As Iran accelerates the industrial production of ballistic missiles, Israel and its leadership cannot afford distraction. Iran is not posturing. It is manufacturing.
Israeli and US defense assessments indicate that Iran has expanded serial missile production across multiple facilities. At its core, this is a problem of timing. Iran’s missile production operates on fixed industrial timelines. Political leaders operate on flexible calendars shaped by elections and coalition dynamics. When political attention drifts toward short-term domestic and personal pressures instead of long term threats, deterrence fails, and our enemies see an opening.
Iran is moving quickly to replenish its ballistic missiles. Production has continued quietly, while attention within Israel’s political sphere and across the US-Israel relationship has drifted elsewhere. Our leadership’s lack of focus becomes our enemies’ strategic gain.
Israel cannot afford to trade strategic preparation, critical to its national security, for internal Israeli political maneuvering.
Ballistic missile production is not deterred by statements or tweets. It is deterred by binding understandings built quietly across political and military levels, by pre-agreed consequences, and by synchronized planning with anchor allies, particularly the US. That work requires sustained focus and institutional follow-through, both of which are harder to maintain when a prime minister governs under the growing cloud of court cases and domestic political fragility.
Every minute of access to an American president and his senior team is strategic capital. It is finite and irreplaceable.
What Israel must secure from the US
That time must therefore be spent securing concrete outcomes: Missile defense integration timelines, joint stockpile guarantees, intelligence sharing protocols, and pre-authorized escalation thresholds. Success is measured not in statements or political signaling, but in deliverables that directly affect the safety, security, and survival of the Jewish state, and the integrity of its strategic partnership with its most important ally, the US.
Supporters of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will argue that personal rapport is not only strategic, but his central superpower, despite mounting reporting in American media that President Donald Trump’s cadre of advisers is running out of patience with Netanyahu.
Netanyahu governs under growing legal exposure and domestic political fragility. As Israel enters an election year, those constraints intensify the pressure on every major diplomatic encounter and narrow the margin for strategic error.
That dynamic becomes most consequential in leader-to-leader settings, where outcomes depend not on access alone but on the ability to convert it into institutional commitments. When that conversion fails, strategic access rapidly loses value.
While Iranian factories cast motors and assemble guidance systems on uninterrupted schedules, Israel’s leadership faces decisions about how to allocate limited diplomatic bandwidth. Missile production operates on fixed timelines. Diplomatic opportunities do not.
The domestic political context sharpens the risk further.
As Naftali Bennett consolidates his position as the most serious and credible challenger to Netanyahu, the strategic environment surrounding Israel’s leadership grows more compressed. Increased political competition raises the stakes of every major international engagement and heightens the risk that diplomatic access is pulled into domestic gravity rather than held at strategic altitude.
Iran’s missile factories do not care about Israeli coalition math. They do not pause for headlines or political turbulence. They operate on schedules measured in output, not optics.
Mar-a-Lago is not a courtroom. It is not a campaign stop. And it is not a venue for personal politics. It is a place where every second should be devoted to countering a very real ballistic missile threat, as well as the nuclear threat that Netanyahu has rightly dedicated his career to confronting.
Iran is preparing for the next war. Missile production does not wait for political cycles or election timelines.
Strategic access, once misused, does not reset. Commitments not secured in real time are not retroactively granted. Deterrence is built before it is tested.
Israel’s leadership will ultimately be judged not by how often it spoke to power, but by what it secured while the window was still open.
The writer is a Tel Aviv-based commentator and strategist.