On December 20, 1989, the United States invaded the Republic of Panama to oust its leader, General Manuel Noriega, who had outlived his usefulness to the empire. At that point, it was the largest US military operation by far since the end of the Vietnam War, and it marked the beginning of an era of endless regime-change wars that continues to this day. Before Operation Just Cause was over, 23 American service members lay dead and 325 wounded.

At the time, I was a brand new platoon leader in the Army's 5th Infantry Division at Fort Polk, Louisiana. Two of my fellow 5th ID soldiers, members of a battalion that was on a rotation to Panama at the time, were killed in the invasion. They died in the assault on the Comandancia – the headquarters of the Panamanian Defense Forces.

I was not part of the invasion, but soon after, my Military Police unit was deployed to Panama to conduct joint patrols of Panama City with the country's reconstituted and demilitarized security forces.

One afternoon, several weeks into my deployment, I had an interesting conversation with one of our Panamanian officer counterparts – a major. As we stood outside a police station near Tocumen International airport, he told me that, on the night of the invasion, he was at the Comandancia. Knowing it had been the site of one of the invasion's bloodiest battles, and knowing what he must have experienced as my fellow countrymen attacked, I could only quietly shake my head to reflect my appreciation of the ordeal he must have endured.

And then, without prompting, he said, "We knew you were coming."

"How?" I asked.

And he replied, "The Israelis told us."

And that's how, 36 years ago, under a hot Panamanian sun, my education about the true nature of the US-Israel relationship began.

This is a relationship without parallel in world history. It's no exaggeration to say that it's the strangest relationship between two countries the world has ever seen.

One in which the largest economic and military power the world has ever known, subordinates itself to a tiny country that would otherwise be almost entirely inconsequential. Not only systematically redistributing its own wealth to that tiny, well-off country, but unconditionally embracing that country's geopolitical agenda, and taking extreme actions on behalf of that country in a way that causes immense harm to its own interests, while also inflicting death, displacement and despair on millions of innocents.

US support for Israel comes at a staggering, multifaceted price. The steepest costs of this relationship are not measured in dollars, but we'll start with dollars… mindful that every one of them is borrowed at interest.