#foreign-policy

Buried deep inside a 192-page intelligence authorization bill is Section 622, titled “United States-Israel Intelligence Sharing Enhancement.” It would require the president, acting through the director of national intelligence and as necessary the secretary of defense, to “expand and enhance intelligence sharing with the Government of Israel” on a list of subjects that encompasses almost every topic of intelligence interest in the Middle East.

The bill, put forward by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, would prohibit any suspension, reduction, or limitation of such sharing “except on the basis of a specific and identifiable national security concern determined by the President.” Any such exception would require a report to Congress within fifteen days detailing not only the reason for the change but also the categories of information involved. The same report would require an assessment of the anticipated impact on regional security and various other matters.

This proposal is one of several recent moves by those in Washington who carry the Israeli government’s water to keep the United States tied to Israel despite plummeting support for the country among the American public. The most salient form of U.S. support to Israel has been more than $300 billion in economic and especially military assistance.

The mandating of intelligence sharing carries this strategy further by moving it into the shadowy world of relations between intelligence agencies. That world is even farther removed from public visibility and accountability than the defense integration, and even less likely to stimulate thoughts about American taxpayers’ money going to a foreign country. So far, Section 622 of the intelligence bill has received less attention than Section 224 of the defense bill.

In intelligence, Israel is more of an adversary than an ally. Being an adversary in intelligence means indulging in the hostile act of espionage. Israel has a long record of conducting that type of hostile act against the United States. The best-known case involves the spy Jonathan Pollard, who stole such an overwhelming volume of U.S. secrets that then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger stated to the court that sentenced Pollard that it was difficult “ to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant in view of the breadth, the critical importance to the U.S., and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel.”

When Pollard completed his prison sentence and parole in 2020, he was given a hero's welcome, led by Netanyahu himself, on his arrival at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel.

The Israeli espionage threat to the United States has only intensified. Last week, NBC News reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency raised the threat level for such espionage, evidently a reflection mostly of U.S.-Israeli differences over the Iran war. The New York Times quotes an official saying that Israeli intelligence operations aimed at senior U.S. officials during the second Trump administration have become so aggressive as to be “unhinged.”

Any sensitive information, including intelligence secrets, shared with Israel entails a high risk of Israel passing it to other countries, including U.S. adversaries. Israel has a long record of that, too

Israel’s sharing of U.S.-origin military technology with China has been an issue.

Israel has started more wars and attacked more nations than any other country in the Middle East. In recent years it has inflicted more death and destruction on civilians through military operations than any other Middle Eastern state. It uses violence to seek regional hegemony and destroy Palestinian nationhood in ways that are inconsistent with U.S. interests.

After being the principal influence on President Donald Trump’s decision to launch the war, Netanyahu’s government has been sabotaging efforts to end it. It currently is doing so mainly with relentless attacks in Lebanon that have killed thousands and displaced over a million people. The divergence of objectives was reflected in an expletive-laden phone call last week between Trump and Netanyahu that was mainly about those attacks.

It comes after Trump ordered U.S. strikes in response to the downing of an American military helicopter.

Iran has not claimed responsibility for shooting down the American helicopter. Tehran accused the U.S. of acting under a “false pretext” and warned that any further U.S. attacks would be met with what it called “devastating and more wide-ranging strikes.” Despite the latest exchange, Trump has maintained that efforts to reach a peace agreement remain on track.

Trump wrote on Truth Social that Iranian leaders have "taken too long to negotiate a deal". US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said Iran had been given a chance to make a deal but had not taken it, adding that bombs would be "dropping on key facilities" in the country. The US president added that Iran would be attacked again if no peace deal was secured.

This is not the first time Israel has been accused of espionage against the US – its closest ally and benefactor – with which it maintains extensive security and intelligence cooperation.

According to NBC News and The New York Times (NYT), citing anonymous current and former US officials, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) arm recently upgraded Israel’s counterintelligence threat level from “high” to “critical”, the most serious designation in its internal assessment system.

The warning was based on Israeli intelligence agencies intensifying efforts to collect information on US military personnel, government officials and policy discussions.

The news reports said the concern was focused on American officials involved in shaping Washington’s approach towards Iran, as the two foes continue to negotiate an end to the war that has sent global energy prices soaring.

“An intensified Israeli effort to learn about US positions in talks with Iran has crossed a line, according to some American officials,” the NYT said.

The reports also referenced incidents in which US defence personnel working in Israel allegedly discovered software on their phones “to tap their communications had been surreptitiously installed on their phones”, the NYT added.

