US Press
Kavanagh warns a US-Israel defense treaty would trap Washington in Israel's wars
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A proposal to bind the United States and Israel by mutual defense treaty and move American forces onto Israeli soil is being argued out in Washington this month, and the sharpest published objection came on Monday from a military analyst who thinks it would cost the United States its freedom to say no.
Writing in Responsible Statecraft, the publication of the Quincy Institute, which argues for American military restraint, Jennifer Kavanagh set out the case against. Kavanagh is a senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a research group in the realist tradition, and previously worked at the RAND Corporation and the Carnegie Endowment.
Her target is a report titled "Shifting the Center of Gravity," published by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, a hawkish pro-Israel policy group whose roster for the report included 43 retired officers, among them 24 generals and nine admirals.
The report asks Washington for four things: a mutual defense treaty with Israel, the basing of American forces there including a new Central Command headquarters, $38 billion in military aid under a fresh ten-year memorandum of understanding, and the integration of Israeli technology into American air and missile defense.
The argument#
Kavanagh's objection is not moral but structural. The proposals, she writes, "will increase the U.S. security burden and tie the United States down in the Middle East in ways that may quickly become irreversible."
She makes the point about moral hazard plainly. American troops stationed in Israel would mean that any attack on Israel almost certainly drags in the United States — which, she argues, lowers rather than raises the cost to Israel of military adventures.
She also notes that Israel has at various times described Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas each as an existential threat, so a treaty written around existential threats would in practice commit American forces to a standing list.
On technology, she cites the Iron Dome precedent: when the United States sought to integrate the system, Israel refused to give American engineers access to the source code. And she notes that Israeli officials have been suspected of spying on the United States, which makes deep technology-sharing its own risk.
Her most immediate evidence is eight days old. On 18 August Israel bombed a non-operational Syrian air base, reportedly to derail Turkish plans to deploy forces there, without notifying Washington — and drew American condemnation for it. An ally that strikes without notice, Kavanagh's argument runs, is not an ally to hand a tripwire.
What the debate leaves out#
Kavanagh's piece does not discuss Palestinians, and that absence is worth naming.
The integration question is being fought in Washington entirely as a question of American risk, and the Palestinian consequence — that the further American and Israeli command structures merge, the harder it becomes for any American administration to condition, restrict or audit what Israeli forces do in Gaza and the West Bank — appears in none of the four papers now circulating.
That consequence is the reason this beat matters here. Times of Palestine has reported the same fight through Section 219 of the National Defense Authorization Act, the US-Israel military integration provision that the former counterterrorism director Joe Kent has campaigned against since resigning in March.
Kent argues from the political end and Kavanagh from the strategic one, and neither argues from the Palestinian end, where the practical stake is whether Washington keeps any lever at all.
Congress will decide it in the authorisation bill and in whatever succeeds the current memorandum of understanding, which expires in 2028.
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