Yves here. Robert Urie sets forth below how even those who have documented how Israel goes about lobbying have underestimated a key source of its power: serving as the poster child for yet more military spending. Urie also documents how Biden has been far and away the biggest political beneficiary of Israel’s largesse.
By Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack
Since publication of John Mearsheimer’s and Stephen Walt’s ‘The Israel Lobby’ in 2007, superior public relations has served as the main explanation for the outsized influence that the nation of Israel holds over American politicians. In that telling, AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee) and other supporters of Israel built a sophisticated and far-reaching public relations machine that promotes US politicians who support Israel and punishes those who don’t.
Conceived this way, rich supporters of Israel finance public relations campaigns whereby American politicians are (legally) bribed and coerced into giving US foreign aid to Israel. This aid is then delivered to the nation of Israel, with a preponderance of the money being spent on weapons produced by American weapons producers. To the extent that the goal of ‘the Israel lobby’ is to maximize US foreign aid to Israel, it is also maximizing funding for the American MIC (military-industrial complex).
According to data on political lobbying (charts below), the Israel lobby has spent about two percent (2%) of US foreign aid to Israel on political persuasion inside the US since 1948. In US dollar terms, this is $6 billion spent by the Israel lobby to get $280 billion in US foreign aid for Israel. And while this ratio isn’t far from what the US ‘defense’ industry and other corporate pleaders get for their ‘investment’ in American politicians, most of the money that Israel receives from the US is used to buy weapons and materiel from American suppliers.
Chart: Of the fighter jets that Israel possessed in 2023, all were built by US-based defense contractors. This is where US foreign aid to Israel is spent. It leaves Israel dependent on US suppliers for spare / replacement parts. But more importantly for the Federal government of the US, it gives the MIC a steady customer for its wares. Source: Aljazeera.com.
In other words, while the ratio of money spent to largesse secured is about the same for US corporations as it is for the Israel lobby, most of the money given to Israel is ‘passed through’ to the American MIC (chart below). Compared with the money given to Ukraine, which initially included a lend-lease agreement with the US, Israel has no contractual commitment to commit national suicide (like Ukraine) in return for funding from the US. This means that Israel could in theory buy military equipment from non-US suppliers— a threat to the US MIC.
In fact, what is put forward inside the US as ‘foreign aid’ is in many cases payments by the Federal government of the US to foreign governments for them to purchase goods and services from American providers. Rather than leaving the matter to ‘markets,’ the Federal government subsidizes US industries through so-called foreign aid. The receiving nations are on the hook to repay the loans either directly or through taking actions— like launching wars, that the US directs them to do. With respect to Israel, the US has a mutual defense agreement, but evidence of lend-lease type constraints on Israel wasn’t found.
Chart: Israel has been the largest recipient of US foreign aid on a cumulative basis since its inception in 1948. While, depending on scale, this could reasonably imply that Israel is dependent on the US, and therefore under its control, the claim since 2007 (year that The Israel Lobby was published) or thereabouts has been that Israel controls the US through well-placed campaign contributions and lobbying. However, the total cost of campaign contributions and lobbying by AIPAC is only a small fraction of US largesse to Israel. So, why doesn’t the US control Israel? Source: cfr.org.
None other than US President Joe Biden has been the largest recipient of (legal) bribes from supporters of Israel amongst American politicians by a wide margin (chart below). That Mr. Biden describes himself as a ‘Christian Zionist’ who has previously complained that Israel wasn’t killing enough Palestinian women and children might be interpreted differently if his political career hadn’t been supported by Israel to the tune of $6,000,000. To tie this together, Mr. Biden received the most money from Israel, and he is Israel’s most reliable co-genocidalist.
