 this question of what the US relationship with Israel ought to look like. And this is something I think about a lot, because sometimes I get frustrated with our fellow traveler libertarians for I think sometimes seeming a little unrealistic on matters of foreign policy. I think there is frequently a sense of what the US should do aspirationally. But then there also needs to be a sense of what the US should do in order to taper off an existing relationship, recognizing that cutting off ties or cutting off any sort of funding of Israel is not something that can realistically happen overnight and that there would be massive second order consequences that would stem from that if that did happen. How do you look at this relationship between the US and Israel and this US support for Israel? How do you look at it aspirationally in terms of what that relationship ought to be like, but also more practically? It's a tricky question. I know it's a big question and you're not a foreign policy expert, but I'm just curious about how your views on this have evolved over time. I'm not an expert, but I often play one on TV, so I'll do the best I can. The United States gives about $3 billion, I think, dollars a year to Israel. You have a similar amount to Egypt, at least until recently maybe. That is not free money. It is credits. It's $3 billion of credits that Israel has to use in the US military grocery store, meaning it's for purchasing US weapons, aircraft, etc. It is a subsidy both to Israel and the US defense industry. Historically, I've never been in favor of that aid. I've always opposed it. I don't think it's good for Israel particularly. We're now a very rich country. When it was first started, we were a pretty poor country. Israel has a pretty high standard of living. We can pay for our own equipment if we want. I'm happy. I hope the US will continue to sell it to us. I think the trickier part of the relationship is what's happening right now. Right now, there are two aircraft carriers in the eastern side of the Mediterranean and a nuclear submarine. They're there mainly to threaten Iran and Iran's friend, Hezbollah. To say, don't think about opening up a second front against Israel or we'll punish you. That's been really helpful to us, more or less here in Israel. It's not clear whether we do have a nuclear weapon here. That carries a lot of weight, but it's a threat you never want to carry out. I don't know what this would look like right now if the US had not made that implicit threat. I'm sure they've made some explicit threats behind the scenes that we don't know about. That's very helpful to Israel. Having said that, I think it's a legitimate question for Americans to ask whether that serves the interests of the United States. There are many Jews, evangelical Christians, and others who see Israel in a very special light different from many other countries. Whether the average American taxpayer should be funding the ability of the United States to still act as something of the world's policemen, I think, is a complicated question. If Israel had to stand on its own, it would have to devote a lot more of its resources to its own military, which it devotes a significant amount already, but it would have to devote more. It would set in motion a whole bunch of things. Some of them would be good for Israel and some not so good. A lot of people would argue that this moment has taught us that Israel cannot defend itself alone, that it needs the United States to be a counterweight to Iran. That may be true. I think it's going to be very interesting to see how this evolves over the next few years. Whether any president, Biden, whoever wins the next election would carry out threats that are being applied against Iran and risk a world war with Russia, which is Iran's ally and the rest of the Middle East. It's pretty challenging. What concerns me about the relationship between the U.S. and Israel, it's not an unconditional support, but it is a very substantial, like we've got your back kind of thing. I'm morally supportive of the right of Israel's government to defend its people against this kind of atrocity and to seek justice and rescue the hostages and dismantle Hamas to the extent that can be done. What I've been uncomfortable with and become increasingly so is any U.S. aid in that project, because Israel's military is having to make really difficult moral calculations and trade-offs about how many soldiers they're willing to sacrifice in ground operations versus how many civilian casualties to accept with other types of aerial bombings, and they're not easy calls. Frankly, they're not always calls that I agree with, and the more the U.S. has culpability in that with its funding, the worst all around on all sides, that is in my view. It's Israel's fight, and the government of Israel seems capable of prosecuting it. I wonder when you're talking about the difference in Israel's interests and America's interests. Do you think America's, in some sense, tying Israel's hands in ways that makes it harder to defend itself? Well, it cuts both ways. I think America's embrace of Israel, the government's embrace, the military's embrace of Israel has costs for the United States. Those costs may be worth bearing for other benefits. They may be worth bearing for moral reasons. It's not an easy question to answer. I would just add that a friend of mine said the other day that the embrace of the United States of Israel is more like a bear hug. It doesn't just show love and affection, it also constrains Israel a great deal. Many of those constraints we would impose on ourselves here, certainly with respect to civilian casualties, but historically, often Israel has gone along with what the United States wanted because there's a feeling here that we need the United States, so we couldn't rely on that. We would behave differently, and that would be both good and bad, I suspect. Thanks for listening to our conversation with Russ Roberts. For the full conversation, go here. For more clips, go here.