Seeing the gaps in a country’s ‘sovereignty stack’

Almost every advanced economy is quietly trying to do the same thing right now. A pandemic cut their supply chains. A war turned energy into a weapon. An artificial intelligence (AI) race started between Washington and Beijing, and everyone else is trying to find a way not to lose their own future. And one by one, governments stopped believing they can simply buy what they need from whoever sells it cheapest. They want to own the things that matter: their chips, their energy, their defence, their AI, and the people who build all of it. 

Call it a sovereignty stack. It’s the full chain a country needs to stand on its own. Money at the base; skilled people in the middle; real production, factories, power, and hardware at the top. Money hires people, people build things, and a country that owns the whole chain can’t be held hostage by another one. 

Wanting the stack is easy. The trap is that your own gaps are invisible until something tests them. A country can look strong at every layer you can see and be quietly dependent underneath. Most nations have no idea what their own gap actually looks like, because nothing has forced them to find out yet. 

Israel is the exception worth studying, not because it’s failing, but because it’s being tested in public. It’s a sophisticated country discovering, in real time, exactly where its sovereignty stack leaks. Every gap it hits is a gap sitting in some form in someone else’s stack too, undetected. 

Start with why it’s trying. For years, Israel bought big parts of its arsenal from allies and slept fine. Then, during the recent war, those allies used the supply as leverage. The United States slowed weapons deliveries mid-fight, and Britain and Canada froze export licences. The lesson is universal, and most countries are starting to learn it now. A supplier who can pause you at the worst possible moment isn’t a supplier. It’s a kill switch, and someone else’s hand is on it. Every country that imports what it can’t live without owns this risk. The bill is coming soon. 

Israel has committed to invest about $110 billion (R1.8 trillion) in its own stack, but its gaps are serious and only now coming into full view. These gaps are often hidden in most national stacks, so it’s instructive to look at Israel’s case. 

A booming top line hides a shrinking base. Israeli tech raised a record $7.6 billion (R127.2 billion) in the first half of 2026. But a strong currency and rising costs meant that money bought fewer local jobs, not more. In 2025, for the first time in more than a decade, the number of research jobs in Israel actually fell, while funding surged. Money coming in isn’t the same as capability going up. Plenty of countries read the inflow and miss the erosion underneath it. 

Talent leaves through the side door. You don’t have to fire the engineers a sovereignty stack depends on to lose them. You price them out, wear them down, or let a stronger currency abroad pull them away. Only 62% of employees at private Israeli tech firms are still based in Israel, down from 69% in 2019. You can fully fund the mission and still lose the people who were supposed to deliver it. 

The “independent” project isn’t. Israel’s flagship self-reliance programme is stitched through with the exact dependence it was built to end, like navy vessel hulls built abroad, and a new plant for its own Iron Dome interceptors that opened not in Israel but in Arkansas. Relabelling dependence as partnership doesn’t make it independence. 

Then physics sends its bill. Israel wants to be an AI hub. AI runs on data centres, and data centres run on electricity. This summer, Israel’s power regulator froze all new data-centre connections after requests hit three times the country’s entire electricity use. Ambition met a grid that can’t carry it. Every country chasing AI is walking towards the same wall. 

Sovereignty is a system, money, people, factories, and power, and being world-class at one layer tells you nothing about the others. The dangerous gap is always the one you can’t see from where you’re standing. 

Israel is finding its gaps out now. The useful question for everyone else is: do you actually know where yours are? 

• Award-winning writer, editor, and host of The Dejargonizer podcast, Amir Mizroch was born in Israel and raised in Krugersdorp, South Africa, studying journalism at Rhodes University. He worked at The Jerusalem Post and Israel Hayom and was later director of communications at Start-Up Nation Central. He was also tech editor EMEA for The Wall Street Journal.