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This is a guest essay by General Yoav Gallant, the former Israeli Minister of Defense.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Last week, in Tel Aviv, Israel and Greece signed the largest defense export agreement in the history of the relationship between our two countries, and one of the largest Israel has ever signed.
“Achilles Shield” will give Greece an integrated national air defense network built on David’s Sling, SPYDER, and Barak MX, with radars, and with a national command and control system tying them together. Roughly 700 million euros of the value will go to Greek subcontractors.
As Minister of Defense, I had the privilege of carrying forward what my predecessors began with Greece. At Kalamata, Israeli industry trains the pilots of the Hellenic Air Force under a government-to-government program running twenty-two years, and during my tenure the first advanced trainers arrived and the center reached full operation. We signed a defense cooperation program alongside it, covering joint exercises and joint training.
With this new deal, Greece chooses to build its national air defense on Israeli systems, with Greek industry inside the production chain, over a period that will outlast several governments in both countries. The substance of this deal is trust, and this kind of trust is a strategic fact rather than a commercial one.
Israeli defense thinking has long been organized around three circles. The first is the internal circle: Judea and Samaria and Gaza. The second is the states on our borders, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, and it is worth saying that with the last two we have peace agreements that are important and that have proven stable. The third is hostile states with no shared border, historically Iraq and Libya, and in recent years, when we speak of the third circle, we are mainly speaking of Iran.
Each circle carried its own doctrine, its own force structure and its own assumptions. All three describe enemies. What the framework never included was a circle of partners.
In a war of alliances waged against adversaries who move flexibly between them, Israel should be building a fourth circle around itself: the friendly states nearest to us, with which real alliances can be built because our interests are close and in some cases genuinely shared.
There are five who currently fit the criteria: India, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, Greece, and Cyprus, with the last two acting politically as a single entity.
The fourth circle works like a star rather than a bloc. Israel is the common point, and the circle holds because each relationship holds, not because the members are aligned with one another.
What each of them shares with us is a threat assessment. All of these states, and Israel with them, see serious danger in radical Islamism, the political doctrine that uses the religion of Islam as its instrument. India contends with radical Islamist terrorism originating in Pakistan, and we remember the Mumbai attacks among the clearest examples of it.
The Emirates chose a deliberate course against religious extremism, and by any measure that choice has succeeded. Azerbaijan is a Shiite state threatened by Iran, a far larger Shiite state, in part because it has prospered while maintaining a pluralistic and tolerant approach to religion, which Tehran finds harder to forgive than hostility. Greece and Cyprus have lived under Turkish pressure for decades.
The second thing they share is that all of them regard the United States as their strategic anchor, not Beijing and not Moscow. At a moment when many states are hedging between the great powers, that alignment matters, and it means the fourth circle strengthens the American position in these regions rather than competing with it.
The third is that with each we already have a real and mutual foundation: energy, intelligence, technology, industry, and tourism. Defense systems move between us as well, and it is worth being precise about what that signifies. Countries do not build their national defense on another state’s systems as a commercial preference. They do it when they trust that state and intend to remain close to it.
Looking at the map, what we are describing is a circle of friendship drawn around the circle of hostility, which places us on both sides of our adversaries rather than only in front of them.
Azerbaijan sits on the far side of Iran, India extends beyond, and Greece and Cyprus sit opposite Türkiye in the eastern Mediterranean, while the Emirates serve as our central anchor in the Gulf. These states are neither military bases nor proxies.
However, by aligning with partners who neighbor our adversaries and directly endure their hostility, our strategic position is fundamentally transformed, expanding what we can observe, deepening operational coordination, and forcing our adversaries to recalculate their own backyard.
Azerbaijan’s identity as a Turkic nation ties it more closely to Türkiye than to us. However, its strong commitment to both relationships creates a valuable strategic opportunity for Baku to act as a mediator between our two countries. Rather than a complication to be managed, it can be an opportunity to be used.
Baku is one of the few capitals trusted in Jerusalem and in Ankara alike, and a state in that position can carry messages, lower the temperature, and open channels that neither side can open directly. Israel and Türkiye have real differences and they are not going to disappear soon. But tension is easier to restrain when someone both sides trust is willing to stand between them, and we should be encouraging that rather than treating Baku’s other friendships as a problem.
The same applies more widely. Several of these states maintain relations with countries hostile to us. They are capable of separating one relationship from another, and so are we. That is also why the fourth circle cannot be built by a single agreement or a summit. It is a set of relationships, each requiring its own attention, its own reciprocity and its own patience.
The region is moving quickly, and Syria shows how quickly. Two years ago it was a country without an army, without an economy, and without a future. Today its government is rebuilding its military capability with determination, and Türkiye is training and equipping the new Syrian army. Hezbollah is engaged in the same effort in Lebanon, and Iran has not given up its nuclear ambition, and it still holds the enriched material on which it intends to build, even after the last round of fighting. Rebuilding is what defeated adversaries do, and it happens faster than most people expect.
The United States is weighing all of this against its own wider considerations, in this region and beyond it. Our task is to make ourselves useful within that, and the fourth circle is one of the clearest ways to do it, because every one of these states looks to Washington as we do.
We can treat the region’s reorganization as a loss of position, or we can build the arrangement that reflects what Israel actually offers and who actually wants it. “Achilles Shield” should be the model rather than the exception.
Brilliant! This thinking is why Israel will NEVER disappear from the map.