For those who may be unaware, were we ‘little people’ to offer $1 apiece to voters to vote or not vote for a candidate, doing so would be a Federal crime. But hostile foreign governments (e.g. Israel) are allowed to pay a US politician (Biden) $6,000,000 to do their bidding as long as their instructions are left at the level of ‘doing their bidding’ rather than passing particular legislation. With the US and developed Europe collecting names to restart their military drafts, American politicians are being paid by foreign governments to put American kids in harms’ way.
There are two components in play here. This first is the conceit that paying politicians for votes is different from paying ordinary voters for votes because politicians serve the public. In fact, very few citizens believe that American politicians serve the public. A majority (link above) believes that Congressional corruption has undermined democracy in the US. This suggests that most Americans don’t see a material difference between personal and professional corruption. If they did, the American system of funding campaigns wouldn’t be considered so corrupt. Another way to state this is that Israel certainly treats Joe Biden, and American politicians more generally, like the hired help.
Chart: at $5.7 million, US President Joe Biden has been the largest recipient of campaign donations from ‘the Israel Lobby’ since Israel was founded in 1948. Mr. Biden has received more than twice as much in contributions as the next largest recipient. The arithmetic is straightforward. Mr. Biden is the largest recipient of Israeli largesse and is the most avid and unflinching supporter of Israel, and against the Palestinians, in the US. Source: opensecrets.org.
Question: might this Federal support for the MIC not also partially explain the US war against Russia in Ukraine? The preponderance of US ‘aid’ to Ukraine has indeed been spent purchasing weapons and materiel from US producers. Coincident with this US transfer of weapons to Ukraine, and following the launch of Russia’s SMO (Special Military Operation) in 2022, Ukraine is now on the hook for repaying the loans, having committed the Ukrainian people to either fight and die for the American MIC or to repay the dollar cost of the weapons it has received.
Of note: 1) while Ukraine spent $5 million to influence US policymakers in 2022, it has otherwise spent very little to secure the $100 billion plus in US arms that it has received and 2) the $800 billion plus annual Pentagon budget apparently hasn’t prepared the US to prevail in the wars that the Biden administration / CIA have already launched. The Judge Napolitano crowd of retired military and CIA strategists has been arguing this point since the second phase of the NATO / American invasion of Ukraine (Russia’s SMO) began in February, 2022.
As readers familiar with Thomas Ferguson’s ‘investment theory’ of political funding (and here) know, this phenomenal return on investment ((1 / 2% ) = 50X) isn’t that far from the everyday return on corporate lobbying. To an analogy that has been in the ether for a decade or more, Congress sells influence so cheaply because it receives the benefit while we, the people, pay the cost. For instance, defense contractor Northrup Grumman’s PAC (political action committee) spent a bit over $2 million (0.01%) in the 2020 election cycle to sustain over $25 billion in Federal contracts.
So far, the difference with the Mearsheimer / Walt thesis here has to do with the nature of the American state. The ‘realist’ contention that Israeli lobbying is a particularly effective example of ordinary lobbying misses that were Iran or Venezuela to do the same, the American response would be to aggressively shut the effort down. For instance, Russia was accused of spending $75,000 on internet troll ads that mostly ran after the 2016 election, and Russiagate was the result. However, at least part of the American charges against Russia appear to be fraudulent.
As yours truly stated in real time, the reason why Russian troll farms were the first to be charged in Robert Mueller’s investigation was because it was assumed (by Mueller et al) that Russian nationals would never appear in an American courtroom to challenge the charges. In fact, one of the Russian troll farms, Concord Management, showed up in a US courtroom. The Mueller team quickly dropped the charges. The reason given: national security. If true, the charges were political (fraudulent) because any planned prosecution would have required that the US produce its evidence in discovery.
The point: irrespective of how skilled ‘the Israel lobby’ is at coercing American politicians to do its bidding, Israel has qualities favored by the MIC that Russia doesn’t. Russia is a manufacturer of weapons and materiel, making it a competitor of the American MIC. The same is true of China. In contrast, the US has multiple contracts with Israel to produce products for the US military. But far more to the point, and again, most US aid to Israel is quickly returned to the American MIC through weapons purchases.
