The United States and their allies are currently discussing how to set up relations between the Nato and theUkraine: for this, in view of the the top of Vilnius of 11-12 July, proposals have been circulating for a few weeks that seem more likely to be sure winners from “burn” before the Atlantic “conclave” in Lithuania that of the solutions that the leaders will take seriously. The German chancellor Olaf Scholzspeaking at the conclusion of a historic European summit in Moldavia, just over a month ago, he stressed that helping Ukraine to defend itself is “the task at hand”. He was referring to a precise scenario: the application of the so-called “Israeli model”.
The idea is apparently simple and functional: it means that Washington and its allies would agree to provide Ukraine with one combination of weaponscommitments of safety e training military that would allow the country – similarly to Israel – to discourage and defend against any future Russian aggression without assuming the risks deriving from Kiev’s accession to NATO. He would also like to mean bypass possible will you (Budapest?) e doubts (Berlin? Paris?) about Ukraine’s future Atlantic membership, allowing policy makers to avoid politically thorny and divisive issues. But is it really so?
First of all, the whole model has a lot of déjà-vu: if we only talk about transfers of arms, technologies and know-how, what changes with respect to the current scenario of relations between Ukraine and its “Atlantic friends”? It has gone into about 500 days of warfare since the sending of Javelin to the supply of HIMARSmedium-range missiles, cluster bombsmodern tanks and soon also of F16not to mention the training of thousands of soldiers: beyond the fury on the Ukrainian civilian infrastructure and population, Moscow has not realized any of the even too veiled threats of recent months after every “upgrade” of the aid plan, nor can think of using the nuclear weapon in conventional warfare and after similar performances.
We must not be fooled: the Israeli model was not an intentional political choice nor for Washington nor for Jerusalem what would it be like to propose it to Kiev. Contrary to what many believe, US support did not start with the creation of the State of Israel: after having shown much coldness at the time of the independence of the Jewish state (the Soviet Union and the Yugoslavia recognized the new government almost immediately, unlike the Americans). Usa they began to arm Israel only in the 1960s with a decision deriving from the logic of Cold War instead of pressure from a pro-Israel lobby that didn’t even exist at the time. Realpolitik called for containing Soviet power and influence in Middle East and establish a US-led regional order, including through Israel. With the collapse ofUSSRIsraeli leaders went from believing that Washington would always be there to bail them out to the certainty that for Americans, entrapment in a de facto alliance with Israel was no longer functional to achieving geopolitical and geostrategic goals in the Middle East region.
Furthermore, the US-Israel relationship is bilateral and not collective. We are sure that all Western leaders could tell Zelensky – credibly and in unison – how the president John F. Kennedy he told the then Israeli foreign minister Golda Meir in 1962: “The United States has a special relationship with you in your region, comparable only to its relationship with the Great Britain on a wide range of world affairs”?
Then, the geopolitical picture is only apparently similar: in the Middle East and North Africa the USA had to make the choice of treating Israel as a “special friend” and not include it in an alliance tout court so as not to ruin relations with some Arab governments – they too – “special friends” in the Arabian Peninsula It is in the Persian Gulf. In the former USSR it is only Russia that asks Washington to sit down and decide together the reciprocal spheres of influence: to leave Kiev in the middle it would mean playing into Moscow’s hands without any advantage, given that Ukraine is already receiving the same treatment as Israel and the “friendly” Arab countries.
The framework of US-Israel bilateral relations does not present a formal commitment on the part of the United States: from 1975 to the present day, the two countries have only signed memoranda in which Washington has committed itself – at its discretion – to the survival and security of Israel , its equipment, its energy needs and its economic needs”. At most Washington has come to name Israel as “important non-NATO ally” with a public statement that you have made it more expensive for US leaders to back down without paying a high price in terms of reputation as a reliable strategic partner. A framework without commitments from Washington? But to be sure, Article 5 of the Atlantic Treaty also requires members to take “necessary action” to support an ally if it is attacked, but imposes no legal obligation on members to fight directly.
Concretely, the United States has so far supplied Israel with approx 158 billion dollars in military assistance. It already sounds similar to what has been done for Kiev since 2021. In short, the Israeli model has the defect of being a heated soupa mixture of the memorandum of Budapest (trampled by the Russians in 2014 and 2022) and what has been seen in recent months, without advantages for those who propose it, let alone for those who should accept it. If it ended up in the newspapers it is because – as they say – one speaks to the daughter-in-law because the mother-in-law understands: what the citizen reads and finds an interesting model, for the leaders it means, more realistically, that either Ukraine is included in the Atlantic framework or governments will have to continue to shoulder huge military expenditures for decades to come. In short, it looks like a candidate to burn quickly.
And to think that the first to draw the comparison with Israel was at the beginning of the war, in April 2022, the Ukrainian president himself Zelensky that he was confident that security would be Kiev’s main challenge for the next decade and that Ukrainians should be armed and trained on the Israeli model, albeit with a different and peculiar face.