Apparently, there wasn’t enough Israel bashing at the United Nations this week, from French President Emmanuel Macron to Jordan’s King Abdullah and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan. Therefore, that cesspool of antisemitism and anti-Zionism has scheduled another hatefest for next week to mark the 25th anniversary of the infamous, rancid Durban conference.

The 2001 “World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance” in Durban, South Africa, unleashed a torrent of visceral anti-Zionism, raw antisemitism, and rank anti-Americanism that has since escalated to unhinged heights.

The myths of Israel as a genocidal and apartheid actor – the Jewish state as the source and cause of every evil in the modern world – were birthed then and there, as were the now-ubiquitous Orwellian campaigns of international lawfare against Israel.

Grotesque is the calmest term I can summon to describe the General Assembly’s planned “celebration” on Monday of this metastasizing monstrous movement.

Since then, the UN has built a sprawling network of more than 30 bodies, investigative mechanisms, offices, commissions, committees, special procedures, and special rapporteurs that contribute to the political, economic, and legal campaigns against Israel – as mapped out in a massive new report by my colleagues at the Jerusalem-based Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy.

“The UN’s Anti-Israel Ecosystem: Mapping the Institutions, Mechanisms, and Resources Behind the Campaign Against Israel” by Dr. Adi Schwartz, Asher Fredman, and Noam Yakoby (165 pp.) shows how these structures result in a self-reinforcing echo chamber in which ostensibly independent bodies repeatedly validate and amplify one another’s “findings” and conclusions – which are invariably anti-Israel and antisemitic.

The UN’s highly resourced Israel-focused machinery manufactures wild claims and statistics about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict based on Arab sources hostile to Israel. These claims are backed by near-automatic voting majorities dominated by Islamic countries, China, and Russia; they then circulate from body to body across the UN system, acquire the authority of technical or professional expertise, and are then cited by governments, journalists, NGOs, courts, and other UN bodies.

The result is an insular institutional and ideological bubble that is ferociously devoted to delegitimizing and criminalizing Israel.

The machinery increasingly produces concrete political, economic, and legal pressure. Human Rights Council and OHCHR mechanisms have generated corporate blacklists and calls for arms restrictions. Special Rapporteurs have promoted sanctions, boycotts, asset freezes, and pressure on private actors. General Assembly initiatives have generated proceedings before the International Court of Justice, whose conclusions are then used to justify further measures. While the International Criminal Court is not a UN body, UN decisions helped create the pathway for Palestinian accession, while UN-generated claims and findings shape the wider environment surrounding its cases.

The authors argue that the danger extends far beyond Israel. The anti-Israel machinery generates legal theories, investigative practices, open-ended commissions, Special Rapporteur mandates, corporate blacklists, arms-embargo campaigns, sanctions proposals, and international criminal proceedings that can establish precedents for use against other democratic states.

Methods developed against Israel can and certainly will later be leveraged against democracies conducting counterterrorism operations or confronting terrorist organizations embedded among civilians. They can expose democratic officials and soldiers to politicized legal proceedings, pressure companies that supply democratic militaries, and delegitimize essential national-security tools.

 WHAT CAN BE done about this? The authors outline eight courses of action, most of which relate to reducing funding for bodies that discriminate against Israel, the US, and other Western countries or undermine Western values.

After all, democratic governments and their taxpayers provide a disproportionate share of the resources that sustain the UN system. It makes no sense that democracies finance institutions that authoritarian and anti-Western blocs use to undermine democratic allies and advance norms those same democracies often oppose.

The amounts of money involved are staggering. In 2024, the US, Germany, UK, Japan, Canada, and France together provided 60% of all direct government contributions to the UN system; the US alone contributed more than 183 other member states combined. Researchers like Prof. Eugene Kontorovich and the late Claudia Rosett have shown that the US government provides more than $20 billion to the UN and related international organizations and multilateral entities – many of which are pugnaciously anti-American and radically woke in addition to rabidly anti-Israel.

The Trump administration started off in the right direction by ending US funding for UNRWA (the forever refugee agency for Palestinians), by reducing funding for the Human Rights Council, UNESCO, and dozens of other international organizations, and by seeking to punish and roll back the ICC.

But since then, the administration nonsensically has nevertheless transferred hundreds of millions of dollars to the UN and paid down hundreds of millions more in accumulated UN obligations, while boasting about paltry reforms and modest efforts to streamline UN waste. This includes payment this month of $827 million for the regular UN budget and for peacekeeping, and a commitment of $3.8 billion in US support for UN humanitarian programs.

And countries like Canada slavishly pour more money into UNRWA and the ICC and the “Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People” etc., no matter what – whether there are “reforms” and “audits” or not – whether to spite Israel and/or to purportedly prop up the two-state “solution.”

All the while, Britain, Canada, and France prattle on incessantly about “settler violence,” when the far, far more rampant violence is Palestinian terrorism against Israelis. See the shooting death of Netanel Shukron on the eve of Yom Kippur and the car-ramming attack on Neria Leiter on Wednesday. If any world leader emitted more than an imperceptible “tsk-tsk” about this terrorism, I missed it.

 PERSONALLY, I doubt the eight reforms proposed by the Misgav Institute are implementable. I do not believe that the UN can be reformed. It operates with no real accountability, no functional moral compass, and no mechanism for acquiring any such vital features. It has developed a tyrant-friendly, diplomatically immune, and collectively irresponsible DNA.

Worse still, as Melanie Phillips has written, it is an “unstoppable geyser of moral and intellectual corruption. It teaches the West that lies about Israel are truths and truths are lies, and it has turned what the West tells itself is morality and conscience into an agenda of evil.”

It has ensured that the West can no longer distinguish more generally between victim and oppressor, reality and propaganda, right and wrong. Treating the UN and the “international law” it has promoted as the moral arbiters of global order is not just a sick joke. It has made the world sick, too.

Therefore, I argue that defunding the UN altogether may be warranted, at least for a while – as prophylactic treatment. It is pretty much taboo to call for shutdown of the UN, but it should not be so. I don’t buy the argument that while the UN may be imperfect, “it’s all we’ve got” – a refrain that tends to be accompanied by prescriptions for reforms that either won’t stick or won’t work at all.

Is the UN really the best we can do? No, it is not.

Do we have to settle for a system that elects Syria and Saudi Arabia to lead human rights councils, women’s rights agencies, and cultural bodies; and that cavalierly disregards slaughters in Syria, Sudan, Iran, and China while outrageously branding Israel a war criminal enterprise?

No, we should not have to. Time to chuck the travesty and start over.

Claudia Rosett’s important book What to Do About the UN argues that the guiding principle for replacing the UN is competition, the establishment of professional agencies with no grandiose moral pretensions.

Competition is what takes down monopolies, and the UN is the biggest monopoly of them all. It is a mammoth institution helped along by immunities, privileges, and lavish government contributions, and backed by legions of special-interest NGOs around the globe that lobby for more.

As a result, the UN has become like the failed collectivist experiments of the 20th century – the huge old Soviet state enterprises and gargantuan Chinese communist industries. It was and is extremely hard to shutter these behemoths since they are tied to every aspect of a dysfunctional economy and into the lives of their employees. They are a terrible drain.