Israel exists as a juggernaut for (perceived) US military interests in the region. (Diana Johnstone, for whom I have the highest regard, articulates the case against this thesis here). The case that Johnstone, along with co-author Jean Bricmont, make is that US support for Israel isn’t in the interest of the US. Question: how much more evidence is needed to conclude that American politicians work for whoever is paying them to do so? In fact, only a minority of Americans believe that elected representatives act in the interest of the US. The liberal architecture of the state requires clean lines of division between political and economic power that capitalism has rendered implausible.
The Marxist / Leninist view that the capitalist state exists to serve the interests of connected capitalists certainly seems to be more descriptively accurate—of the US at any rate, than the liberal theory of a ‘mixed economy.’ The American MIC was originally conceived as a make-work program to prevent a recurrence of the Great Depression after WWII ended. Beginning in the 1980s, private equity was used by MIC insiders to buy Federal assets for pennies on the dollar and load them up with debt to resell them to the public in order to enrich insiders.
In practice, wages were cut and production processes ‘streamlined’ in the companies bought by private equity, thereby erasing the public benefit of the MIC, such as it was. Neoliberal myopia went so far as to outsource military production to the nations with whom imperial competition has long been considered a foregone conclusion. The same politicians and technocrats who thought outsourcing a great idea in 1993 (or 2001) are today declaring China to be a ‘cheater’ that ‘stole’ the production it more precisely was handed.
This point isn’t just abstract, a matter of characterization. The core conceit of Western economics is that money, the pursuit of wealth, motivates human decision making. Payment in this frame is premised in the exchange of goods and services for money. Corporations and foreign governments pay ‘American’ politicians to do their bidding through campaign contributions. Pushback that there is no quid pro quo, no direct link between campaign contributions and legislative outcomes at the level of individual politicians, misses that such a link is easy to demonstrate (and here) at the systemic level.
The liberal state of Mearsheimer / Walt and Johnstone / Bricmont exists historically within capitalist political economy, making claims that the state is the state and the economy is the economy iterative, which in turn requires carefully chosen starting and stopping points to draw conclusions. In that view, the US state develops policies and then goes about gathering the resources to bring its policies to fruition. State policies would be the basis of the Great Powers struggle in Mearsheimer’s view. Missing is that corporations within the MIC can coerce Congress into starting wars and destroying nations through (legal) bribery.
New Members of Congress are directed to spend four hours per day soliciting campaign contributions when they arrive in Washington. The people and entities that make campaign contributions tend to have business before Congress. A system whereby entities with business before Congress fill the campaign coffers of politicians willing to do their bidding serves the needs of both the contributing entities and the willing politicians. The only people not served by this practice are citizens whose interests are subordinated to often malevolent corporations by corrupt politicians.
For those who missed it, the US claim to be the premier capitalist nation in the world 1990 – 2007 was premised on / in institutional constraints against corruption that were in the process of being dismantled in favor of ‘markets.’ And the whole of the ‘money-in-politics’ debasement of New Deal reforms occurred following the replacement of these institutions with neoliberal ideology. Today the imagined architecture of the liberal state hasn’t changed to reflect this neoliberal debasement. Liberal theory proceeds with a clear distinction between state and economy that never existed.
To be clear, there is no call to ‘get the money out of politics’ contained herein. The problem is the distribution of power in a capitalist state, of which the US system of political campaign funding is but a byproduct. State-funded political campaigns (as once existed in the US) would still have to get past the permanent government (CIA) which has openly acted in recent US elections to 1) choose the winning candidate or 2) go to war against the winner if it isn’t the permanent state’s desired candidate. The last two CIA-sponsored candidates, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, have been about as popular as liver cancer and child rape amongst actual voters.
