In late August 2021, United States President Joseph Biden hosted the newly elected Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennet, at the White House for an official meeting. Shortly after, Israeli journalist Barak Ravid reported that Biden and Bennet ‘reaffirmed the strategic understandings’ between the two allies on Israel’s ‘alleged undeclared military nuclear program’, noting that this reaffirmation of policy has been repeated by every US President since Richard Nixon.¹ As shall be explored below, this statement is mostly accurate, with the seemingly glaring exception of President George H.W. Bush. Upon its publication, Ravid’s story became the most recent in a long line of reports detailing this repeated commitment by US presidents to their Israeli counterparts.²

What role does this commitment play in Israel’s long history with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)? The primary aim of this article is to answer this question by charting Israel’s relationship with the NPT and its decades-long fear of American coercion to join it. A secondary aim of this article is to provide a concise primer, or introduction, to this nuanced question for scholars and students alike, by reviewing the existing literature and adding insights from new archival sources to this growing body of work.

The paper proceeds in three parts. The first charts the emergence of Israel’s NPT policy and the technical-diplomatic road which led to the emergence of the policy in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. The second charts how this policy impacted Israel’s nuclear energy policy in the following decades, ultimately preventing it from pursuing its plan of launching a massive civilian nuclear infrastructure program, specifically nuclear power plants for electricity production. The third concludes with charting Israel’s NPT policy at the end of the Cold War. Research for this study was conducted in archives in the US, United Kingdom, Canada, and Israel, and taps both primary and secondary sources; Hebrew translations are by the author, unless otherwise noted.³

This memo examines securitization within the public political discussion of both Russia and the United States. We have selected keywords pertaining to the country itself in general and to the country’s intelligence services in order to identify whether the overall sentiment towards the country is similar to the sentiment given to one of the most securitized topics. For the dataset, we selected recent content from the 10 most-cited political bloggers, with the platforms being Substack for the US and Telegram for Russia. Further on, we analyzed some of the relevant post texts qualitatively. Policy recommendations are provided based on the results. 

Washington’s alliances are under immense strain. Many allies and partners are subject to increased threats from great-power adversaries, and they are coming to doubt whether they can rely on the United States. The response to these pressures is to rearm. Like the United States itself, U.S. partners across Asia, Europe, and elsewhere are building up their defense industrial and technological bases to improve their ability to project power, deter enemies, and prevail in a protracted conflict.

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This paper asks whether the United States and the European Union, despite divergent economic exposure and institutional design, can sustain a coherent sanctions strategy toward Russia, and how that divergence shapes the regime's effectiveness. It proceeds through a structured comparison across three policy domains — energy, finance, and immobilized sovereign assets — drawing on the literatures on economic statecraft, energy security, and financial-network theory, and on transaction-level, macroeconomic, and legal evidence from 2022 to early 2026. The analysis finds, first, that the United States' position as a net energy exporter enabled rapid embargoes, whereas the EU's import dependence produced a slower, phased decoupling. Second, US financial measures operated extraterritorially through dollar centrality and centralized OFAC enforcement, while the EU relied on regulatory jurisdiction over SWIFT but enforced through fragmented national authorities; a Gazprombank carve-out preserved the energy-export inflows that offset the intended balance-of-payments shock. Third, in the dispute over frozen assets, EU custodial institutions bear the legal and retaliatory exposure that the United States advocates from a position of relative insulation. The findings indicate that the regime's effectiveness is constrained less by the design of individual measures than by uneven enforcement and an asymmetric distribution of risk; absent institutionalized burden-sharing, its durability and credibility are likely to weaken.

Escalating threats to undersea cable networks, stemming from gray-zone sabotage at vulnerable chokepoints, are receiving long-overdue attention from policymakers and the public. Recent incidents highlight the strategic vulnerability of this infrastructure, due to a lack of redundancy, limited repair capacity, and gaps in international maritime law. Despite attempts at multilateral cooperation through the G7 and the Quad, concrete actions are lagging. The US administration has not directly addressed this issue. To strengthen resilience, democracies must collaborate and invest in hardened cable designs, real-time monitoring and data sharing, routing diversity, regional repair hubs, and enhanced legal frameworks. They must work together to secure their lifeline for economic and national security and future digital-technology advancement.