You fix this by creating competition. So, Rosett proposed the establishment of coalitions that are not so much pegged to ideals as mission-driven, bringing together countries with specific shared interests – like NATO during the Cold War.

Thinkers and experts need to apply themselves diligently to this task. It is time for those with the expertise, resources, and genuine goodwill toward future generations to take an in-depth and non-polemical look at the opportunity cost to the West (not to mention Israel and the Jewish People) of cleaving to the UN.

We are way past the kumbaya rhetoric surrounding the founding of the UN 80 years ago. We are deep into the disastrous damage to global sanity and security unleashed by the abysmal Durban conference 25 years ago and everything ugly that has transpired since.

Published in The Jerusalem Post 25.09.2026. 

*The opinions expressed in Misgav publications are the authors’ alone.

For the Full Report

 This paper was written with the assistance of Noam Yakoby. 

• Over decades, the UN has developed a vast, complex, and interconnected ecosystem dedicated to condemning and singling out Israel, promoting its demonization and delegitimization, and advancing political, economic, and legal measures against the Jewish state. This report aims to map and analyze the UN’s institutionalized and highly resourced Israel-focused machinery, expose the dangers it poses not only to Israel but to all democracies, and recommend practical ways to counter it.
• The report presents a systematic mapping of dozens of UN bodies and officeholders involved in anti-Israel activity, including specialized agencies, committees, Secretariat units, investigative mechanisms, and Special Rapporteurs. For each, it details the mandate under which it operates, its composition, and the way its members or officeholders are selected or appointed, together with a record of the anti-Israel activity it has advanced: resolutions, reports, investigations, publications, and political and legal initiatives. The mapping identifies who drives this activity, the authorities and tools they employ, and how the actions of different bodies combine into a sustained institutional campaign against Israel. On that basis, the report offers practical recommendations for confronting the system and changing the mechanisms that enable it.
• This report highlights how the parts of this ecosystem reinforce and complement one another. General Assembly majorities create mandates, committees, budgets, reporting requirements, and legal referrals. Secretariat units turn those decisions into permanent bureaucratic infrastructure. Human-rights mechanisms convert political claims into purported legal findings. Humanitarian and technical agencies supply statistics and institutional authority, while communications bodies disseminate the resulting narratives. One UN body cites another until allegations generated within the system acquire the appearance of independent validation.
• October 7 exposed the consequences of this structure. Hamas carried out the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, kidnapped hostages, fired rockets at Israeli cities, and operated from within Gaza’s civilian environment. Yet much of the UN quickly returned to its established framework: Israeli conduct was investigated, condemned, and transformed into legal demands, while Hamas’s responsibility was often marginalized or treated as background context – if it was mentioned at all.
• The machinery is rooted in the UN’s basic political structure. Under the one-country-one-vote system, every General Assembly member has the same formal voting power regardless of population, financial contribution, democratic status, or human-rights record. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Arab Group, Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and Group of 77 and China (G77+China) can generate automatic or near-automatic majorities. Since 2015, the General Assembly has adopted 187 condemnatory resolutions against Israel, more than twice the number adopted against Russia, China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Myanmar, Qatar, Pakistan, Cuba, and Venezuela combined.
• The system goes far beyond resolutions. Israel is the only country subject to a dedicated country-specific Human Rights Council agenda item at every regular session. It is also subject to an open-ended Commission of Inquiry and a uniquely indefinite Special Rapporteur mandate focused on Israeli conduct. Permanent Palestinian-focused institutions, including the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP), the Division for Palestinian Rights, the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine (UNISPAL), the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices, UNRWA, and a dedicated communications programme, provide reports, databases, advocacy, and public-information infrastructure for one side of the conflict, with no comparable system for Israel.
• The same pattern extends through bodies with ostensibly universal or technical mandates. OCHA, OHCHR, UNICEF, UN Women, WHO, UNDP, ESCWA, UNESCO, the ILO, WFP, and other agencies repeatedly single out Israel for country-specific reporting, resolutions, programmes, and scrutiny rarely applied in comparable fashion to other states or conflicts. Their work focuses overwhelmingly on one side of the conflict, while paying far less sustained attention to Hamas, Palestinian armed groups, terrorism, and Palestinian governance.
• Almost every specialized arm of the UN has translated the war into the language of its own field – thereby creating an additional channel through which to accuse Israel. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) turned Gaza into a case study in ecological destruction, measuring construction debris, soil and water contamination, damage to vegetation, the collapse of sewage systems, and the accumulation of 61 million tonnes of rubble. Yet the vast underground system built by Hamas – hundreds of kilometres of tunnels, the diversion of cement, fuel, and electricity for military purposes, and the storage of explosives in densely populated areas – received almost no analysis as a source of environmental damage. UN-Habitat followed a similar pattern: it mapped the destruction of homes, infrastructure, and the built environment in Gaza and proposed reconstruction plans, but did not examine in parallel how Hamas transformed homes, roads, public buildings, and the underground urban space into military infrastructure. The result was reporting on cities destroyed by Israel with almost no explanation of how and why the city itself had been turned into a battlefield.
• The same mechanism operated in fields even further removed from the conflict. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) translated the war into the language of pregnancy, childbirth, hygiene kits, and women’s hardship: only six days after October 7, it was already addressing the war’s possible impact on Palestinian women without mentioning that Israeli women and children were still being held hostage. The International Labour Organization recast the suspension of Palestinian workers’ entry into Israel after the October 7 massacre as a workers’ rights crisis for which Israel was responsible, without mentioning Israeli workers who were murdered, evacuated, or called up for reserve duty. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) calculated the ‘economic cost of the occupation’ and the collapse of the Palestinian economy, but not the economic cost of Hamas rule, tunnel construction, or Palestinian rearmament. The International Organization for Migration framed events as a story of Palestinian displacement without establishing a parallel mechanism for the hundreds of thousands of Israelis displaced by attacks from Hamas and Hezbollah. Across these fields, the same template prevailed: Palestinians were presented as victims, Israel as the active and responsible party, while Hamas and the war it initiated were marginalized or disappeared altogether.
• The claims and statistics produced in this way circulate from body to body across the UN system, acquire the authority of technical or professional expertise, and are then cited by governments, journalists, NGOs, courts, and other UN bodies. The result is a self-reinforcing institutional echo chamber in which ostensibly independent bodies repeatedly validate and amplify one another’s conclusions.
• The machinery increasingly produces concrete political, economic, and legal pressure. Human Rights Council and OHCHR mechanisms have generated corporate blacklists and calls for arms restrictions. Special Rapporteurs have promoted sanctions, boycotts, asset freezes, and pressure on private actors. General Assembly initiatives have generated proceedings before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), whose conclusions are then used to justify further measures. While the International Criminal Court (ICC) is not a UN body, UN decisions helped create the pathway for Palestinian accession, while UN-generated claims and findings shape the wider environment surrounding its cases.
