideration to a defense treaty, as the price of Rabin’s and Barak’s peace proposals (President Donald Trump briefly toyed with the idea). Indeed, the last time the United States signed a formal defense treaty with any nation – the ultimate American security commitment – was with Japan in 1960. In addition to Japan, the US has bilateral defense treaties with Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and the Philippines, as well as a multilateral treaty with NATO’s 31 members. The different treaties all vary significantly in specific content and in the actual extent of the American security commitment. By far the strongest commitment is in the NATO treaty, in which an attack on one is deemed an attack on all.
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