The next world order will not begin with a peace treaty or a handshake on the White House lawn. It is already being built – in data centers, undersea cables, chip factories and the code that runs power grids, hospitals and armies. The only question is who will write its rules.
In my previous article, “Who writes the code of the new world?,” I argued that software has become part of the strategic architecture of civilization. Here I go a step further: the democracies that build this architecture must also govern it. And the United States and Israel are best placed to lead.
Henry Kissinger spent his life on one problem: how to make power legitimate enough to be stable. In World Order, he warned that cyberspace had outpaced any shared doctrine, leaving states with powerful capabilities and no agreed limits.
In his final books on artificial intelligence, The Age of AI and Genesis, he went further: machines that act faster than human judgment could upend deterrence itself.
His central lesson still holds. Order rests on two pillars: a balance of power and a shared sense of legitimacy. Remove either, and the system slides into chaos or coercion.
What Kissinger’s century could not fully foresee is a world in which a nation can lose sovereignty without losing territory. A government can be recognized at the United Nations yet depend on foreign clouds, foreign chips, and foreign algorithms it cannot inspect.
Its power grid can be switched off from a continent away. In the cyber age, the balance of power is measured not only in divisions and warheads, but in who controls the infrastructure everyone else relies on.
That is why the new order needs a core: trusted democracies with both the capability and the credibility to set the rules.
No relationship is better suited to that role than the one between Washington and Jerusalem.
America brings scale: leadership in advanced computing, chip design, AI, space, and a global network of alliances. Israel brings something rarer: a nation that must defend itself every day, in every domain, from rockets to ransomware.
Its cyber sector, born of necessity and refined under fire, is among the most innovative on Earth. Google’s $32 billion agreement to acquire the Israeli cloud-security company Wiz was not charity. It was recognition.
Last year’s war with Iran showed what this alliance means in practice. Israeli intelligence and American power, acting together, set back a nuclear program that threatened the entire region. Missile defenses developed jointly by the two countries protected civilians from hundreds of ballistic missiles. And the war was fought in cyberspace too, with attacks on banks, infrastructure, and information systems. The battlefield now runs through servers as well as skies.
This is no longer only a bilateral asset. When Germany bought Israel’s Arrow 3 system to protect European skies, Europe acknowledged that Israeli defense innovation is part of its own security. Cyber should be next.
The opportunity now is to turn US-Israeli cooperation into a wider architecture: a trusted technology alliance open to European democracies and Abraham Accords partners. Three steps would make it real.
First, joint defense of critical infrastructure. Power grids, ports, hospitals and financial systems need shared early warning, threat intelligence and rapid response, the cyber equivalent of integrated air defense.
Second, trusted supply chains. Democracies cannot defend themselves on hardware and software built by authoritarian rivals. The chips, clouds, and AI systems that underpin national security should come from partners who share values and accept accountability.
Third, rules for AI in security. Kissinger’s final warning was that AI could compress decisions beyond human control. Washington and Jerusalem, which field some of the world’s most advanced military AI, have the standing and the responsibility to set standards for meaningful human oversight before adversaries set them by default.
The Eastern Mediterranean and the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor show the geography of this architecture: energy, data cables, and trade routes linking the Gulf, Israel, Cyprus, Greece, and Europe. Whoever secures these networks will shape the region’s future more than whoever fires the most missiles.
The alternative is not a vacuum. China offers digital infrastructure with dependence built in. Russia has shown how cyberattacks and disinformation complement tanks. Iran uses proxies, drones, and hackers to project power far beyond the reach of its economy.
These regimes are not a single bloc, but they share a goal: an order in which rules are optional and dependency is a tool of coercion. The democratic answer cannot be rhetoric. It must be capability combined with legitimacy – precisely Kissinger’s formula.
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. Europe still depends on foreign clouds, foreign chips, and, increasingly, foreign defense technology.
Strategic autonomy cannot mean isolation. The smarter choice is deeper integration with the American and Israeli ecosystems, partnerships that strengthen European sovereignty rather than replace it.
I write from Sarajevo, a city that learned the hard way what happens when international guarantees fail. Here, security is not an abstraction. It means a hospital that keeps working, electricity that stays on, and institutions that do not abandon their citizens.
Smaller democracies, including those of the Western Balkans, feel the new vulnerability most acutely. They are asked to meet Western standards while depending on technology they cannot verify or replace. A US-Israeli-led alliance that shares knowledge and builds local capacity, rather than creating new dependencies, would earn something no adversary can buy: genuine trust.
Kissinger believed lasting order is built by those who combine strength with a vision others can accept. The cyber order will be no different.
The US and Israel have the strength, and they have proven the partnership. Now they must offer the vision: an order in which democracies protect not only their borders, but the systems on which free societies depend.
The table of the new world order is being set right now. If America and Israel do not lead in writing its rules, others will – and they will not write them for freedom.
The writer is a cybersecurity strategist and expert in artificial intelligence, data governance, and international security, based in Sarajevo.