The fact that neither Joe Biden nor his brain trust has picked up a telephone to speak with Vladimir Putin in 2 ½ years of war with Russia suggests that Mr. Putin and Russia might be better served by negotiating an end to hostilities directly with Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Biden is failing, corrupt, and he launched a war of choice against Russia that the US is losing. He is currently leading a WWII style genocide in Gaza. Impressively, being allied with self-described Nazis in Ukraine while leading a racist genocide in Gaza represents the political program of both American liberals and the radical Right in 2024.
None of this is intended in an electoral frame. Donald Trump has demonstrated himself to be a ‘toll booth’ Zionist, having agreed to support Jerusalem as the capital of Israel after receiving $20 million in campaign contributions from Israeli-American Zionists. Now in line to receive another $100 million contribution from Miriam Adelson, wife of the late Sheldon Adelson, Mr. Trump recently supported a bill to further fund US wars in Ukraine and Israel, assuring its passage. There is little difference between the major party candidates regarding Israel’s genocide, likely because the American MIC is laundering its Federal subsidies through Israel.
The solution to ‘the Israel lobby’ is for the US to stop funding Israel. The competition for campaign contributions amongst pro-genocide US Senators and Representatives would end with the funding. Of course, this won’t happen. But not because of the Israel lobby. It won’t happen because Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman hold the political power to assure that doing so isn’t even considered. This makes ‘the Israel lobby’ a subsidiary of Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex. In fact, Eisenhower’s MIC speech originally included ‘congressional’ in the complex for the reasons laid out here.
Graph: the Great Recession produced a break with respect to how Americans perceive the nation. In 2016, sentiment remained near its Great Recession low and the establishment candidate (Hillary Clinton) lost the election. In 2019 Joe Biden and the liberal Democrats were advertised as the people and party who would restore the US. While they seem satisfied with their results, sentiment in 2024 is worse than it was in 2016. The American political establishment is conspicuously incapable of achieving anything other than launching wars that kill millions of innocents— implying that the world would be a better place without it. Source: gallup.com.
Most of what is written here comports with Mearsheimer’s / Walt’s explanation of the Israel Lobby. The difference comes through deference to political economy rather than to liberal theories of the state. With $800 billion plus per year in Pentagon spending plus ad hoc funding of the US war against Russia in Ukraine, the MIC exists prior to Congress being lobbied by AIPAC or Ukraine. And the ‘revolving door’ between Congress and the MIC further incentivizes Congress to overfund the MIC relative to need.
This difference between the thesis of Mearsheimer / Walt and the argument made here may seem small, but it is crucial. With most US aid to Israel actually going to the American MIC, it can’t actually be claimed to be aid to Israel without a more robust accounting of the broader political economy embedded in the relationship. In other words, the claim of a benefit to Israel comes through the future evolution of regional hostilities, not the nominal dollar value of weaponry ‘awarded’ to Israel. And the evolution of regional hostilities is a function international relations.
I’ve previously linked (starts about 2:45) to US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stating that without US support, the hostilities in Israel and Ukraine would end immediately. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed this when he complained that slow-walking one weapons delivery by the Biden administration caused Israel incalculable harm. But a contrary argument can just as well be made. Israel will hereafter be known as a pariah state for its extermination of the Palestinian people. Seventy years after WWII ended, the Germans are still apologizing for Adolf Hitler.
Exactly how propagandized a population must be to believe that Israel and Ukraine run US foreign policy, no matter how effective their lobbying, suggests a deep national insecurity. With the New York Times now revealing heretofore officially denied details about US actions vis-a-vis Ukraine— from the building of multiple CIA facilities there to the CIA organizing and training the Ukrainian military to attack Russia, to the 2022 peace deal that would have prevented the destruction of Ukraine that was stopped by the Biden administration and the Brits, the American MIC runs US foreign policy.
With the preponderance of US foreign aid to Israel being redeposited into the bank accounts of the American MIC, the MIC benefits in excess of Israel from it. This basic fact complicates the claim that the Israel lobby exists to benefit Israel. Even without US foreign aid that goes directly back to the MIC, Israel would still likely garner more aid than the Israel lobby spends to get it. However, the MIC wouldn’t. And as Benjamin Netanyahu stated (link above), any holdup of US weapons flows to Israel would end its genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.