• Much of this machinery is extraordinarily difficult to reform because it is rooted in the UN’s basic political structure. Under the one-country-one-vote system, authoritarian regimes, governments hostile to Israel, and states aligned with terrorist organizations can help create mandates, elect officials, determine budgets, and shape international norms on the same formal basis as liberal democracies. Organized blocs magnify their influence and allow them to preserve politicized institutions and shield themselves and their allies from comparable scrutiny.
• Yet the states that exercise this influence often bear only a small share of the financial burden. Democratic governments and their taxpayers provide a disproportionate share of the resources that sustain the UN system, including the mandates, offices, agencies, investigations, reports, databases, and bureaucratic structures directed against Israel. In 2024, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, and France together provided roughly 59 percent of all direct government contributions to the UN system; the United States alone contributed more than 183 other member states combined. The result is a striking inversion: democracies finance institutions that authoritarian and anti-Western blocs can use to undermine democratic allies, weaken democratic interests, and advance norms and mechanisms those same democracies often oppose.
• The danger extends far beyond Israel. The anti-Israel machinery generates legal theories, investigative practices, open-ended commissions, Special Rapporteur mandates, corporate blacklists, arms-embargo campaigns, sanctions proposals, and international criminal proceedings that can establish precedents for use against other democratic states. Methods developed against Israel can later be leveraged against democracies conducting counterterrorism operations or confronting terrorist organizations embedded among civilians. They can expose democratic officials and soldiers to politicized legal proceedings, pressure companies that supply democratic militaries, and delegitimize essential national-security tools.
• In this sense, Israel is not an isolated target. A system that normalizes permanent discriminatory machinery against one democracy lowers the barriers to its use against others, weakens the distinction between democratic self-defense and terrorism, and gives authoritarian regimes new instruments with which to constrain free societies.
• Challenging this machinery does not require defending every Israeli policy or arguing that Israel should be immune from scrutiny. The question is whether scrutiny rests on common standards, credible evidence, genuine impartiality, due process, realistic interpretations of international law, and equal consideration of all parties. Permanent mechanisms for one state, combined with a system that treats democratic self-defense as the central problem, undermine the principles of universality and equality on which legitimate international institutions depend.
• The report’s detailed mapping provides a basis for action: identifying which bodies and mechanisms advance the campaign against Israel, how they operate, and who funds them – and then using budgetary, diplomatic, and legal tools to change the situation. To that end, the report proposes eight practical steps:
• End automatic funding and determine where the money goes. Donor states should conduct and publish a comprehensive mapping of their financial transfers to the UN system: how much money is transferred, to which bodies, for which activities, and through which channels, including indirect transfers through pooled funds and intermediary organizations. Recipient bodies should be required to provide detailed reporting on how funds are used and where they are transferred onward. Continued funding should be subject to explicit, periodic approval by the executive and legislative branches, in accordance with each country’s constitutional division of powers. This would require governments and legislators to examine the activities they finance and accept public responsibility for them.
• End or reduce funding for bodies that discriminate against Israel. Donor states should use the report’s mapping to identify bodies that devote resources to discriminatory activity against Israel and reduce or terminate their funding. Funding decisions should be based both on a body’s mandate and on its actual conduct, including the reports it publishes, the initiatives it promotes, and the way it uses its resources. Safeguards should ensure that withdrawn funds do not return to the same activity through a pooled fund, intermediary body, or alternative budget line.
• Condition additional funding on dismantling special mechanisms directed against Israel. Donor states should establish defined conditions for continued funding: abolishing Human Rights Council Agenda Item 7, which singles Israel out for a separate standing debate; terminating the open-ended Commission of Inquiry concerning Israel; ending the uniquely indefinite Special Rapporteur mandate; and abolishing permanent institutions that promote one side of the conflict, including CEIRPP and the Division for Palestinian Rights in the UN Secretariat. The release of additional funds should be conditioned on implementing these changes according to predetermined benchmarks and timelines.
• Apply transparency and oversight across the UN system. Scrutiny should not end with anti-Israel activity. Donor states should require all UN institutions to provide transparency concerning budgets, work programmes, appointment processes, implementing partners, and subcontractors. The objective is to enable democracies to identify when institutions they finance are being used by authoritarian regimes to advance anti-Western agendas and damage democratic interests – and to act on those findings.
• Deny funding, cooperation, and political backing to discriminatory lawfare mechanisms. Donor states should refrain from funding mechanisms and initiatives that promote legal proceedings, corporate blacklists, boycotts, and sanctions against Israel on the basis of discriminatory mandates. They should not participate in, sponsor, or adopt the conclusions of such initiatives without independently examining their evidence and methodology, and should avoid providing practical assistance to their operations. A resolution or report bearing the UN emblem should not receive automatic support when the process behind it fails the tests of equality, credibility, and fairness.
• Take targeted measures against those driving the campaign. Alongside institutional action, governments should consider measures against UN officials, Special Rapporteurs, and other officeholders who abuse their authority to advance discriminatory activity or engage in serious misconduct. Depending on their conduct and the legal authorities available, such measures may include visa restrictions or denials, economic sanctions, and the freezing of assets and bank accounts. Where there is a sufficient evidentiary and legal basis for involvement in, or support for, terrorism, governments should also consider using counterterrorism authorities, including designation under appropriate sanctions regimes. Any measure should rest on documented conduct and individual responsibility.
• Establish a coordinated democratic front against lawfare and selective enforcement. Democratic states should create a permanent framework for political and legal coordination: sharing information on discriminatory initiatives, developing common legal positions, coordinating votes, and jointly opposing biased mandates and appointments. They should also support one another when such mechanisms target elected officials, soldiers, or companies operating in their jurisdictions. In the face of organized voting blocs within the UN, democracies require sustained collective action that insists on the application of the same standards to all states.
• Make clear that anti-Israel activity at the UN has consequences for bilateral relations. Israel should take each state’s conduct at the UN into account when shaping its relations with that state. Sponsoring discriminatory resolutions, voting for them, and participating in special mechanisms directed against Israel should affect Israel’s willingness to support that state’s international candidacies, expand cooperation with it, or grant it benefits. Israel should state in advance which actions will damage bilateral relations and apply those consequences consistently. At the same time, it should encourage its allies to consider such conduct when making decisions on aid, trade, and diplomatic support. States should understand that activity against Israel in international forums carries a price in their direct relations with Israel and its partners.

