How Eisenhower Explained the Israel Lobby in 1961

Americans Receive 100% of US Foreign Aid to Israel

One of the practical challenges with political debate in the US emerges from the embedded Western philosophical view. This point is best made with an example. In Western ontology (bear with me), objects are frozen in time. Conceptually, an acorn is an acorn and an oak tree is an oak tree. This in turn creates binaries--- local oppositions. Something either is or is not an acorn. And something either is or is not an oak tree. Time is frozen and hard conceptual (ontological) boundaries are created.

The discursive / conceptual problem here is that under the right conditions, an acorn grows into an oak tree. Western ontology cannot accommodate this passage of time. In a world where children become adults and the passage of time is in evidence everywhere, the premises that underlie Western modernity cannot accommodate change. Readers who are militarily inclined know this through the state-space mathematical models long favored by the US military. They are a Frankenstein’s monster of dead space-time.

Now notice how this abstract idea evolved to be embedded in the American political system. Europe has long favored Parliamentary governance. In contrast, the US created a two-party system where the parties are imagined to oppose one another (binary). Parliamentary systems are premised upon diverse populations. In the US you are a member of one party or the other. The rise of registered Independents may appear to contradict this tendency. But what are the choices that ‘independent’ voters have? That would be the Red Team or the Blue Team.

When former US President Dwight Eisenhower gave his famous farewell speech (excerpt below, 1961) in which he warned of the rise of the military-industrial-complex, he originally included Congress in the equation. It was the military-industrial-congressional-complex. Eisenhower reportedly removed ‘congressional’ in his address out of respect for the separation of powers, not because he changed his theory. Eisenhower’s ontological position in the speech is historical. He is using past actions (rise of MIC) to inform his view of the future.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government…. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” US President Dwight Eisenhower, 1961.

Eisenhower’s inclusion of Congress along with the MIC is as the transfer mechanism for corruption. Through Congress, the power of the MIC can be used to gain ‘misplaced power.’ That reads like a functional definition of the Israel Lobby. It was most definitely a description of the American MIC in 1961. And in 2026. US arms manufacturers have consolidated in recent years into five major multinational corporations. As the result of this consolidation, the MIC’s economic power is far more concentrated today than it was in 1961

What is inexplicable in the present is that Eisenhower’s words read as prescient, and yet their substance is missing from current discourse. The Israel Lobby is the ‘unwarranted influence’ that Eisenhower spoke of. It rose to prominence using the very levers that Eisenhower alluded to. And its power in the present represents ‘the disastrous rise of misplaced power.’ The point: the Israel Lobby doesn’t contradict Eisenhower’s warning of a runaway MIC. It is evidence that Eisenhower had it right.

This point is easy enough to understand via the economics. Israel exists as a regional power at the behest of the US. Were the US to end all of its support for Israel--- money, weapons, materiel, logistics and diplomatic cover, Israel would cease to exist militarily. In a material sense, the US controls Israel absolutely. Turn the spigot off and the spigot turns off. But what of the US ‘will’ to turn off the spigot? One explanation is that Israel controls the spigot. Missing from that explanation is that a few very large US corporations earn their profits from the US arrangement with Israel.

American corporations like Lockheed Martin and JPMorgan Chase were buying special dispensations from American politicians decades before the Israel Lobby was conceived. The evidence? A former US President, Dwight Eisenhower, provided an articulate explanation of how in 1961 the US was structurally organized to facilitate the rise of organizations like the Israel Lobby. It is this structural point that Lobby proponents cannot get past. If the US was set up to facilitate bribes to Congress, how is the Israel Lobby an exception?

Where this turns into farce is in the inability / refusal to place the Israel Lobby thesis in the larger envelope of Eisenhower’s MIC. Consider: as an aspect of the US MIC, the Israel Lobby thesis can be 1) substantially true as explanation while 2) missing the larger context that ties Israeli wishes to US commands. In fact, US ‘aid’ to Israel is contractually required to be spent on products made by the US MIC. In upcoming contracts, the proportion that Israel is required to spend on US weapons rises from 75% to 100%.