The newspaper said the DIA reports found Israeli spying on the US, which has occurred before, surged from late 2024 onwards, coinciding with US President Joe Biden’s administration stepping up pressure on Israel over its genocide in Gaza.

Israel has previously been involved in espionage cases targeting the US, although such incidents have not been spoken about much given their close ties.

The most famous example is the Jonathan Pollard affair. The civilian intelligence analyst working for the US Navy was arrested in 1985 after passing large quantities of classified information to Israel. He later pleaded guilty to espionage and served 30 years in prison before being released on parole in 2015.

“Over decades, Israel has sought to penetrate US policymaking circles through both formal and informal networks, including intelligence and lobbying channels, in order to gain insight into American strategic thinking and decision-making,” he added.

Nevertheless, Washington has for years provided billions in military aid and weapons sales to Israel, including throughout the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza.

The US Congress is also currently debating a section of a new defence bill, which would integrate the two countries’ research and development for weaponry to an unprecedented degree. The US has also provided diplomatic cover to Israel at the UN and other international bodies.

“What surprises many observers is the extent to which Israel, despite being heavily dependent on American military, diplomatic and financial support, has developed the capacity to penetrate multiple layers of US policymaking and cultivate influence across key institutions involved in American statecraft.”

According to analyst and Iran expert Negar Mortazavi, Israel’s reported espionage in the current context is not new and has past precedent. Israel’s opposition to US-Iran negotiations goes back to the time of US President Barack Obama when he signed a nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, which the US under Trump withdrew from in 2018.

“The Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu did not want any deals or serious negotiations or normalisation between Tehran and Washington, and he tried to stop it publicly and privately in any way he could,” she told Al Jazeera.

President Donald Trump stood in front of regional leaders during a visit to the Middle East in May and declared a new era of US foreign policy in the region, one that is not guided by trying to reshape it or change its governing systems.

“In the end, the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves,” the US president said in rebuke of his hawkish predecessors.

Less than a year later, Trump ordered an all-out assault on Iran with the stated goal of bringing “freedom” to the country, borrowing language from the playbook of interventionist neoconservatives, like former President George W Bush, whom he spent his political career criticising.

Analysts say the war with Iran does not fit with Trump’s stated political ideology, policy goals or campaign promises.

Instead, several Iran experts told Al Jazeera that Trump is waging a war, together with Israel, that only benefits Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

“This is, once again, a war of choice launched by the US with [a] push from Israel,” said Negar Mortazavi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC.

“This is another Israeli war that the US is launching. Israel has pushed the US to attack Iran for two decades, and they finally got it.”

Netanyahu, who promoted the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, has been warning for more than two decades that Iran is on the cusp of acquiring nuclear weapons.

Iran denies seeking a nuclear bomb, and even Trump administration officials have acknowledged that Washington has no evidence that Tehran is weaponising its uranium enrichment programme.

After the US bombed Iran’s main enrichment facilities in the 12-day war in June last year – an attack that Trump says “obliterated” the country’s nuclear programme – Netanyahu pivoted to a new supposed Iranian threat: Tehran’s ballistic missiles.

“Iran can blackmail any American city,” Netanyahu told pro-Israel podcaster Ben Shapiro in October.

“People don’t believe it. Iran is developing intercontinental missiles with a range of 8,000km [5,000 miles], add another 3,000 [1,800 miles], and they can get to the East Coast of the US.”

Trump repeated that claim, which Tehran has vehemently denied and has not been backed by any public evidence or testing, in his State of the Union address earlier this week.

“They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America,” he said of the Iranians.

But the US president’s own National Security Strategy last year called for de-prioritising the Middle East in Washington’s foreign policy and focusing on the Western Hemisphere.

Only 21 percent of respondents in a recent University of Maryland survey said they favoured a war with Iran.

The June 2025 war, initiated by Israel without provocation, also came in the middle of US-Iran talks.

“Netanyahu’s agenda has always been to prevent a diplomatic solution, and he feared Trump was actually serious about getting a deal, so the start of this war in the middle of negotiations is a success for him, just like it was last June,” Jamal Abdi, the president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), told Al Jazeera.

Earlier this month, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told conservative commentator Tucker Carlson that “if it were not for Iran, there wouldn’t be Hezbollah; we wouldn’t have the problem on the border with Lebanon”.

Carlson said, “What problem on the border with Lebanon? I’m an American. I’m not having any problems on the border with Lebanon right now. I live in Maine.”

