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When American and Israeli warplanes struck Iran on Feb. 28, Israeli officials let themselves believe the alliance was entering a golden age. Four months later, they are bracing for a future where Israel stands more alone than ever. The vice president of the United States set the stage last week, telling Israel it has almost no friends left in the world, and that it should think hard before turning on the one it has. But the problem for Israel is much bigger than JD Vance, according to seven people, including U.S. and Israeli officials and others familiar with the relationship. Instead, they say, Vance is only the face of the new normal, in which Israel’s status as an American ally doesn’t stand above all others. Israel had expected when President Donald Trump came into office that his America First foreign policy would include “an exception” for Israel, said an Israeli political adviser. “That was never going to hold. We were never going to be able to stay for four years as an exception to everything else America does in its foreign policy,” the adviser said. “When the clash came, Israel was naive to think that we would be able to be exempt from those expectations.” The chill between the sides is evident. In 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Washington five times. He visited once this year in February but there are no dates on the calendar for another White House visit, and phone calls have tapered off considerably, according to a person familiar with interactions between the two governments. “I don’t think we’ve reached the worst place possible,” the person said. “There’s more to come.” Both people, like others in this story, were granted anonymity to speak candidly about sensitivities in the relationship. The White House said U.S.-Israel relations remain strong. “The president and the vice president are on the same page: Israel has always been a great ally to the United States, and there has been no greater friend to Israel and a fighter for peace than President Trump,” White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said. “The Israel Defense Forces were incredible partners throughout Operation Epic Fury, which decimated the Iranian regime’s military capabilities in 38 short days.” Still, Vance’s warning to Israel was unusually stark. “Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment,” he said during his press conference. “If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world. He noted Washington’s significant contributions to defending Israel and made a veiled suggestion that such a relationship could change. “Anybody in Israel who thinks their biggest problem is the president of the United States needs to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in,” he said. Vance’s office declined to comment, but a person close to his team said the rhetoric is an acknowledgement of what Vance sees as the new political reality. “The vice president sees that the ground is shifting against Israel among voters, including with younger Republicans. He’s responding accordingly, with nuance instead of stridency,” the person said. Vance’s comments stunned some Israeli officials, even though they were used to Vance being skeptical of the relationship. One called it a “low point.” Vance has argued for years, even before he was vice president, that Israel’s interests and America’s do not always align, and that the U.S. should not be dragged into a war with Iran on its behalf. “Israel has the right to defend itself, but America’s interest is sometimes going to be distinct,” he said on a podcast in 2024 while he was Trump’s running mate. “And our interest very much is in not going to war with Iran.” As a result, Israel has long preferred to deal with Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio over Vance, the person familiar with the dynamics between the governments said, wagering that the vice president’s skepticism was a fringe it could outlast. Vance’s prominence in Iran negotiations and the deal that has resulted suggest otherwise. While the memorandum of understanding with Iran helps the Trump administration toward its goal of lowering oil prices and reopening shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz, it is only an agreement to talk about Iran’s nuclear program and doesn’t address Israel’s worries about ballistic missiles and a regime it believes remains committed to Israel’s destruction. In recent months, Trump has charmed, cursed and reversed himself on Israel. But his tone toward the U.S. ally has been noticeably harsher and more critical. He called Netanyahu “f—ing crazy,” earlier this month amid his frustration with Israeli actions in Lebanon that threaten the Iran talks. Afterward, Netanyahu shelved planned strikes on Beirut, the kind of restraint Vance had been urging all along. Natan Sachs, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said that Netanyahu’s government sees the rift, but doesn’t realize how much of a break it is. “At the leadership level there is deep concern…but they are underestimating the severity of the moment,” he said. Even a new framework that Israel and Lebanon signed Friday committing to steps toward ending that conflict may not be enough to change the trajectory. The agreement binds the two governments but not Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia that is fighting Israel. The Lebanese government historically hasn’t been able to do much to change the group’s behavior. “It depends a lot on what happens in Lebanon,” Sachs said. “It’s laid bare fundamentally different interests. For the United States a deal with Iran — whatever it is — Trump has decided the deal is in the American interest, and Lebanon is just not that close to that importance…For Israel…Lebanon cannot be relegated to an afterthought.” And with voters soon to weigh in on both sides of the Mediterranean, the gap between what Israel wants from Washington and what Washington will give is likely to grow. Netanyahu’s office is trying to keep the focus of its displeasure on Vance alone. His government “never trusted him,” said the person familiar with interactions between the governments. “He’s the one pushing for an agreement, he was the one pushing for separating from Israel.” Netanyahu and his office don’t “take everything that is happening now with Trump as the end-all, because in the same way it can turn around, everybody’s fully aware of that,” the person said. Vance’s allies say the vice president and Trump are aligned, even more so now than before Trump made the decision to attack Iran. “JD was just echoing the president, who, by the way…has been quite aggressive recently in his criticisms of Bibi both publicly and privately,” said another Vance ally. Two weeks after he cursed Netanyahu, Trump declared at the G7 summit that “without me there would be no Israel.” For all the friction, Israeli officials still take a holistic view of the relationship, weighing the considerable benefits it has delivered under Trump — for example ending the Gaza war and bringing 20 living hostages home — against the recent strains. They want Washington to keep that fuller picture in mind, too. “Trump has done enormously important, impressive things for Israel,” the Israeli adviser said. As a result, Israel tends to “give him the benefit of doubt, give him grace, to say, listen, we can accept the kind of comments he makes sometimes. Because in the end, when it counts, he’s definitely had our back.” Vance and others on Trump’s team, meanwhile, haven’t been spared from Israeli criticism. That is evident on Israel’s Channel 14, a pro-Netanyahu television station known to reflect messaging from the prime minister’s office. Yinon Magal, host of a nightly talk show, described Vance in Hebrew as “scum” or a “lowlife” and accused Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner of selling out “their brothers in Israel.” Asked on a podcast whether he trusts JD Vance, one of Netanyahu’s main challengers Naftali Bennett responded, “I haven’t met him, I’ve not met JD Vance…in general I’d say there is a very strong wind in America, reminiscent of pre WWII isolationism…We have to act in this reality.” Officials in both Israel and the U.S. expect the divisions to deepen in the months ahead. Netanyahu’s fate at the ballot box in October is now entangled with a White House he can no longer count on. “Netanyahu was banking on the fact that Trump will give him full support before the elections, and that hasn’t happened yet. It may happen, but it’s not happening now,” said the person familiar with interactions between the two governments. The GOP, meanwhile, will see its own fight over Israel play out at the ballot box a month later. Vance’s 2028 prospects loom over all of it — with his record on Iran only defensible if he can tout the Iran war as the beginning of a new Middle East. “Very interesting to see the vice president put out some, if you will, bread crumbs for his own thoughts and pathway for the future about how he’s choosing to not just navigate these issues, but also articulate them to international, and then even more importantly, domestic and base audiences,” said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former Trump appointee to the State Department in the first administration.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s abrupt shift toward an aggressive and unpredictable oversight regime for artificial intelligence has some in the industry yearning for some Biden-style regulation. It’s a reversal that few would have predicted at the start of Trump’s second term, after he swept into office on a wave of donations from Silicon Valley billionaires who warned that former President Joe Biden’s AI safety policy would crush U.S. innovation. Trump had signaled an intention to leave AI alone to flourish, and in his first year he mostly focused on stopping states from regulating the technology. But the arrival of powerful new AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI caused the White House to clamp down this month on the firms’ ability to release their most advanced products, for fear that bad actors might use them to unleash cyberattacks. The shift to new AI controls has been chaotic and imprecise — leaving the American AI industry in limbo at the same time that its Chinese competitors are gaining ground. The unpredictability was on display again Friday when the Trump administration partially rescinded its export ban on Anthropic’s most advanced artificial intelligence model — de-escalating a confrontation that has caused confusion across the American AI industry. But a second advanced Anthropic model, called Fable 5, remains blocked for reasons that remain opaque. And Anthropic’s top competitor, OpenAI, limited the release of its most advanced model this week because of similar cyber concerns from the White House. The moves have whipsawed an industry that had come to believe it had a partner in the White House, but is now facing a growing bipartisan backlash and an uncertain regulatory regime whose scope and scale seems to change week by week. One senior executive at an AI company, granted anonymity to avoid retaliation, was bluntly critical of the hurdles the administration has put in the way of new models. “This seems like