For the Full Report

On April 28, 2027, India and Japan will mark 75 years of diplomatic relations. Both governments already have a full calendar of events to observe the anniversary under the slogan “Year of Shared Horizons.” It covers almost every aspect of the relationship, from defense to sports.

India and Japan aren’t waiting until next year to show what the relationship has become. This month, the two countries are doing something they have never done before. Japanese F-2 fighters landed in Jodhpur on Sept. 9 for Veer Guardian 26, Japan’s first-ever fighter deployment to India. Later this month, on Sept. 22, the two countries’ cricket teams will meet in Sano, Japan, for the first-ever India-Japan T20 international match.

The depth of India-Japan relations reflects the strategic importance of the partnership. It is not only about direct security and economic interests or the soft-power diplomacy of cultural and sports exchanges. It is a genuine comprehensive bond between the two strongest democracies in the Indo-Pacific region.

The Indo-Pacific framework was the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s idea, dating back to 2007. Current Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is pushing it further and faster than Abe himself. This is one of the reasons for Japan’s current military buildup.

Japan has just concluded its fourteenth consecutive year of increased defense spending. It has achieved its 2% of GDP military spending target two years ahead of schedule and is projected to have a defense budget of $64 billion by 2027. It test-fired its first Tomahawk missile in July and adopted a “counterstrike” doctrine, breaking from its post-war defense-only strategy. The same month, it formed its first new intelligence agency since World War II—the National Intelligence Bureau.

U.S. officials have flagged 2027 as the year by which China wants its military to be capability-ready for a move on Taiwan. Although there’s no timeline for a Chinese invasion, both India and Japan intend to shape what will be the Indo-Pacific’s security architecture in that year. They want to be prepared and will not wait for Washington to act. As anchor states of the Indo-Pacific, China is a mutual rival and supports their most dangerous neighbors: Pakistan and North Korea.

Neither India’s nor Japan’s recent relations with the United States have been smooth enough. India spent most of 2025 under 50% U.S. tariffs, which U.S. President Donald Trump imposed as “reciprocal” duties along with a penalty for Russian oil purchases. A February 2026 deal cut the rate to 18% in exchange for trade concessions still contested in New Delhi.

Japan fared better in one sense: A 2025 trade agreement left most Japanese exports facing a 15% U.S. tariff. However, Section 232 auto duties remain intact, and Tokyo is still lobbying Washington for relief.

In both India and Japan, discomfort with the Trump administration’s policies has sharpened the logic of investing in each other. Ironically, this is in line with Trump’s position on military intervention and aid to American allies, as well as his desire to see partners take more of the security burden on themselves.

Israel fits perfectly into this framework.

2027 is a milestone year for Israel’s own ties to India and Japan. The two nations first established diplomatic relations on May 15, 1952, weeks after India and Japan did the same. That relationship cooled during the Middle East wars but is regaining momentum under Takaichi. A former senior U.S. official shared that Japan wants the kind of special relationship with Washington that Israel has long enjoyed.

Meanwhile, Israel and India will mark 35 years of full diplomatic relations in January 2027. This relationship has moved from cautious, low-profile ties to a full strategic partnership since 2014, as shown by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s second visit to Israel in February.

Israel’s partnerships with Japan and India are deep. Israel and Japan were both founding members of Pax Silica, the Washington-led coalition securing AI and advanced-chip supply chains. India joined two months later, in February 2026.

In other words, Israel, Japan and India are already part of the same framework regarding the technology that will shape the next decade of great-power competition. The next step is to enhance their collaboration by expanding trilateral efforts in areas influenced by Pax Silica, such as infrastructure, model training, data-center sharing, standards and safety, physical AI and critical minerals.

Moreover, Israel’s defense-tech sector, especially missile defense, drones and cyber, fits directly into the interoperability layer India and Japan are assembling through exercises like Veer Guardian. Israeli firms should be pursuing joint trilateral development arrangements now, while that architecture is still open. Such cooperation will be of high value as it connects technological innovation, scale, engineering and manufacturing capabilities and operational experience.

Geopolitical and strategic logic binds the three democracies together, but their partnerships also reflect shared values. While India and Japan mark what they have built over 75 years, Israel should focus on making sure that it is investing in establishing a strong trilateral relationship that will prompt like-minded countries to join. As a first step, Israel should adopt an official Indo-Pacific strategy, declaring India and Japan its essential anchors.

Published in JNS, on September 18, 2026

*The opinions expressed in Misgav publications are the authors’ alone.

The IMEC (India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor) was introduced at the G20 summit in New Delhi in September 2023. Its framework links three layers of connectivity: trade, energy and data. It represented an auspicious move forward.

Then came the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, and the ensuing war in the Middle East. It stalled IMEC’s progress as an intra-regional connectivity initiative, and Israel was sidelined as an active force within it.

Following “Operation Epic Fury” against the Iranian regime, IMEC has regained momentum among governments and in academia, as the Strait of Hormuz crisis has accelerated global efforts to develop alternative energy routes. IMEC seems like a perfect fit, and the buzz around it has gotten louder.

Now this buzz has entered the current Israeli election campaign.

Most Israeli parties see IMEC as a rare opportunity to change both Israel’s fortunes and global image, and to position the Jewish state as a major power in the Middle East. Through IMEC, Jerusalem could become a valuable partner to other countries, whether in Asia or Europe, that are seeking to connect via the Middle East. That, Israelis believe, will be an effective response to false narratives, as well as the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

Moreover, one party—Yesh Atid, part of the Beyachad list—endorses integrating Israel into major regional economic corridors, IMEC chief among them, and promises returns of hundreds of billions of dollars and a vision of Israel as a regional hub that “everything passes through.”

The fact that a major Israeli party now talks about connectivity infrastructure is genuinely good news. Yet a massive gap exists between populist promises during an election campaign and creating impact for Israel the day afterward.

The actual status of IMEC is less dramatic than “hundreds of billions of dollars.” To this day, there is no agreed-upon estimate of its potential impact on the Israeli economy. Some researchers argue that it will generate a maximum of two to three billion shekels. Others will not commit to a specific number, but point to potential benefits like job creation and the strategic gains of becoming a regional hub.

At the same time, some publications are creating panic among decision-makers by arguing that if Israel stays outside IMEC, it will be a disaster, as there are alternative routes in the making via unstable countries like Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

Moreover, whether due to pure populism or advisors misleading politicians, the reasons to commit to IMEC’s trade route remain unclear. There are major challenges: The corridor’s overland leg runs through Saudi Arabia, which means its entire premise depends on Saudi-Israel normalization or steps toward it, a process that has been stalled since Oct. 7. The corridor relies on financing structures across multiple governments that remain unresolved three years after IMEC was announced in 2023. Finally, IMEC depends on regional stability that no single Israeli election, government or minister can manufacture on their own. These issues don’t make IMEC worthless, but they do make it a long-term gamble.

To be sure, connectivity is crucial to the Israeli economy, and developing multiple trade routes is essential for redundancy. However, this distinction highlights the difference between a buzzword and concrete reality. IMEC is an appealing concept, but its feasibility and potential impact on the Israeli economy are questionable. After all, three years after the G20 announcement, IMEC has sparked significant diplomacy and commentary, yet it has produced only a minimal tangible outcome in terms of what it’s supposed to be about: connectivity.

There is also a major issue with relying on a trade corridor as Israel’s main economic-diplomatic asset. It simply won’t be such an asset. Connectivity encompasses more than just trade and railways. Israel’s true, defensible contribution to interregional connectivity and global partnerships is not about speeding up the movement of containers or trucks between Mumbai and Piraeus. It’s about technology. Israeli technologies can enhance value in various sectors relevant to connectivity initiatives worldwide, including energy, defense, cyber, AI, data, fintech, smart mobility and critical minerals processing.

Technology is an area where “hundreds of billions of dollars” is a realistic figure for something that Israel can develop independently, rather than relying on Riyadh and Washington to develop something around it. A corridor’s value depends on what passes through it. Israel’s influence stems from being essential to what passes through the corridor, not from claiming ownership of the infrastructure itself. By prioritizing technology, geographic constraints and geopolitical sensitivities become less significant, allowing business interests to set the tone and treating connectivity as an inclusive concept in its broadest sense.