The family of independent UN investigator Francesca Albanese has sued the Trump administration over US sanctions imposed on her last year for her criticism of Israel’s policies during the war with Hamas in Gaza, saying the penalties violate the first amendment.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in the US district court in Washington, Albanese’s husband and minor child outlined the serious impact those sanctions have had on the family’s life and work, including the ability to access their home in the nation’s capital.

Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, is a member of a group of experts chosen by the 47-member UN human rights council in Geneva. She has been tasked with investigating human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories and has been vocal about what she has described as the “genocide” by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza.

Both Israel and the United States, which provides military support to its close ally, have strongly denied the genocide accusation. Washington had decried what it has called Albanese’s “campaign of political and economic warfare” against the US and Israel before imposing sanctions on her in July after an unsuccessful US pressure campaign to force the international body to remove her from her post.

When it comes to his handling of foreign affairs, most do not trust Donald Trump to make the right decisions about international military action (56%) or the use of nuclear weapons (59%). The public is similarly skeptical when it comes to his handling of relationships with both U.S. allies and adversaries, with 56% and 55%, respectively, expressing little to no trust.

Trust in Trump’s decision making on international issues is starkly divided along partisan lines with Republicans more likely than Democrats or independents to have faith in the president’s judgment. Ninety-two percent of Democrats and 65% of independents have little or no trust in Trump’s ability to make the right decisions on the use of nuclear weapons compared with 20% of Republicans. There are similar partisan divisions when it comes to use of military force abroad and relationships with other countries.

In a part of the opinion joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Roberts said that Trump’s reliance on IEEPA to impose the tariffs violated the “major questions” doctrine – the idea that if Congress wants to delegate the power to make decisions of vast economic or political significance, it must do so clearly. In 2023, the court relied on the “major questions” doctrine to strike down the Biden administration’s student-loan forgiveness program. In that case and others like it, Roberts observed, it might have been possible to read the federal law at issue to give the executive branch the power it claimed. But “context” – such as the constitutional division of power among the three branches of government – and “common sense” “suggested Congress would not have delegated ‘highly consequential power’ through ambiguous language.”

In cases like this one, Roberts continued, in which the Trump administration contends that Congress has delegated to it “the core congressional power of the purse,” considerations like context and common sense “apply with particular force.” “[I]f Congress were to relinquish that weapon to another branch, a ‘reasonable interpreter’ would expect it to do so ‘clearly.’” And indeed, Roberts said, “[w]hen Congress has delegated its tariff powers, it has done so in explicit terms, and subject to strict limits,” a test that Trump’s tariffs failed here.

The bipartisan war powers resolution, sponsored by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), aims to reassert Congress’s authority to wage war by requiring Trump to win congressional approval before launching any strikes against Iran.

But Massie, so far, is the only House Republican to say he’s supporting the resolution. And a small handful of Democrats — all of them close allies of Israel — are already lining up to oppose it. The combination sets the stage for the measure to fail in the Republican-controlled House, which would give Trump what amounts to a tacit authorization to conduct unilateral strikes as the president and other top officials signal that such an attack could be imminent.

Khanna, Massie and other supporters of the check on executive war powers maintain that they’re merely firming up the use-of-force authorities delineated by the Constitution, which explicitly grants Congress the power “to declare war.”

Last summer, after Trump launched strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, Senate Republicans blocked a bipartisan resolution limiting Trump’s use of force in that country.

Over the last three months, the lower chamber has voted on three separate war powers resolutions — two related to military actions in Venezuela, and the third governing the Pentagon’s strikes on alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean region. All resolutions were defeated by Trump’s GOP allies.

“We were told that the nuclear program in Iran had been completely and totally obliterated. Not my words, Donald Trump’s words. And so now we’re to believe that there’s an exigent circumstance where Donald Trump may need to strike militarily in order to prevent Iran presumably from achieving its nuclear ambitions,” Jeffries said Tuesday.

