The next world order will not emerge from a treaty signing or a diplomatic photo op. It is taking shape right now inside data centers, chip fabrication plants, undersea cable routes, and the software controlling hospitals, power grids, and military systems.
Who gets to write the rules for that infrastructure will determine the balance of power for decades.
Henry Kissinger devoted his career to a single puzzle: how to build power legitimate enough to endure. In *World Order*, he cautioned that cyberspace had outpaced any shared doctrine, leaving nations with massive capabilities and zero agreed boundaries. His final works on artificial intelligence went further, warning that machines acting faster than human judgment could unravel deterrence entirely.
His core insight still applies. Order requires both a balance of power and a shared sense of legitimacy. Remove either, and the system collapses into coercion or chaos.
What Kissinger’s century could not fully anticipate was sovereignty loss without territorial loss. A country can hold a UN seat while depending entirely on foreign clouds, foreign semiconductors, and foreign algorithms it cannot inspect. Its grid can go dark from another continent. In the cyber era, power gets measured by who controls the infrastructure everyone else needs, not just by divisions and warheads.
That reality demands a core of trusted democracies with both capability and credibility to set standards.
Washington and Jerusalem fit that role better than any other pairing. America supplies scale: leadership in advanced computing, chip design, AI, and a global alliance network. Israel contributes something scarcer: a nation forced to defend itself daily across every domain, from rockets to ransomware. Its cyber sector, forged under fire, ranks among the most inventive on the planet.
Google’s $32 billion acquisition of Israeli cloud-security firm Wiz was not philanthropy. It was acknowledgment of that edge.
Last year’s conflict with Iran demonstrated what this alliance delivers in practice. Israeli intelligence and American power jointly set back a nuclear program threatening the entire region. Jointly developed missile defenses shielded civilians from hundreds of ballistic missiles. Meanwhile, the war unfolded in cyberspace too, with attacks on banks, infrastructure, and information systems.
Germany’s purchase of Israel’s Arrow 3 system to protect European skies showed that Israeli defense innovation now forms part of Europe’s own security architecture. Cyber cooperation should follow.
Three concrete steps would turn this bilateral cooperation into a broader architecture. First, joint defense of critical infrastructure, with shared early warning and rapid response for power grids, ports, hospitals, and financial networks. Second, trusted supply chains: democracies cannot secure themselves with hardware and software built by authoritarian rivals. Third, rules for military AI, where Washington and Jerusalem have both the standing and the responsibility to set standards for human oversight before adversaries do.
The Eastern Mediterranean and the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor map this architecture. Energy, data cables, and trade routes linking the Gulf, Israel, Cyprus, Greece, and Europe. Whoever secures those networks shapes the region’s future more than whoever fires the most missiles.
The alternative is not a vacuum. China offers digital infrastructure with dependency baked in. Russia pairs cyberattacks with disinformation. Iran uses proxies and hackers to project power far beyond its economic weight. These regimes share a goal: an order where rules are optional and dependency becomes a coercion tool.
Europe has led on regulation, from data protection to the AI Act. But regulation without capability is a rulebook for a game others are playing. Strategic autonomy cannot mean isolation. Deeper integration with American and Israeli ecosystems would strengthen European sovereignty rather than replace it.
Smaller democracies feel this vulnerability most acutely. They face Western standards while depending on technology they cannot verify or replace. An alliance that shares knowledge and builds local capacity, rather than creating new dependencies, would earn something no adversary can acquire: genuine trust.
The table is being set now. If America and Israel do not lead in writing the rules, others will. And they will not write them for freedom.
