Past top Israeli, US officials reveal new vision for ties rooted in tech partnership

As US support drops, ex-envoy Tom Nides and ex-IDF intel chief Amos Yadlin present Technology Alliance, in which both countries would invest $2 billion a year into joint projects

Amid cratering support for Israel in the United States, a former senior US official and a former senior Israeli official are offering a new vision for the bilateral relationship.

“We need to establish the relationship anew,” former IDF Military Intelligence chief Amos Yadlin told The Times of Israel on Thursday.

“The model in which Israel is assisted by the United States and receives aid has a very small chance of continuing under any future administration,” he continued, “and perhaps even under the Trump administration, so we need to find a new basis for the relationship that is a transition from aid to partnership.”

Six in 10 Americans say they have a very or somewhat unfavorable view of Israel, up 20 percentage points since 2022, according to a new Pew Research Center survey released last month.

About half of them say they have a “very unfavorable” view of Israel, a proportion that has tripled in the last four years.

“We have work to do,” emphasized former US ambassador to Israel Tom Nides. “We have to tell the story of Israel. We have to tell the story about the innovation. We got to tell the story about Israel being a melting pot. Israel is a country of seven-plus million Jews and two million Arabs. We got to talk about what’s been great about the State of Israel and what they have done.”

In order to recast ties in a way that is more relevant for the coming years and addresses some of the political concerns about the relationship, Yadlin and Nides are advancing the US-Israel Technology Alliance — Strategic Technology Compact.

The initiative, rolled out at the AI+ Expo over the weekend in Washington DC, looks to build “the Special Relationship 2.0” by combining American capital, industrial might, and world-class laboratories with Israel’s speed, experience and engineering ingenuity, according to the organizers.

“The United States has lots of technology,” said Nides. “We’re leading in technology and AI and innovation. It’s not lost on anyone that Israel is the startup nation. These two countries have been working together to create technology innovations and breakthroughs.”

“These two nations working collectively together is both good for Americans, the average American, and good for the average Israeli,” he continued. “And quite frankly, it’s good for the region and for the world as a whole.”

According to a draft proposal of the initiative — created by the US think tank Special Competitive Studies Project and the Israeli consultancy MIND Israel — the US-Israel relationship has rested on defense cooperation, security assistance, shared geopolitical interests and cooperation between businesses.

“That foundation remains essential,” write the organizers. “But it is no longer sufficient for a century that will be defined by leadership in artificial intelligence, semiconductors, advanced energy, cyber, quantum, bioconvergence, and strategic manufacturing: both military and civilian.”

The US-Israel Tech Alliance looks to move beyond the security foundation for the relationship by creating “a more modern, more reciprocal, and more productive basis for long-term strategic partnership.”

The organizers call for both governments to sign a memorandum of understanding that would see Jerusalem and Washington commit to at least $1 billion per year of public funding of joint projects.

“The United States gains a trusted, battle-tested technology ally that strengthens American leadership in AI, cyber, energy, quantum, and industrial resilience,” according to the draft proposal. “Israel gains durable access to the world’s most important technology ecosystem — including federal programs, laboratories, capital pathways, procurement channels, and scale-up opportunities.”

The partnership could also give the US an edge in its competition with China.

“China is working to establish its technical governance frameworks and infrastructure standards as global defaults — including across the Middle East, where both the United States and Israel have significant and overlapping strategic interests,” say the organizers.

“A US–Israel partnership, structured correctly, provides a credible, operationally validated alternative. It can also strengthen and expand the multilateral agreements — including the Abraham Accords — which underpin regional collaboration.”

No regime change

Nides, a lifelong Democrat who served in the Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations, had rare praise for US President Donald Trump on his approach toward Iran.

“Iran has been a cancer in the region,” said Nides. “I certainly applaud President Trump for some of the actions he has taken to diminish the ballistic missiles and obliterate, I guess for the second time, the nuclear materials.”

Trump ordered US bombers to join Israel’s Operation Rising Lion in June 2025, and, in February, embarked on a joint operation against Tehran alongside Israel.

“That said,” continued Nides, “we need to have a pathway to end this.”

“You are not going to have regime change in Iran at this point,” said Nides. “But we can and have done a pretty good job of diminishing much of their military apparatus.”

Nides predicted that the final agreement will look very similar to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was scrapped by Trump in 2018 during his first term.

“It won’t be called that,” he said. “But I have a feeling, when I hold my breath and I shut my eyes really tight, it’s going to have a lot of elements that we had in 2015, which many of us spent a lot of time working on.”

Yadlin argued that the Iran war, though it didn’t lead to the immediate fall of the Islamic Republic, was successful in countering the Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile threat.

“We have significantly set back these programs, and I think that this is where the results of the campaign were achieved,” said Yadlin. “Now we need to see whether the severe economic damage to Iran will also create the conditions for regime change. We don’t need to stand here with a stopwatch. It won’t happen in a week or a month, but it could definitely happen in a year or two.”

Yadlin said that it is in Israel’s interest for the US and Iran not to reach an agreement.

“The situation of neither agreement nor war is a better situation than an agreement that saves the regime,” he said, “and to a certain extent also betrays all the brave Iranians who took to the streets.”