Statecraft is ultimately an exercise in cold arithmetic. You count your artillery tubes, your interceptor stockpiles, and your reliable partners in foreign capitals. When a leader begins substituting the hard math of national defence for the tawdry arithmetic of a narrow legislative majority, the entire architecture of deterrence wobbles. Benjamin Netanyahu’s continued reliance on the Israeli far right is not a grand ideological realignment. It is something much more mundane and dangerous: a desperate holding action by a politician who has run out of moderate creditors.
The pattern is familiar enough to anyone who watches the fringes of Europe and the post-Soviet space. An embattled leader, facing legal jeopardy and institutional friction, finds the centre ground mined by his own past betrayals. To survive the next election, he does not broaden his base; he mortgages his cabinet to dogmatists whose sole qualification is a reliable bloc of votes. By promising senior portfolios to ministers whose rhetoric belongs in an agitation pamphlet rather than a defence ministry, Netanyahu is trading the strategic flexibility of the Israeli state for personal longevity in office.
This is bad policy, but worse, it is bad strategy. The security of Israel has historically rested on two pillars: undisputed qualitative military superiority and ironclad diplomatic integration with Western powers. Both require institutional discipline. They require professional armed forces insulated from street-level revanchism and a foreign policy capable of reassuring allies from Washington to Berlin. When domestic ministries are handed to political arsonists who treat security policy as a vehicle for sectarian grievance, the professional apparatus suffers. Commanders find their strategic focus diverted from regional adversaries to managing unnecessary internal fires.
For Europe, this spectacle is thoroughly unedifying. Western capitals already struggling to maintain strategic coherence across their own southern and eastern flanks do not need another unpredictable actor setting off localized crises. European defense planners looking south across the Mediterranean understand that regional stability depends on quiet intelligence sharing, steady energy corridors, and credible deterrence against Tehran. When Jerusalem permits its domestic fringe to dictate security policy, it alienates the very European partners who are otherwise predisposed to support Israel's legitimate right to defend its borders.
True conservative statecraft is cautious, institution-minded, and allergic to performative radicalism. It understands that national strength is built on durable alliances, fiscal discipline, and a defense establishment governed by strategic calculus rather than ideological zeal. Far-right agitators rarely understand the mechanics of deterrence; they mistake provocations for power and volume for victory. In reality, their antics merely provide diplomatic ammunition to Israel’s worst enemies, who are only too eager to frame a modern, capable state as an erratic aggressor.
Netanyahu has long styled himself as the ultimate guarantor of his nation's security, the hard-nosed realist who could manage superpowers and outmaneuver regional foes. Yet his current posture reveals the classic vulnerability of the political strongman who has lingered past his prime. The sovereign who must bend his knee to the fringes of his own coalition is not operating from a position of strength; he is a hostage to his own survival instincts.
Elections will deliver their verdict, and Israeli voters have their own sovereign choices to make. But the strategic cost of elevating extremists into senior command roles is already clear. Real defense policy cannot be improvised to appease parliamentary kingmakers, nor can alliances survive an indefinite diet of ideological melodrama. When the smoke clears, the borders still have to be manned, the ammunition depots must be replenished, and the hard, unglamorous work of state preservation will still demand serious adults in the room. Right now, Jerusalem's ruling coalition seems intent on locking them out.