a de facto European-style licensing regime,” the executive said. Paul Lekas, head of global public policy and government affairs at the Software & Information Industry Association trade group, which represents some of the leading AI companies, said there is a “real need for a formal process.” “We want to avoid a situation where the release of any model or piece of software is based on an ad hoc process and a one-off license process,” Lekas said. One OpenAI executive, granted anonymity to describe discussions with the administration, said the industry is looking for “clarity” from the administration — a phrase repeated across interviews with half a dozen other lobbyists and industry representatives. But the industry representatives also said they’re wary of pushing the White House for answers, lest they end up hit with export controls or other blunt tools of regulation. “It feels like they’re walking on eggshells a little bit,” said one AI policy adviser who works with major frontier labs, granted anonymity to candidly describe the landscape. White House spokesperson Liz Huston, in a statement, defended the president’s efforts to facilitate innovation in the AI industry, including fast-tracking permits for AI infrastructure and signing an executive order that aimed to stop a patchwork of differing state laws on the technology. “President Trump has clearly and repeatedly articulated his goal: ensure continued American dominance in AI and other cutting-edge technologies,” Huston said. “President Trump and the entire Administration will continue to cement America as the world’s premier innovation powerhouse.” The first sign of the administration’s pivot on AI policy came in early June when, after weeks of debate, Trump signed an executive order that laid out a voluntary vetting process for companies developing advanced AI models. But before the order was implemented, the White House went much further — in mid-June, it imposed export controls on Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and Fable models, blocking the company from releasing its new product over potential security concerns. And this week, the administration pressured OpenAI to restrict the release of its new GPT-5.6 model to a small group of partners approved by the administration. Saif Khan, a former adviser on emerging technology in the Biden administration, called the Trump administration’s actions an overreaction to predictable safety concerns, and suggested it stemmed from the White House’s prior laissez-faire attitude toward AI rules. “Because there has been some dismissiveness of the risks, there’s been no preparatory work, no hiring of experts that you need to do this work,” Khan said. “And now you have this opaque, almost vibes-based system for what is going to get approved and what’s not.” Khan called the new White House approach far more damaging to the AI industry than anything the Biden administration had envisioned, including a rule introduced just as the former left office that would have imposed export controls for certain countries on both semiconductor chips and the weights of advanced AI models. “The administration’s current actions have resulted in an almost complete moratorium on new releases,” Khan said. “And that’s going to start seriously impacting companies’ bottom lines.” Dean Ball, a former Trump administration official and OpenAI’s incoming head of strategic futures, said it was inevitable that the White House would need to take a more heavy-handed approach, but added that it could have found a middle ground. “It can be true that a fully laissez-faire attitude is not appropriate to this technology, and it can also be true that, while the Trump administration’s concerns here are like 100 percent legitimate, there are various ways in which I think they are likely overreacting to these legitimate concerns,” Ball said. Despite the fast-spreading chaos, some in the AI industry are hopeful that the White House will revert to its previous hands-off baseline. “They are in the middle of a process,” said the OpenAI executive. The person suggested the administration will soon finalize the executive order that Trump signed earlier this month — and that once it does, it could replace the current crackdown with the voluntary vetting regime outlined in that order. “I think they understand that it’s important to get to a finalized framework as soon as possible,” the OpenAI executive said. “Because the labs are continuing to release models, and it’s important for the labs to continue to release models to ensure that the U.S. stays a leader in AI.” As a whole, many in the AI industry have come to agree that the White House’s new slant toward regulation is a necessary shift, even if they disagree with the execution. “In the bigger picture, like yes, there are things the administration is doing that I’m not so much of a fan of, in terms of the abruptness and the opacity and the strictness, but the more fundamental point is that I’m glad they’ve arrived to the conclusion that they have — to take this stuff seriously,” Ball said. Lekas also said that the tech industry is developing a “coordinated push for an actual framework” on advanced AI rules. And he said the tech lobby wants Washington to put it in writing — whether it’s through an executive order or more permanent levers in Congress. That effort will require the tech companies to agree on a standardized approach for AI safety. If they can’t row in the same direction, they may keep receiving the same unpredictable treatment. “It would behoove industry to coalesce around a best practice,” Lekas said.

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