By Jonathan Ruhe
Thursday, January 15, 2026
The raid on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was a big
surprise. But the absence of foreign interference during the U.S. military’s
open buildup in the months leading up it was anything but. For all the Trump
administration talks of “restoring American preeminence
in the Western Hemisphere,” according to a White House spokesperson, we never
lost it in the first place. And if we ever had, knocking off a local dictator,
even one as menacing as Maduro, would not do much to restore it. We predominate
precisely because no other great power, current or aspiring, can yet hope to
challenge us in this hemisphere—not China, Russia, Iran, or any of them
together.
Even if they take lower priority, U.S. interests still
extend well beyond our backyard. The White House’s new national security
strategy reiterates enduring stakes
in the Pacific, Europe, and Middle East. The president’s warnings
to Iran over its nuclear work, missiles, and now protests underscore this
point. But refocusing closer to home makes it harder to defend these overseas
interests, most immediately if there are further rounds of direct conflict with
Iran: Assembling the Caribbean armada,
for instance, entailed pulling U.S. forces from Pacific and Mediterranean
duties.
The United States needs allies and partners to fill these
growing gaps. But the way we have treated the countries that do the most on
this front demonstrates Americans’ underappreciation of the roles our partners
play in our own security. Take Israel and Ukraine, for example. Two presidents
have shown reluctance to provide Ukraine with what it needs to fight Russia
successfully, and some on the right have advanced claims that Ukraine and NATO
sought war with Russia. Israel, too, is caricatured as a rogue actor in need of
restraint. Its stunning military actions over the past two years are triggering
critiques of its newfound “hegemony” in the
Middle East—an “imperialism” that will supposedly exacerbate
regional conflicts, inflame
global energy markets, and sound the death
knell of various peace processes. Aside from the personal sympathies of
both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, there are pervasive and growing doubts about
Israel’s continued salability
as a partner on both
sides of the aisle, and among
the American
public.
Misperceiving our partners as overweening, and ourselves
as undermined, will be counterproductive. We need our partners to be more powerful,
not kept in check, so they can help us “maintain global and regional balances
of power to prevent the emergence of dominant adversaries.” Here Trump’s
national security strategy is explicit: Our hemispheric predominance depends on
us being the only such power anywhere on the planet. Our sphere of influence is
exclusive of anyone else attaining an equivalent. As John Mearsheimer argues,
“A great power that dominates its own region will be an especially powerful foe
that is essentially free to cause trouble in [America’s] backyard.”
America fought major wars to keep Germany and Japan from
such predominance, and we waged the Cold War for the same reason. Today, our adversaries
openly state similar ambitions,
and they work increasingly
closely with one another. In the face of these challenges, strong U.S.
partnerships help uphold our unique and precious position as the world’s only
regional hegemon.
In their strictest definitions, international relations
theories posit hegemony as an uncontestable preponderance of military and
economic power, an “informal
imperial order” that deters any and all would-be challengers, in the words
of John Ikenberry. This bar is so high that the United States is the only
country to have attained it, anywhere, in nearly 400 years of the Westphalian
state system. This required an exceptional, and to date irreplicable,
confluence of circumstances.
With the success of Manifest Destiny, we became a
continental power, abounding with millions of square miles of natural and human
resources. With the success of the Monroe Doctrine, we also became an island
power, buffered by oceans that bestowed splendid geographic isolation from
Europe’s and Asia’s cockpits of conflict. These informal policies culminated
in making America the sole, unmatchable great power in the entire Western
Hemisphere by the early 20th century. Seeing Europe encourage and
exploit the splitting
apart of this nascent behemoth during the Civil War, William Tecumseh
Sherman told a Confederate general, “You cannot have peace and division of our
country. If the United States submits to division now it will not stop, but
will go on until we reap the fate of … eternal war.”
By avoiding that fate, the United States escaped the
common lot of other great powers crowded on either end of Eurasia. At the same
time, we had to translate very little of our wealth into military strength.
This is the true essence of Pax Americana. By 1900, the U.S. population
was equal to the rest of the Americas put together, and our gross
domestic product, steel production,
and oil
output each were greater than the second- and third-place countries
combined. Yet U.S. armed forces amounted to merely one-fifth the active
personnel of the average European great power. Where Paris, Berlin, St.
