Dermer’s Exit and Israel’s Strategic Vacuum |
Ron Dermer was never a conventional diplomat; he was a force multiplier. American-born, Ivy-trained, and ideologically fluent in Washington’s grammar of power, Ron Dermer fused personal trust with state authority and converted access into leverage. He understood something most envoys never do: in Washington, proximity precedes policy, and persuasion is often personal before it is institutional.
Certainly, his ascent—from behind-the-scenes adviser to ambassador and later strategic affairs minister—reflected a hard belief that individuals, correctly positioned, can bend the arc of geopolitics.
Dermer’s bond with Benjamin Netanyahu was not chemistry; it was doctrine. Together they wagered that Israel’s survival required locking in American power while reordering the Arab world around a single organizing threat—Iran. It was a wager grounded in realism and executed with precision. Dermer was the translator, the calibrator, the man who could read a room, count votes before they were cast, and anticipate where U.S. bureaucratic gravity would land months in advance.
From Washington, he turned worldview into outcome. He helped engineer the U.S. exit from the Iran nuclear deal; he quietly stitched together the scaffolding that became the Abraham Accords; and—less........