Connectivity is a strategic priority and should be taken seriously enough to stop chasing trendy buzzwords. Whoever leads the next Israeli government owes the public a connectivity strategy built on Israel’s real advantages, not a campaign talking point.

Published in JNS, on September 16, 2026.

*The opinions expressed in Misgav publications are the authors’ alone.

Japan officially launched its National Intelligence Bureau (NIB) on July 31, the most significant restructuring of its intelligence architecture since the founding of the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office (CIRO) in 1952.

In essence, the reform formalizes and expands CIRO’s existing mission under a new name and structure rather than creating a completely new capability. Stability and continuity are key: Kazuya Hara, NIB’s first director-general, was CIRO’s last director. Staff remains at around 700 officials, seconded from other ministries—just as before.

The new National Intelligence Council is functionally an elevation of the existing vice-ministerial Cabinet Intelligence Council to a ministerial body chaired by the prime minister, styled after the National Security Secretariat’s cabinet-coordination model rather than a standalone agency, and now sitting on par with it.

Yet this should not be mistaken for a semantic change. In practical terms, it enables smoother information sharing, better communication between agencies and alignment under Sanae Takaichi’s leadership. Its mandate covers counterterrorism, national emergency response and counter-foreign-intelligence. Beyond that, it reflects an ongoing shift in Japanese society from dogmatic pacifism to pragmatic realism, a shift also displayed by Japan’s recent foreign policy.

This is another link in a chain of reforms aimed at preparing Japan to address geopolitical uncertainty. The most notable previous overhauls were the 2008 intelligence community reform and former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s 2013-15 security legislation package, which built the political and legal foundation for the current reform.

There is also an operational layer to this story, which emerged in January 2015. As Abe visited Israel, news broke that ISIS had captured two Japanese citizens, Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa, alongside a Jordanian pilot, and was demanding ransom. Abe sent an emergency response team to Amman, led by then-Deputy Foreign Minister Yasuhide Nakayama, to oversee negotiations. They achieved little, and ISIS murdered the hostages.

Japan learned a hard lesson that day about the limits of its ability to protect its citizens overseas, as well as the gap in its own understanding of Middle Eastern trends. Abe’s immediate response was to expand Japan’s regional presence, sending officials to learn about and deepen security cooperation, including with Israel. That 2015 decision laid the operational groundwork for what is unfolding now.

Abe blazed the path. Takaichi is walking down it. Doing so without a parliamentary majority by winning opposition support for the reform says as much about a shift in national mindset as does the reform itself. No one can ignore the growing threats from China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and non-state actors anymore.

Days after the NIB’s launch, Japan’s cabinet approved the new edition of its defense white paper. The roughly 600-page document again named China as “an unprecedented and the greatest strategic challenge” to Japan’s security. For the first time, it contained a chapter dedicated to drones and AI, drawing lessons mainly from the Russia-Ukraine war and the Middle East. The white paper also revised Japan’s arms export rules to extend the country’s security reach globally.

Takaichi isn’t stopping there. As promised after her election win, the government confirmed it will revise all three national strategic documents ahead of schedule: the National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy and Defense Buildup Program. This comes alongside a defense budget that has exceeded nine trillion yen for the first time.

These steps are the manifestation of Japan’s proactive foreign and security policy, which in turn enables deeper cooperation with partners. The United States remains Japan’s dominant defense partner and provided much of the model for the NIB and the NSS alike. Australia, the United Kingdom and Germany have contributed as well.

Takaichi is building Japan’s self-reliance and autonomy in the security sphere, diversifying its intelligence partnerships beyond the U.S. alliance, and potentially turning the Asian nation into a more sophisticated intelligence player relative to its allies.

Despite rumors, formal accession to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance—composed of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand—isn’t on the agenda. In any case, the added value of accession is questionable: Japan already has geographic proximity to Chinese, Russian and North Korean signals environments that none of the Five Eyes states can match, along with advanced technology and close cooperation with at least three of the five. What Japan can now do is expand intelligence and security cooperation with a much wider circle of like-minded countries.

What’s next for Japan? It still needs to build out its Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), Human Intelligence (HUMINT) and counter-intelligence capabilities to make the NIB a world-class agency.

Israel is positioned to be the partner Japan needs to accomplish this and is far more suited for the role than it was in 2015.

The security dialogue between Jerusalem and Tokyo has matured steadily since Abe’s original outreach. And the wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran have generated precisely the kind of operational knowledge that the NIB will need to absorb. This includes large-scale drone warfare, layered missile defense tested under live fire and, most importantly, the creative thinking that turns raw intelligence into mind-blowing operations in real time, such as the “pagers” operation against Hezbollah.

Israel has been forced to build and rebuild its intelligence-to-operations pipeline repeatedly while under fire on several fronts. Few countries can teach these capabilities to other countries the way Israel can. Thus, intelligence is simply the next layer in an Israel-Japan relationship that has already touched on trade, defense and technology.

Published in JNS, August 11, 2026.

*The opinions expressed in Misgav publications are the authors’ alone.

China launched the World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO) in Shanghai on July 16, with some 29 countries joining as founding members. China’s aim is to reach at least 40 members to outnumber the American-led tech coalition Pax Silica. Even U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres attended the WAICO launch ceremony, handing Beijing a meaningful image win.

Yet compared to China’s other international initiatives, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Belt and Road Initiative, which drew Western countries and even G7 members, WAICO remains isolated. Chinese President Xi Jinping told the audience that AI development “should not be a solo performance by one country, but a symphony of international cooperation,” an unmistakable jab at Washington.

In practice, WAICO is not a real coalition, but a Chinese effort to manufacture high visibility and the appearance of cooperation, deepening Chinese influence across the Global South, including in AI. The knowledge, technology and rules are all made in China. Moreover, WAICO members include Russia, Belarus, Pakistan, Cuba, Venezuela, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, South Africa, Senegal and about a dozen more African and Asian states already under some level of Chinese influence. Nearly every major BRICS economy has joined, except India, which signed onto the American framework back in February. The only country hedging its bets in both camps is resource-rich Kazakhstan, which recently joined the Abraham Accords in an effort to get closer to the United States.

On the other side stands the American-led Pax Silica framework, launched in December, which likely served as the trigger for WAICO’s creation. Israel is a founding member alongside the United States, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Australia and Greece, with additional countries joining later as partners. Under this umbrella, real cooperation is taking place, aimed at securing global AI supply chains among leading countries in their respective fields.

While WAICO is selling subsidized Chinese software models to countries that can’t afford or build their own, Pax Silica is built around the physical stack: critical minerals, energy, chips, manufacturing and logistics. That difference reflects exactly where each side holds the advantage. China controls roughly 60% of global rare-earth mining and about 90% of refining and separation capacity. The United States and its partners still lead in the development of the most advanced models and chip designs. Thus, each side is investing in shrinking its weaknesses while preserving its strengths.

China is not shy about using its advantages as weapons, not just assets. After Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said in November 2025 that a Chinese assault on Taiwan could be treated as an existential threat to Japan, Beijing tightened its rare-earth export licensing regime in December 2025 and banned dual-use rare-earth exports to Japan outright in January 2026.