Petersburg, and Tokyo each planned to mobilize dozens of army corps in just
weeks, Washington would struggle consistently to put more than a handful of
regiments in the field.
Those other great powers maintained strong armed forces
precisely because the tyrannies of geography and resources put American-style
predominance out of reach. As an island power, but not a continental one,
Britain needed the Royal Navy to overawe potential invaders and blockaders.
Imperial Japan faced this same problem. As a continental power, but not an
island one, Russia and the Soviet Union needed massive armies to shield their
vast internal resources from overland invasion. Lacking either predicate for
power, Louis XIV’s and Napoleon’s France, and Germany in both world wars, each
built potent military machines that failed to conquer their way to supremacy.
Encircled by competitors with far larger resource bases,
Israel is inherently far feebler than any island or continental power. It
barely cracks the Middle East’s top 10 in terms of area or population and, even
with the miracles of “Start-Up Nation,” it is only the region’s third-biggest
economy. Per capita wealth, technological prowess, and nuclear arsenals cannot
negate this small size and lack of strategic depth that make Israel a “one-bomb
country,” in the unnerving words of Iran’s former president. No amount of
U.S. defense assistance, however mutually beneficial, can alter this immutable
arithmetic of Israel’s ceiling as one of several regional powers. Completely
unlike the United States, simple survival requires Israel to convert as much of
this relatively meager latent capacity into military strength as possible.
Israel goes to such lengths to maximize its security, not
its power, in a Hobbesian Middle East that embodies Sherman’s eternal war among
middling states. Kenneth Waltz famously observed how this international anarchy
tends to “shape
and shove” the states trying to survive in that system. The sharp edges of
security competition dissuade and punish bids for hegemony, yet with all their
peril and uncertainty, they also produce unintended outcomes.
Put another way, Israel’s military ascendance does not
imply any rash desire for predominance, nor any such capability. The Western
Hemisphere’s de facto hierarchy of power makes it possible to draw
fairly straight lines from America’s policy decisions to regional outcomes, as
the Maduro raid shows. The anarchical Middle East is categorically different.
The notion of Israel proactively
pursuing hegemony is a red herring for the structural factors Waltz describes,
and the razor-thin margins for error they create in trying to navigate
unexpected, potentially catastrophic threats. Analogously, Ukraine could well
emerge with Europe’s strongest military from a war it never sought.
Indeed, Israel’s military triumphs were the result, not
the goal, of a conflict that began in 2023 with Hamas’ assault and Hezbollah’s equally
sudden opening of a second front. They collapsed
Israel’s assumption that deterrence obtained and defense sufficed. Overnight,
security seemed vanishingly scarce and, for that reason, all the more urgent,
imperative, and difficult to regain. Echoing the guns of August 1914, risks of
escalation became highly preferable to absorbing attacks. Thus set in motion,
the conflict outran anyone’s control. Compounding fog and friction spread a
local Gaza offensive to most of Israel and, by the end, much of Lebanon, Syria,
Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and Qatar.
Israel’s wartime victories belie its ambivalent place in
the postwar Middle East. Its fragile lattice of latent power was exposed by two
years of grueling conflict, evidenced by the continual impact of U.S. political
pressure and material assistance on its strategic and operational
decision-making. In the war’s early days, two U.S. Navy carrier strike groups
arrived off Lebanon’s coast to dissuade
Hezbollah, but also Israel, from escalation. Thus compelled to focus on the
lesser threat of Hamas, Israel continually found its Gaza campaigns affected by
arms
embargoes and arm-twisting
from Washington, right down to President Trump’s successful insistence on a
ceasefire. The same went for Israel’s responses
to massive Iranian projectile barrages in spring and fall 2024.
Israel’s most brazen moves highlight this confinement.