With Zionist settlers in the West Bank now once again ‘clearing’ Palestinians by seizing their land and exiling them, the plan of Israel being revealed is the total extermination of the Palestinian people. Here the Wannsee Conference has bearing. It was the meeting of top Nazis in 1942 to plan the systematic extermination (‘final solution’) of European Jews as WWII was underway, illustrating that the most hateful acts in human history have come in the form of powerful political actors calmly planning the extermination of entire peoples. With Israel now exterminating the Palestinian people, history has come full circle. The persecuted are now the persecutors. That the US is funding and arming the effort makes it the ultimate state actor in this process of genocide.
Chart: AIPAC expenditures to influence US elections were converted to yearly amounts and multiplied by the number of years of data for US foreign aid to Israel to quantify the difference. Grossing up the AIPAC expenditures came to $6 billion and change, versus $280 billion in US foreign aid to Israel. While this is a rough estimate, the purpose was to scale the relative difference, not to develop a precise estimate of AIPAC expenditures. To the extent that this estimate is correct, Israel has received $50 in foreign aid for every $1 AIPAC has spent to get it. Sources: CRF, opensecrets.org, Urie.
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A question about “aid”
I have not read how much in dollars the US has supplied to Israel for the current war. Does anyone know?
Is this aid a loan that Israel has to pay back or a gift which they don’t have to pay back?
I guess the same question applies to Ukraine.
Thx
It has long been common for US aid to Israel – especially emergency military aid – to start as loans but those “loans” are later paid by some subsequent Bill which passes Congress with strong bipartisan support.
As always, Rob Urie makes a compelling statement of inconvenient truths. If only the electorate could tolerate inconvenience :-(
Given public obsession with presidential politics, I especially appreciate Urie’s emphasis upon the corruption of Congress. Since the assassination of FDR, presidents have been puppets*. It is Congress that makes the laws that (war) business pays them to make. Presidents merely execute these laws, with greater or lesser ferocity.
*Like Pinocchio, dim Dwight learned to talk, but too late. JFK listened, and look what happened to him.
FDR is actually not far off, considering his movement( 4th term ), was actively smothered in Chicago, as the MIC appointed their boy Truman as his VP through skullduggery.
U.S. Aid to Isreal in 4 Charts
I guess it boils down to a relevent/trusted source. Not sure if the above qualifies or not.
I’ve made the same points repeatedly over the years and am always treated to something like this;
To which I answered;
Today’s post is much more direct in making the point that I hinted at concerning the governments of Great Britain, and the USA;
His name was Jamaal Bowman
Just as the proverbial “if you shoot at the king, you better not miss…”….
if you poke the IS lobby, you better delivery great constituent servicss, show you face at constituent town halls, keep your voters happy, etc.
Did Jamaal do that? i honestly don’t know.
House primaries typically are so low-turnout, it doesn’t take much for highly motivated deep pockets to organize motivated voters to defeat an incumbent
I guess that explains his behavior in this video I just ran across: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xqrz-IN_0KQ
It’s from a couple days before he lost the primary. Not sure if dropping all the f-bombs was really the best look for a sitting US Congressman, but maybe I’m just old and out of touch.
Video is from a right wing source so probably edited to make both Bowman and AOC look as bad as possible, but ranting and raving in front of a pretty small crowd doesn’t look good. So many of our politicians on both sides of the aisle have the gravitas of Krusty the Clown.
