EXCLUSIVE: Israel’s new ambassador predicts a ‘new age’ of international relations under President Trump

Israel's new ambassador to the United States, Dr. Yechiel Leiter, has officially taken up his post in Washington, D.C. He begins his tenure at a critical moment, with war raging at home and the new Trump administration signaling its intent to reshape the world order.

“For the first half of the 20th century, we had a paradigm called multipolarity. That was the order of the world. For the second half of the 20th century, we had the bipolar paradigm – U.S. and Soviet. For the beginning of the 21st century, we had the unipolar paradigm,” Leiter told THE ROSENBERG REPORT on TBN, referring to American preponderance worldwide.

“But none of those paradigms worked very well, did they?” he added. “The multipolar system resulted in two world wars. The bipolar system was a world divided on the threshold of a Cold War... We need a new paradigm now.”

In his first interview with any U.S. or Israeli media outlet since replacing Michael Herzog as Israeli ambassador, Leiter told ALL ISRAEL NEWS Editor-in-Chief Joel Rosenberg that he believes U.S. President Donald Trump has the ability to shift international relations into a new age.

“We're a very chaotic world because we've stepped back from the unipolar moment. But I think President Trump is going to introduce a new paradigm, which is going to be not mutually assured destruction, but mutually Assured Construction. I think he's going to have a very constructive approach to international relations.”

Ambassador Leiter is an academic with a PhD in political philosophy from the University of Haifa. He has run think tanks and served in multiple posts in public office in Israel, including as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s chief of staff at the Israeli Ministry of Finance. His relationship with Netanyahu spans about 30 years, as a long-time trusted friend, advisor and ally within the Likud party.

Leiter immigrated to the Jewish state from the United States at age 18 and joined the IDF to fight in the First Lebanon War. He was born to Jewish-American parents in Pennsylvania and grew up in the same town as former U.S. President Joe Biden.

“I'm very proud of my background in Scranton,” he told Rosenberg.

Another thing he has in common with the former president is having experienced the tragic loss of a son. Leiter’s oldest son, Maj. (res.) Moshe Yedidyah Leiter fell in combat in Gaza in November 2023.

“He was not only my firstborn, he was my best friend,” Ambassador Leiter told Rosenberg.

Moshe had just received his medical diploma and was about to begin his rounds as a doctor at a Tel Aviv hospital on Oct. 8, 2023. Instead, he returned to the military, where he had been serving for over 15 years in a special ops unit in the Israeli Air Force.

“He actually trained extensively with the Delta Force in the U.S. He led operations that they're classified to this day,” Leiter added. “He was very courageous, and he would always get his soldiers out of harm's way.”

“One thing I discovered, Joel, after my son was killed by Hamas in battle… I realized that a parent that loses a child has to make a decision every morning: Do you fall or do you get up and start living again? And it's not a one-time decision. It's a repeated decision. And there's this little enzyme within you that kind of brings you down and tells you to give up on life and to be sad, and not forge ahead with a constructive life, and you make the decision to live. That's what my son would have wanted.”

At the funeral, which took place at Jerusalem's Mount Herzl military cemetery, Leiter appealed to Biden and called on the former president to let Israel finish the war in Gaza.

“At the time, there were all sorts of rumors about American pressure on us to stop the war,” he recalled. “And I said, look, we can't do this. This is an existential issue. This really goes to the very root of our existence here. I think it goes beyond our security to the core issue of who we are as human beings.”

Leiter went on to explain, “Are we able to identify evil as evil and good as good? And to fight for the good, and to fight against the evil?”

As a religious man of faith, the ambassador nodded in agreement when Rosenberg referenced the Bible: ”Solomon tells us in Ecclesiastes, there is a time for war. Obviously, there is time for peace. Mostly, we want peace but sometimes we have to just accept there is no other way forward than war.”

“How does the Bible inform your own personal views and how do you respond to the criticism, that you're a radical settler, you're going to make it more difficult to make peace with the Saudis or whomever?” Rosenberg asked Leiter, who resides in Israel in Efrat, a community situated between Bethlehem and Hebron in the Judea region.

Leiter replied, “How could it be that Jews living in Judea is a controversial idea? Is there anything more natural than where did you come from? I mean, if you deny the right of us to Judea, you deny our identity as Jews. I know that the Evangelical community gets it.”

When asked about his message to Evangelicals, the Ambassador decisively said: “It's time to come in! Come back. Be here. Walk through the biblical homeland, feel and experience it. Come to our army bases, meet with our soldiers, meet with the people who have risked their lives in order to free hostages, in order to secure Israel and to secure Western civilization. And, of course, in the United States, try to fight back against this tsunami of anti-Israel propaganda which has taken over campuses and over much of the media.”

Watch Part One and Part Two of Rosenberg’s interview with Yechiel Leiter on the TBN website.

THE ROSENBERG REPORT airs Thursday nights at 9 p.m. EST and Saturday nights at 10 p.m. EST – on the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), the most-watched Christian television network in the United States.