The Donald Trump administration’s two-year deadline to take a fresh look at the Obama-era New START nuclear treaty with Russia could give pro-Israel advocates another chance to deepen defense ties.

The potential lapse of the treaty, inked in 2009, would remove a prime legal obstacle to transferring US-made bombers overseas. Such a sale would in turn give Israel the platform it currently lacks for delivering bunker-busting bombs that could target Iran.

The possibility of the United States leaving New START, or the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, has increasingly been raised after the Trump administration gave Russia notice it would leave the Ronald Reagan-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in six months. The president himself called the pact “another bad deal” in a 2017 interview with Reuters, while The Guardian reported late last year that national security adviser John Bolton has blocked talks on renewing the treaty.

New START establishes limits on the number of “strategic offensive weapons” such as nuclear weapons, bombers, ballistic missiles and nuclear-capable submarines in US and Russian arsenals, and bans their transfer to other countries. Asked about the future of the New START Treaty, or NST, in a recent interview, the State Department’s top arms control official demurred on extending the deal past February 2021.