On the American side, the Pentagon expanded its list of “Chinese military companies” to 188 entities on June 8, sweeping in civilian tech giants like Alibaba, BYD and Baidu, and the Trump administration layered on a 25% semiconductor tariff from mid-January alongside a tightly conditioned approval for Nvidia to sell China its H200 chip.

China hit back two weeks after the Pentagon’s move, adding 10 American entities to its own export control list, including MP Materials and USA Rare Earth—the two companies Washington is counting on to break free of rare-earth dependence on China. In the background, talks between U.S. President Donald Trump and Xi continue, with a potential meeting to take place in September.

Meanwhile, the supposed technology gap between China and the West is narrowing faster than it appears. Chinese models (DeepSeek, Zhipu’s GLM line, Alibaba’s Qwen) have been closing on Western benchmarks for over a year now, a product of the civil-military fusion Beijing has accelerated across its tech sector. Just before the Shanghai summit, Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model that still trails Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 but outperforms Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 on a number of benchmarks. This is strong evidence that the software gap the West is counting on to offset China’s mineral advantage is closing fast.

WAICO accelerates this trend, but at the same time creates a risk for affiliated members. Even though Chinese models currently have the technical ability to integrate with Western models like Claude and ChatGPT, Western companies will likely block such cooperation in practice for fear that Beijing would exploit it for intellectual property theft and espionage. Middle powers’ room to maneuver is shrinking.

These developments carry implications for Israel. Unlike the mineral-rich Gulf states or the manufacturing powers in the Pax Silica coalition, Israel’s value lies not in raw materials but in AI expertise, chip design and cybersecurity. Israel therefore has a direct stake in Pax Silica delivering a non-Chinese supply chain for the inputs its own tech industry depends on. If the mineral chokepoint is used against Washington’s allies the way it was just used against Japan, Israel is exposed to high costs as well.

The deeper point Israeli policymakers and the business sector should focus on is whether Israel is investing enough, fast enough, in the parts of Pax Silica where its exposure is greatest. Israel needs to diversify mineral sources, chip manufacturing and energy security. It must be prepared for the potential impact of shifts in this field on leading industries (defense, aviation and space). Such preparation should also include creating more intimate frameworks with Pax Silica members separate from the larger Pax Silica forum—mainly with India, Singapore and Japan.

Published in JNS, July 28,  2026.

*The opinions expressed in Misgav publications are the authors’ alone.

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the Iran War, intensifying U.S.–China strategic competition, and the continuing shift in the global balance of power, this article examines why many influential Chinese policymakers and intellectuals increasingly view the international system as evolving from a U.S.-led unipolar order toward a more competitive distribution of power.

The article identifies six major trends shaping this worldview: the enduring influence of China’s historical consciousness on the thinking of its leadership; Xi Jinping’s consolidation of political power and acceleration of China’s national rejuvenation; the emergence of the Chinese techno-economic model as an alternative for developing countries; China’s rapid advances in artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and advanced manufacturing; Beijing’s interpretation of the Iran War and subsequent U.S.–Iran negotiations as evidence of constraints on American power; and the gradual fragmentation of the international financial system following Western sanctions on Russia and Iran.

The article does not argue that China is destined to replace the United States as the world’s leading economic and military superpower. Rather, it suggests that the international system may evolve toward competing spheres of influence, in which the United States and China remain strategic rivals while continuing to depend on one another economically and technologically. Alongside China’s growing sources of strength, the article also examines its significant domestic challenges, including demographic decline, high levels of debt, the prolonged real estate crisis, and slowing economic growth.

It concludes by considering the implications for Israel, arguing that its foremost strategic challenge will be to reinforce its alliance with the United States while simultaneously building a more self-reliant foundation of national power in technology, industry, and defense.

This article reflects the author’s observations from meetings in Beijing and Shanghai, together with publicly available historical and policy analysis. It is intended as an examination of contemporary Chinese strategic thinking rather than an endorsement of any particular geopolitical perspective. The views expressed are solely those of the author.

How Beijing Sees the Changing World Order

I spent the week preceding the 250th anniversary of American independence in Beijing. Walking through the Forbidden City—the world’s largest imperial palace complex, which served as the seat of China’s emperors from the 13th century onward and has witnessed centuries of transformation in the international order—I found it an appropriate place from which to reflect on the geopolitical changes unfolding today. During a two-week working visit to Beijing and Shanghai, I met with senior figures from China’s business, policy, and academic communities. Those conversations offered valuable insight into how China’s elites perceive the ongoing shift of global power away from the West and how they believe the Iran War has accelerated these trends. This article summarizes those impressions through six principal observations.

The first observation is that modern China is deeply shaped by its historical consciousness, particularly by the memory of its former centrality in world affairs and the trauma of what Chinese historiography calls the “Century of Humiliation,” which began in the nineteenth century.

While the United States celebrates 250 years of independence, Chinese civilization traces its history back roughly five millennia. Since the Qin Dynasty unified China in the third century BCE, the country has viewed itself as a continuous civilization governed by successive dynasties that ruled under the “Mandate of Heaven.” For much of recorded history, China was the world’s largest economy and among its foremost centers of scientific and technological innovation. It gave the world the compass, gunpowder, paper, printing, and paper currency, while also demonstrating extraordinary engineering capabilities through projects such as the Grand Canal and the Great Wall.

When the United States declared its independence in 1776, the thirteen American colonies had a population of approximately 2.5 million people. China, by contrast, was home to nearly 300 million inhabitants. Beijing itself was already one of the world’s largest and most advanced cities, with a population approaching one million.

For most of the past two millennia, China occupied the center of the East Asian regional order as the “Middle Kingdom.” Neighboring states maintained diplomatic and tributary relations with Beijing through a hierarchical regional system that recognized China’s preeminence. This conception of regional order, together with the strategic tradition of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, which emphasizes achieving political objectives without direct military confrontation, continues to shape Chinese strategic thinking today.

Beginning with the Opium Wars in the 1840s, however, Britain and later other Western powers forced China to open its ports, undermined its sovereignty, and imposed a series of unequal treaties. Japan subsequently joined this process, occupying large parts of China and committing widespread atrocities. This period, remembered as the “Century of Humiliation,” profoundly shaped China’s national consciousness. It reinforced the conviction that only sustained economic, technological, and military strength can prevent China from ever again experiencing such subjugation.

The second observation is that Xi Jinping has emerged as China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong and appears well positioned to remain in power for years to come. Under his leadership, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has tightened its political control while accelerating China’s military modernization, economic development, and pursuit of technological self-sufficiency.

After assuming the presidency in 2013, Xi abolished the constitutional two-term limit in 2018, effectively removing formal constraints on his tenure. Since then, particularly during his third term, he has removed numerous senior military officers and Communist Party officials through an extensive anti-corruption campaign. While officially presented as a campaign to strengthen party discipline, many scholars also interpret it as a mechanism for consolidating Xi’s personal authority and eliminating potential political rivals. At present, there is little evidence of organized opposition to Xi’s rule. He is widely expected to secure another term at the Communist Party Congress in late 2027 and to continue leading China well into the next decade.

If Mao Zedong unified China under communist rule in 1949, and Deng Xiaoping transformed its economy by opening it to global markets in the 1980s, Xi Jinping has articulated a new national mission: restoring China as one of the world’s preeminent powers during the present generation. Chinese students today study not only Mao’s writings but increasingly The Governance of China (2014) and other collections of Xi’s speeches and writings, which have become the principal ideological framework shaping contemporary Chinese politics.