Day one actions of his presidency included restoring U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement, revoking the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline and halting funding for the Mexico–United States border wall.[3] On his second day, he issued a series of executive orders to reduce the impact of COVID-19, including invoking the Defense Production Act of 1950, and set an early goal of achieving one hundred million COVID-19 vaccinations in the United States in his first 100 days.[4] The first major legislation signed into law by Biden was the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that temporarily established expanded unemployment insurance and sent $1,400 stimulus checks to most Americans in response to continued economic pressure from COVID-19.[5] He signed the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a ten-year plan brokered by Biden alongside Democrats and Republicans in Congress to invest in American roads, bridges, public transit, ports and broadband access.[6]

Biden appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court—the first Black woman to serve on the court. In response to the debt-ceiling crisis of 2023, he negotiated and signed the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, which restrains federal spending for fiscal years 2024 and 2025, implements minor changes to SNAP and TANF, includes energy permitting reform, claws back some IRS funding and unspent money for COVID-19, and suspended the debt ceiling to January 1, 2025.

The foreign policy goal of the Biden administration was to restore the U.S. to a "position of trusted leadership" among global democracies in order to address the challenges posed by Russia and China. Biden signed AUKUS, an international security alliance together with Australia and the United Kingdom. He supported the expansion of NATO with the additions of Finland and Sweden. Biden approved a raid which led to the death of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, the leader of the Islamic State, and approved a drone strike which killed Ayman Al Zawahiri, leader of Al-Qaeda. He completed the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan, declaring an end to nation-building efforts and shifting U.S. foreign policy toward strategic competition with China and, to a lesser extent, Russia.

He responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine by imposing sanctions on Russia and providing Ukraine with over $100 billion in combined military, economic, and humanitarian aid.[19][20] During the Gaza war, Biden condemned the actions of Hamas and other Palestinian militants as terrorism, and announced American military support for Israel; he also sent humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip and brokered a four-day temporary pause and hostage exchange in 2023 followed by a three-phase ceasefire in January 2025.

Sen. Bernie Sanders: “Israel is forcing Doctors Without Borders & dozens of other humanitarian groups to end their work in Gaza. Countless innocent people rely on these services amid the ongoing crisis there. This is yet another cruel, inhumane step from the extremist Israeli government.”

The announcement specifically names the distribution of humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza as a duty of the multinational force under Jeffers’ command. This raises renewed concern that the multinational force will militarize the distribution of aid like the Israeli military did under the GHF scheme.

The militarization of humanitarian aid violates the humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence–just as Israel’s weaponization of food through the GHF did.

The naming of Jeffers as the commander of the multinational force should trigger Congressional oversight of the US military’s activities in Gaza, including the War Powers Resolution.

About 55% less fentanyl was seized by September 2025 than by September 2024.

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Trump's text, sent at 4:15 pm Norway time (10:15 am ET), said.

"I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland," he continued.

The ceasefire agreement was announced on Oct. 10, two years after Hamas militants killed 1,200 and took 251 hostage in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, most of whom were returned in previous negotiations. Since then, Israeli troops have killed more than 70,700 Palestinians in Gaza, many of them women and children, and have displaced most of the enclave’s population. Health authorities in Palestine say Israel has violated the ceasefire multiple times, even daily, and at least 386 people have been killed in strikes by its military since Oct. 10. Israel, meanwhile, says three of its soldiers have died since the ceasefire began, and that it is responding to ceasefire violations by Hamas.

The year 2025 has been marked by three very different wars. There is Ukraine of course, where the UN says 14,000 civilians have died. In Gaza, where Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu promised "mighty vengeance" after about 1,200 people were killed when Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023 and 251 people were taken hostage. Since then, more than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military action, including more than 30,000 women and children according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry – figures the UN considers reliable. Meanwhile there has been a ferocious civil war between two military factions in Sudan. More than 150,000 people have been killed there over the past couple of years; around 12 million have been forced out of their homes. Maybe, if this had been the only war in 2025, the outside world would have done more to stop it; but it wasn't. "I'm good at solving wars," said US President Donald Trump, as his aircraft flew him to Israel after he had negotiated a ceasefire in the Gaza fighting. It's true that fewer people are dying in Gaza now. Despite the ceasefire, the Gaza war certainly doesn't feel as though it's been solved. Given the appalling suffering in the Middle East it may sound strange to say the war in Ukraine is on a completely different level to this. But it is.

While several legal experts have told The Associated Press they believed the second strike violated peacetime laws and those governing armed conflict, the Pentagon’s own manual on the laws of armed conflict also specifically cites striking survivors of a sunken ship as being patently illegal.

“Orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal,” the manual says.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday distanced himself from the secondary strike, which the news report said killed two survivors who were clinging to the wreckage.

Hegseth, sitting next to Trump at the Cabinet meeting, said Trump has empowered “commanders to do what is necessary, which is dark and difficult things in the dead of night on behalf of the American people.”