Nixon's guarantee of Israeli national security
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Nixon's guarantee of Israeli national security is, in John Kiriakou's account of the relationship, the hinge between lobbying and commitment.

AIPAC was created in the 1950s as a domestic lobbying organisation supporting Israeli foreign policy goals. Kiriakou says it began focusing seriously on fundraising for American elections in the late 1960s, and that it was then successful in getting President Nixon, in 1969, to guarantee Israeli national security. "We had never said that before", a break, in his telling, with everything from Truman onward.

In the same account, the guarantee is followed by the growth of AIPAC's fundraising from a few million dollars to hundreds of millions, enough to make it competitive in effectively every political race in America.

The structural dependency

Kiriakou treats the 1969 guarantee as the answer to a broader question, whether American intelligence can disentangle its priorities from Israel's at all. Asked in December 2025 whether there is a structural dependency built into the relationship, his answer was "Yes. Yes.", and he dated it precisely: "it started in 1969 when Richard Nixon said that the US would protect Israel under any circumstances. Our foreign policy changed in 1969 to guarantee Israel's safety and security."

He pairs the date with the lobbying shift rather than treating them as separate events: 1969 "was also about the same time that AIPAC became a major force in American politics." AIPAC had existed since the 1950s, but through the 1950s and 60s its activity amounted to campaign donations to one candidate or another.

See also

- AIPAC
- Truman's regret over Israel
- Israel-United States relations
- AIPAC and foreign-agent registration