Hegemony enables America to fight wars “over there,” and thus pay little price
for retreating inward when victory proves elusive. By contrast, Israel and
Ukraine must expand the frontiers of conflict outward when the frontlines are
frozen in their front yard, whether in Gaza or Donbas. Hightailing out of
Vietnam or Afghanistan, and never looking back, is a perquisite of immense
power. Striking Siberian bomber
bases, or targeting
Hamas in Tehran
and Doha, is audacity begotten by the desperation of existing on anarchy’s
bleeding edge.
The fallout from Israel’s audacity further underscores
its constraints. Other regional actors are responding by strengthening their
own capabilities and seeking new external strength. Iran is rebuilding
missiles, reviving proxies, and pursuing Chinese and Russian military
assistance. Alongside Saudi Arabia, Qatar and its close ally Turkey each have
shown interest in ending
Israel’s regional monopoly of U.S.-made, top-of-the-line F-35 combat aircraft.
The United States will face no such counterbalancing for whatever we are doing
in Venezuela, at least on our side of the globe.
Most Israelis struggle with just how great, and inbuilt,
this disparity really is. For years, I’ve taught
U.S. strategy to Israeli military officers as they rise from tactical to
big-picture responsibilities. Uniformly, they are astounded to learn the
yawning difference between what they take for granted—constantly having to
guard their intrinsically vulnerable country from larger, hostile neighbors—and
what we assume to be our birthright: vast expanses of land, sea, and resources
that make security so plentiful and cheap. Growing up in a place where foreign
policy is often life or death, Israelis cannot contain their confusion at
average Americans’ default indifference to the rest of the world.
Yet our continued hegemony depends on Israel, Ukraine,
Taiwan, and others whose geostrategic situations diverge most sharply from our
own. America’s privilege to convert so little of our latent power to armed
might depends on partners wringing every possible drop of military power out of
their limited resources. Making our partners stronger does not beget their
ostensible recklessness or prod them to upset delicate balances of power.
Instead, their tough-willed pursuit of basic security hinders the hegemonic
ambitions of our shared adversaries. This was true of the global coalitions
that won the world wars, and of our alliances blocking communism in East Asia
and Central Europe. Israel’s degradation of Iranian missile and nuclear
arsenals, and its facilitation of follow-on U.S. strikes, is the latest shining example.
Ukraine’s dogged defense, and its developing defense industry, have set
back Vladimir Putin’s dream of renewed dominion in Europe and destroyed
more Russian combat power than the wildest dreams of any NATO planner.
Continuing to hold
that line will require our European allies to act more like Israel or
Ukraine. Armed to the teeth and prepared to fight for its life, Taiwan is a
similar “hedgehog”
that literally sits athwart China’s ambitions to dominate the Western Pacific.
Now, short of the best imaginable outcome for ongoing
internal protests, Iran’s regime could redouble
its military threats to the Middle East and deepen China and Russia ties,
especially if military hardliners exploit unrest to consolidate control.
Sensible planning suggests Israel’s abiding value as an anchor for U.S.
regional interests—all the more so as America remains involved in brinkmanship,
and potentially further conflict, with Iran.
China, Russia, and Iran desperately want daylight between
the United States and our partners. The new “Donroe
Doctrine,” and whatever succeeds it, cannot treat these relationships as
extraneous to our core security. Washington needs to signal its continued
support for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan, even if that requires adapting the
partnerships to changing strategic circumstances. Two years of war certainly
have impacted the U.S.-Israel relationship, at times creating new tensions. But
in crisis there is opportunity. Israel’s wartime insight
to make its defense industry more resilient, and expand its base of latent
power, supports Trump’s official
priority that partners expand their capacity and assume greater roles for
collective defense. If part of a plan to align bilateral
production, supply chains, and technology development, this could enhance
U.S.-led deterrence and warfighting. Other once-unthinkable ideas, like using
Israeli airbases
to boost the U.S. military’s global mobility, strengthen our Middle East force
structure and readiness, and bolster Israel’s freedom of action, are becoming
equally attractive.
In a recent study of America’s rise to hegemony,
Sean Mirski describes how it “freed the United States to leave the hemisphere
behind and to become a global superpower, invested in the security and
stability of the world at large.” That investment has paid great dividends. Our
partners remain crucial to its success, not least in terms of the basic
protections Americans easily assume away.
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