Xi seeks to accelerate China’s emergence as a leading economic, technological, and military power capable of matching, and in key domains surpassing, the United States, particularly within Asia. To achieve this objective, he has elevated science and technology to the level of national strategy, prioritized technological and economic self-reliance, reaffirmed reunification with Taiwan as an essential component of China’s national rejuvenation, and strengthened the Communist Party’s control over the state and society in the name of preserving political stability. At the same time, Beijing has increasingly prepared for the possibility of prolonged strategic confrontation and international isolation, drawing important lessons from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The third observation is that China has developed what many policymakers and scholars increasingly regard as a serious economic and political alternative to the Western liberal democratic model, one that is becoming increasingly attractive to many developing countries seeking rapid economic growth, advanced technologies, and effective digital governance.

For decades, many Western economists assumed that breakthrough innovation could flourish only within liberal democratic and capitalist systems. China, however, has challenged this conventional wisdom by combining one-party political rule with a highly competitive and dynamic private-sector economy. Companies such as Huawei, Xiaomi, Tencent, and Alibaba have expanded aggressively beyond their original markets, creating integrated technology ecosystems that increasingly rival those of the West.

China has also built an industrial manufacturing base without parallel in the modern world. It now leads globally in electric vehicles, batteries, drones, robotics, and renewable energy. While the United States is projected to account for roughly 11% of global industrial output by 2030, China is expected to produce approximately 45%. Such an industrial advantage could prove decisive not only in economic competition but also in future military conflicts.

These advantages have enabled China to expand its global influence. Chinese exports of software, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence are growing rapidly across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. As more countries adopt Chinese digital infrastructure and technology platforms, they may also become more closely aligned with Beijing technologically, diplomatically, and geopolitically.

The fourth observation is that China has significantly narrowed the technological gap with the United States in artificial intelligence while moving rapidly toward semiconductor self-sufficiency.

The emergence of large language models such as Kimi, DeepSeek, and Alibaba’s Qwen demonstrates that Chinese firms now compete at the global frontier of AI. At the same time, Beijing is investing enormous resources in building a complete domestic semiconductor ecosystem. Although China still lags the United States and Taiwan in manufacturing the most advanced chips and remains dependent on ASML’s EUV lithography systems, the technological gap continues to narrow. If these trends continue, the long-term effectiveness of American export controls is likely to diminish.

A defining feature of China’s strategy is its emphasis on embedding AI in the physical economy through robotics, autonomous vehicles, drones, intelligent factories, and industrial automation. Combined with China’s unmatched manufacturing base and a domestic market of more than 1.4 billion people, this creates a powerful platform for scaling new technologies. Chinese firms are simultaneously promoting open-source AI models and expanding computing infrastructure abroad, particularly in Southeast Asia, to mitigate the impact of U.S. export restrictions.

The fifth observation is that the Iran War and subsequent negotiations between Washington and Tehran are widely interpreted by Chinese elites in Beijing as further evidence of the erosion of the U.S.-led unipolar order.

Many of my Chinese interlocutors interpreted Iran’s ability to withstand sustained American pressure without regime collapse as evidence of limits on U.S. coercive power. In my discussions with Chinese academics and policy experts, a recurring view was that Washington struggles to sustain prolonged conflicts, is reluctant to deploy ground forces, and increasingly finds it difficult to mobilize broad international support for military operations. Whether this assessment proves accurate remains uncertain, but it illustrates how some influential Chinese observers are reassessing the limits of American power.

Some observers even suggested that the conflict could represent an American “Suez moment”—a reference to Britain’s loss of great-power status following the 1956 Suez Crisis. If Beijing concludes that Washington’s willingness to use military force is diminishing, it may reassess the credibility of American security commitments to allies such as Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan. Recent discussions in Washington about achieving “strategic stability” or an “equilibrium” with China reinforce the perception among some Chinese observers that the regional balance of power is gradually shifting in Beijing’s favor.

The sixth observation is that Western sanctions on Russia and Iran have unintentionally accelerated the development of alternative financial systems that are less dependent on the U.S. dollar and the SWIFT payments system.

Since the Bretton Woods era in the 1940s, the dollar has served as the world’s principal reserve currency, giving the United States extraordinary influence over the global financial system. Yet recent sanctions have also encouraged countries to develop alternative payment mechanisms. China has continued extensive trade with both Russia and Iran using yuan-denominated transactions and alternative settlement systems, reducing the effectiveness of Western financial pressure.

This does not mean that the dollar is about to lose its dominant international role. A more plausible outcome is the gradual emergence of a more fragmented financial system in which sanctioned states possess an expanding range of options for bypassing Western financial infrastructure. The growth of cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based financial systems may reinforce this trend over time.

Taken together, these six observations do not suggest that the United States is ceasing to be the world’s leading power. America is likely to remain dominant in many areas, including innovation, higher education, capital markets, and alliances. They do, however, point toward the gradual erosion of the post-Cold War unipolar order and the emergence of a more competitive international system.

Rather than returning to a Cold War characterized by two isolated blocs, one plausible trajectory is a more regionally differentiated international system characterized by intensified strategic competition alongside continued economic interdependence. The United States may increasingly concentrate on the Western Hemisphere while maintaining the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific through its alliance network. China, meanwhile, may continue consolidating its position as the dominant power in East Asia through expanding economic, technological, and security relationships that in some respects resemble the historical tributary system.

Competition between the United States and China is likely to be far closer than the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. At its peak, the Soviet economy was only around 50 percent the size of America’s. China has already reached parity with the United States in purchasing power parity (PPP) and continues to narrow the gap across multiple measures of economic, industrial, and technological strength. Nevertheless, China’s continued rise is far from guaranteed. Demographic decline, the prolonged property crisis, high levels of local government debt, slowing productivity growth, and intensifying tensions with the West may all constrain its future trajectory.

The possibility that major international decisions may increasingly require competition, negotiation, and selective cooperation between Washington and Beijing remains the subject of active debate in the United States. In important respects, the emerging international system resembles the 19th century more than the late 20th: a world of multiple great powers rather than a single dominant superpower.

If this is indeed the view from Beijing, the central question for Israel is not simply whether it is correct, but how Israel should prepare for it. Historically, China has admired Israel for its achievements in science, technology, and innovation. At the same time, Israel’s close strategic partnership with the United States has made its relationship with Beijing increasingly complex.

The appropriate response for Israel is not to distance itself from the United States, but rather to strengthen that strategic alliance while simultaneously building a more independent foundation of national power. If the international system is indeed becoming more competitive, with economic, technological, industrial, and military capabilities playing an increasingly central role in national security, Israel will need to invest even more heavily in innovation, advanced industry, artificial intelligence, energy, infrastructure, and manufacturing. Its foreign policy will require greater strategic agility while preserving its indispensable alliance with the United States. That will be Israel’s defining strategic challenge in the decades ahead.

*The opinions expressed in Misgav publications are the authors’ alone.