By simply repeating the evidence in favor of the Lobby thesis (which was granted at the outset), the implication is that criticism is a result of ignorance of the theory. This is akin to assertions that criticism of Donald Trump or Joe Biden are the result of ignorance of their policies. How plausible is that? The critics of both have been more aware of the broader details than supporters have been. The current approach rewards what people don’t know, not what they do know.

So, Israel is a major customer (via US subsidies) of the MIC. The MIC is a major economic force in the US. It employs workers in every state, is the largest employer in the US broadly considered, and consumes a major portion of national expenditures. In business terms, it looks like a money laundering operation using Israel as the conduit through which money is laundered. The US ‘gives’ Israel the money but requires that it be spent buying US weapons and materiel. Israel then pays for the weapons and materiel with money provided to it by the US.

Net – net, Israel was able to keep 25 cents / dollar, soon to be zero cents / dollar, of this money. The US MIC received 75 cents / dollar, soon to be 100 cents / dollar, of this money. The American state paid the money and the US MIC received the money. And Israel got the weapons. But Israel can’t use the weapons except as tag-alongs on US military excursions in West Asia because Israel lacks the capacity to prevail militarily without the US. The US has been rushing weapons to Israel since October 7, 2023.

The rebuttal to this argument has been painful in how superficial it has been. Loudly repeating evidence that Israel controls aspects of US foreign policy assumes that there is someone on the other side claiming otherwise. To my knowledge, there isn’t. And why would someone make such an argument with so much visible evidence to the contrary? The point is that if I am saying it and they are saying it, they aren’t offering a rebuttal. Again, what this suggests is that the nature of the critique isn’t understood.

Further. the Israel Lobby thesis contradicts the very framing being used to define it. The argument is that Israel controls US foreign policy through bribing / controlling Congress. That Eisenhower had a solid grasp of this problem in 1961 and that nothing was done to preclude it from happening indicates the ‘revealed preference’ of Congress. The American Congress exists to be bribed. This wasn’t an accident in 1961 and it isn’t an accident today. This is a structural point.

1) Eisenhower laid out a robust theory of how in 1961 US political economy was organized around US military production, 2) that placed an easily corrupted Congress and US commercial interests in a position to 3) organize future military funding / production for their own benefit. The Israel Lobby thesis is that an easily corrupted US Congress is being used by a hostile foreign power to gain control over US foreign policy in West Asia.

The effort to claim that the Israel Lobby is ‘something more’ or ‘exceptional’ appears to be a category error. Recall the acorn and the oak tree. Things progress. While I don’t see a path to the claim that the MIC is irrelevant to the existence of the Israel Lobby, that is exactly what is implied in the push back that I received. I’m not sure which part of the US MIC money laundering scheme laid out above isn’t understood? A few Americans are getting rich from the US supplying Israel with weapons and materiel.

This latter argument points in the direction of the political premises that underlie the Israel Lobby thesis. John Mearsheimer argues that the US relationship with Israel works against US interests. In the classical liberal framing of the genesis and nature of the American state that Mearsheimer uses, the US is a unity and the political system manages this unity. But how many Americans today see the US as a political unity? No modern president can negotiate a treaty to end a war because Congress will oppose it for party-adjacent reasons rather than the expected benefit to the US.

An alternative framework that explains these facts quite a bit more precisely is Marxist class analysis. In contrast to the liberal frame of a unified national interest, class analysis suggests that US decision making is determined by economic interests. The reason why it matters that a few oligarchs and the corporations that they control are benefiting from the US arrangement with Israel is that these oligarchs control the political process in place of some imagined national interest. Every single US military adventure that I have lived through has arguably harmed the US national interest.

For readers who read ‘Marxist class analysis’ as synonymous with bullshit, 1) you are still welcome here and 2) recall the facts. Neither Marx nor yours truly wrote the contracts governing the use of US aid to Israel to make it so that it all flows back to the American MIC. To the question of cui bono (who benefits?), American oligarchs connected to the MIC get the money and Israel gets the weapons. All of those questions about why the US would go along with Israel’s crazy bullshit suddenly have an answer: because American oligarchs are getting rich from doing so.

