Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon : the administrations that forged U.S.-Israeli relations while facing the bomb in the basement

The subject of this paper1 is U.S. foreign policy during the presidential administrations of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon. The main research objective was to analyse the U.S. relationship to Israel in the light of its nuclear weapons program and in relation to U.S. Cold War foreign policy. The aim of the paper is to compare and contrast three case studies – the individual presidential administrations – and to show how U.S. foreign policy and the relationship to Israel changed from lukewarm ties, through a "special" relationship, to a "strategic" relationship, regardless of the fact that Israel was not a signatory of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). This is especially important in the context of U.S. Cold War politics, as the Middle East was another area where the two superpowers competed for proxy spheres of influence. In the context of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War it is common to talk about the area of Southeast Asia or Europe, while the Middle East is usually discussed in connection to U.S. politics of the 1990s and onward. The aim of this paper, thus, is to show that the Middle East was equally important to U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War in terms of finding another proxy area and that the relationship that the U.S. has with Israel now was built during the administrations in question, especially since the U.S. pursued these ties regardless of the conflict of interest over the nuclear weapons program. This paper is based on the author's MA thesis defended in February, 2017 at the Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University.