For the Full Report

• The U.S. State Department’s Strategic Plan for 2026-2030 declares: “The Department will no longer fund or support international organizations that act contrary to America’s interests or that erode our sovereignty.” This statement reflects an important paradigm shift. International institutions are not ends in themselves. The United States should participate in them only when the benefits to American interests outweigh the costs.
• The traditional American approach treated the United Nations as flawed but necessary, assumed its defects could be addressed through reform, accepted America’s disproportionate financial burden as the price of leadership, and viewed continued participation as necessary to preserve influence. These assumptions no longer stand up to scrutiny.
• In reality, the UN repeatedly undermines American interests, advances the positions of China and other adversarial powers, fails to deliver international peace and security, and has become a caricature of bureaucratic waste and bloat.
• The central problems with the UN are structural. The UN’s core Charter, procedures, membership, political blocs, and incentives create a system which undermines American sovereignty and interests while generating institutional sprawl.
• The flaws begin with the UN’s one-country-one-vote structure. Every member of the General Assembly has one vote, regardless of population, power or contribution. From 2015-2024, U.S. taxpayers provided roughly 28 percent of all government contributions to the UN, equal to the contributions of 183 other member states combined. In 2024 alone, the United States provided $14.3 billion to the UN system. By contrast, the lowest-assessed countries are charged less than $40,000.
• It is a mistake to think that the one-country-one-vote principle shapes only unimportant General Assembly resolutions. It in fact affects a wide range of UN bodies, elections, decisions, budgets, initiatives, and norm-setting processes. States that pay little can expand budgets, preserve politicized bodies, create mandates, block reform, and advance anti-American positions, while American taxpayers fund the machinery.
• China has learned how to exploit this system. Through the G77 and China bloc, Beijing can influence the votes of nearly 70 percent of UN members. The result is a system in which China and other hostile powers use the language of multilateralism to advance strategic goals.
• The UN has therefore become a platform for attacks on U.S. sovereignty and national security, including efforts to delegitimize U.S. sanctions, undermine nuclear deterrence, and advance migration norms over U.S. objections.
• Nowhere are the UN’s politicization and double standards clearer than in its treatment of Israel, a country described by the 2026 U.S. National Defense Strategy as a “model ally” of the United States. Israel alone faces a permanent, multi-layered machinery of condemnation across dozens of UN bodies, councils, special procedures, commissions, secretariat units, databases, and recurring annual resolutions. This directly harms American interests and creates tools that can be turned against America itself, including politicized reports, committees, special rapporteurs, blacklists, lawfare campaigns, and international criminal accusations detached from reality.
• The UN has failed at its most basic purpose: maintaining international peace and security. While UN regular and peacekeeping budgets grew, the number of global conflicts increased. From Rwanda to Srebrenica, Syria, the DRC, Lebanon and beyond, the UN repeatedly failed to prevent massacres, wide-scale displacement, sexual violence, and the build-up of terror armies. With UNRWA, the UN created a massive bureaucracy that promotes radicalization, perpetuates conflict, and was thoroughly infiltrated by terrorists.
• By contrast, U.S.-led diplomacy, leverage, and frameworks have repeatedly produced outcomes and breakthroughs that the UN could not deliver.
• The UN cannot and will not carry out the fundamental reforms necessary to fix the organization. U.S. pressure can produce cost-cutting and administrative efficiencies, but it cannot change the UN’s basic structure or member-state incentives. This is because the very countries that benefit from bureaucratic sprawl, waste, and bloat are the ones with the authority to determine the extent and nature of reform. UN80, the UN’s latest reform initiative, proves this point.
• UN80 exposed absurd institutional sprawl. Since the UN’s founding, more than 40,000 mandates have been adopted by the UN’s main bodies. 86 percent of active mandates lack sunset clauses or termination reviews. The UN Secretariat processes an average of 2,300 pages of documentation every day. In 2024 alone, it supported more than 27,000 meetings and produced more than 1,100 reports. Processing these meetings and reports costs roughly $360 million annually, about 10 percent of the UN regular budget.
• The internal management picture is no better. Only about 40 percent of UN entities have strategic plans, and only 30 percent operate with frameworks that connect resources to results.
• S. pressure has helped secure some administrative and cost-cutting measures, including a 15 percent budget cut, which removed $570 million from the UN regular budget. But achieving deeper and more substantive reforms, such as retiring mandates, closing bodies, and ending the operation of duplicative, politicized, or wasteful mechanisms, would require the consent of the very states that benefit from their existence.
• For American policymakers, the central question is therefore not whether the UN can be made marginally more efficient, cost-effective, or unbiased. The question is whether the UN system can become sufficiently accountable and aligned with American interests to justify continued U.S. engagement on a broad scale. The answer is no.
• The United States should therefore adopt a new strategy with relation to the UN: “Disengage, Withdraw, and Replace.” The U.S. should maximally disengage and withdraw from the UN, and replace it wherever possible with better alternatives.
• This does not mean America should leave the world. It means America should lead more effectively by distinguishing necessary international functions from the failed institutions that currently perform them.
• Congress should establish a presumption of zero automatic funding for the UN system. No assessed or voluntary contributions should be made unless Congress specifically authorizes the payment’s amount, purpose, duration, and safeguards.
• The White House should create an interagency task force to manage lawful and orderly disengagement, while preserving case-by-case cooperation with the UN as necessary.
• The United States should be willing to allow its General Assembly vote to lapse if withholding assessed contributions triggers Article 19 of the UN Charter. America’s influence does not come from possessing one vote in a chamber where it is routinely outvoted by blocs of states with competing interests.
• Responsible withdrawal requires replacement where possible. The United States should build non-UN mechanisms for humanitarian delivery, global health cooperation, technology development and governance, security, counterterrorism, standard setting, legal coordination, and strategic development. It should rely on bilateral agreements, alternative diplomatic frameworks, vetted NGOs, faith-based organizations, private logistics firms, and mission-specific coalitions, while preserving genuinely useful technical cooperation with the UN.
• Congress and the administration should end the presumption that UN credentials, privileges, and immunities shield misconduct. Where appropriate, the United States should deny or revoke visas and impose personal sanctions on UN officials or affiliated personnel who support terrorism, abuse diplomatic privileges, or target U.S. personnel and allies through politicized legal campaigns. Congress should clarify that U.S. courts should not recognize UN privileges or immunities for personnel accused of terror-related offenses, corruption, gross violations of human rights, or other serious criminal conduct. In cases such as UNRWA, Congress and the administration should determine whether specific UN-linked offices, committees, unions, contractors, or personnel meet the criteria for terrorism-related sanctions or designation.
• Withdrawal must be durable. Congress should repeal or sunset outdated statutory authorizations for U.S. participation in UN bodies from which the United States has withdrawn, and require congressional approval before future reentry. Washington should also align foreign aid and trade benefits with countries’ behavior in international organizations.
• Disengagement from the UN does not mean America is leaving the world. It means America is leaving failed structures. The U.S. should not treat outdated commitments as permanent obligations. It should build a new architecture of international cooperation grounded in sovereignty, accountability, burden sharing, measurable results, coalitions of capable allies, and peace through strength.

For the Full Report

*The opinions expressed in Misgav publications are the authors’ alone.

In recent years, Japan has gradually changed the language it uses when discussing China and Taiwan.