Political scientists Thomas Ferguson and Gilens and Page have published well supported research explaining how this process works in practice. What they do is back-fill Eisenhower’s generic MIC thesis with empirical research. Those who seek favorable legislation from Congress pay for it with campaign contributions in a bidding process. The factions organize to arrange affairs to their liking. Lockheed Martin gets new military expenditures and JPMorgan Chase gets more bailouts.

To perpetuate the illusion that Lockheed Martin has the American interest at heart rather than its own when bribing Congress, foreign governments have been precluded from funding US elections, except when they haven’t been. Through this process, dual citizens of the US and foreign nations have the capacity to represent the interests of foreign governments through campaign contributions. This is how the Israel Lobby became a thing.

Something to consider is that JPMorgan Chase and Lockheed Martin still get their way via lobbying Congress. Who recalls that oil and gas industry executives met with Dick Cheney before the US war against Iraq to divide the expected spoils? And who recalls that Citigroup chose most of Barack Obama’s senior staff and communicated the list of appointees to Obama before the 2008 election was even settled? This is how America operates.

As I keep writing, I have had the highest regard for John Mearsheimer since the onset of the US proxy war with Russia when he articulated his theory of US responsibility for the war. I understood Mearsheimer’s political frame the moment that I encountered it. It is textbook classical liberal. I had just written a book, Zen Economics, that took the liberal worldview apart piece by piece. The political framing was what I initially objected to.

And nothing that I have written as criticism has claimed that Mearsheimer has his facts wrong. For at least the tenth time, that isn’t the basis of the criticism. The criticism is that there is a larger and more inclusive story to tell with the US MIC. The Israel Lobby thesis is an interesting footnote that has come to prominence via a regional war in the region that Israel exists within. No one of whom I am aware was arguing that the Israel Lobby controlled US foreign policy at the outset of the US response to Russia’s SMO. But if Israel runs US foreign policy, that was a must.

To understand the push back that I received to this criticism, I went back through what an older leftie cohort--- Noam Chomsky and Michael Parenti, had to say on the matter of Israel and US militarism. Without apparently knowing it, Chomsky was deep in the materialist camp. His view of the Israel Lobby thesis was more dismissive than mine. Parenti struggled conceptually, having been drawn to the ‘special relationship’ argument and then back to my original explication that Israel is a US vassal and US imperialism in West Asia explains Israel’s ‘special’ role in it.

I’ve been claiming for longer than I am willing to say that Americans haven’t heard an argument from an actual Left in forty years. This is no slam against the actual lefties in the US--- their voices aren’t heard. My experience with the Israel Lobby thesis suggests that I was wrong--- it has been at least a century since Americans have heard an argument from the left. So much for all of that bullshit about free speech. Please let me know if it ever arrives.

Last, I also received push back for a recent comment made regarding naval blockades and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. 1) there exists a difference between description and endorsement that Americans have a very hard time understanding and 2) the attack was used as an analogy, not as a characterization of US foreign policy. And in the American frame, the reference is contested history. Most US history books never mention the blockade. I revisited my understanding a year ago to make sure that I had the history right. As best I can determine, it is.

The context for the comment was discussion of the US ‘blockade’ of the Strait of Hormuz. As I wrote, Iran is getting more than half of its desired oil out whereas ship traffic through the Strait is 3% of its pre-February 28th level. Point: there is no blockade. At Pearl Harbor US ships were attacked by Japanese aircraft. The current American threat involves US ships versus Iranian missiles. But more importantly, the ‘blockade’ places ships and missiles in close enough proximity to one another to risk ‘accidental’ escalation. This risk was carefully managed in the post-War period by not placing vessels in close proximity to one another.

To the view that my words were in some way an endorsement of the Japanese attack, either my history is correct, and I spent some time over the years looking into the matter, or it isn’t. In either case, the purpose of the history was to fill out the analogy between naval blockades then and now. That is why the history was added, for context. It is the leadership of the US that is occasionally problematic. The troops are but cannon fodder being used for generally nefarious purposes. Ending US wars is the way to respect them. Pointless sentimentality isn’t.