For decades, Americans have understood the relationship between the United States and Israel through a single number: $3.8 billion a year in military aid. Earlier this month, President Trump announced that this financing would come to an end. Two weeks before he did, Rich Goldberg published an essay in National Review titled “It’s Time for a Reset in U.S.-Israel Relations,” arguing for a new understanding of the alliance between the countries, not as an aid program or even an arms-financing program, but as a joint venture.
Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and a veteran of both the National Security Council and the National Energy Dominance Council, as well as the U.S. Navy Reserve, joins the podcast this week to discuss what this would mean. The premise of his argument is that America’s competition with China will be the defining fact of international relations for the remainder of this century. In conversation with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver, he explains why the race to develop the best artificial intelligence is also a race for energy and for control of the information on which free societies depend, why China’s grip on critical minerals is a vulnerability for the American military, and why in that context, Israel—a small country with little oil and almost no rare-earth elements—matters so much. They discuss what American forces have learned from Israel’s use of American weapons in the war with Iran, and why Israel’s decision to build its own munitions lines may one day serve America in a crisis of its own.