Thanks for the essay but surely saying it’s all about the weapons industry is much too narrow. Didn’t someone say “the banks own this place” and then there’s the real estate lobby, the pharma lobby, the hospital lobby, the oil lobby etc. You could say all of these are in opposition to the best interests of the “people lobby” of 330 million that are supposed to be in charge. But if these foreign lobbies are bribing Congress to act in a way that is contrary to US national security and safety then it takes on a more sinister dimension. The real estate lobby isn’t going to get us all blown up in a nuclear war. Whereas Israel or Ukraine could do just that. There was a time when we were safe behind our two oceans but when the ICBMs come flying over the North Pole those won’t mean much. Our corrupt Congress are now threatening our safety and that of the world.
After WW2 they changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department and the conceit was that yes the MIC would continue to pour out weapons but peace was the goal. That didn’t last long however because power rather than peace is always the goal unless more rational minds are able to step in. And those have never been in shorter supply.
> After WW2 they changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department
In Germany that was always the case: Reichswehr, Bundeswehr etc.
<After WW2 they changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department
Not so much changed the name; rather forced a merger of War and Navy Departments and split off Army Air Corps. So created an additional tier of bureaucracy, which then begat its own "defense agencies".
>BlackRock — No Compromise with Evil. Allied to Israel’s Weapons Industry
Along the same subject:
BlackRock has extensive investments in companies closely allied to Israel’s arms industry. It has a 7.4% stake in Lockheed Martin, a defence contractor that has played a critical role in arming the Israeli military. This is why Lockheed has been accused of complicity in the barbaric genocide in Gaza which is now in its eighth month. The CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink, is known to be a staunch supporter of Israel in its colossal massacre of Palestinians
https://www.globalresearch.ca/blackrock-no-compromise-evil/5860878
Thank you sir! I will dig into this in earnest, at length. Also, of interest from Lee Fang and Jack Poulson:
Israeli Documents Show Expansive Covert U.S. Influence Campaign
Thank you, Yves.
Readers may be interested in and not surprised by https://www.declassifieduk.org/how-israel-funds-uk-parliamentary-staff/.
The main donors to Labour are Zionist, including apartheid SA sanctions busters. One of them, a sanctions buster, has placed his son as leader of Labour’s student wing.
It’s not just Craig Murray and George Galloway calling out the lobby. Former Tory politician and lobby target, Alan Duncan, has, too. Threats from the lobby to Duncan’s safety were ignored and swiftly swept under the carpet by PM Theresa May, whose husband works with a friend at their employer’s Paddington HQ and is involved with national security related investments.
Thanks Colonel. I instantly had to search for a song that was the UK “B side” to the Chicken Song by Spitting Image when we were not afraid to call out apartheid etc.
I’ve never met a nice South African. British humour at its finest. Warning. Just about every warning I can give!
Can I just qualify that we are talking about ‘white’ south Africans, in which case I agree.
(Keep up the good work Yves!)
Jamal Bowman was a mediocrity considered a safe vote for Wall Street and the MIC. When he got uppity and objected to the Gaza massacre, AIPAC unseated him as a warning to others in Congress. Americans have normalized the corruption of Congress, and this has resulted in the slow poisoning of the nation by reckless militarists empowered by the MIC. Unless the CEOs of the non-defense corporations wake up, their companies will be seriously harmed by the next neocon fiasco: war with China.
The history of Germany and Japan in the last century shows that when militarists take over a government capitalists profit handsomely – until the outbreak of disastrous hostilities. The U.S. is undergoing the same process, and its end may well involve being on the receiving end of nuclear weapons.
So basically Ukraine and Israel are in the same boat.
Zelensky and Netanyahu do seem to be the begger prince and the begger king.
Unfortunately I don’t think this is cynical enough.
That the MIC is really just the trophy wife of the banks.
All that money is public debt backing large amounts of private wealth.
The military is just the only tool in the toolbox when Washington feels the need to Do Something.
The long term problem being that turning brown people to pink mist is not an effective long term investment.
Even if it gives the alpha males their jollies and lets the nerds think they are Masters of the Universe.
As always, Follow the Money.
Urie presents a well-documented and concise statement of how the Clinton/Gingrich dismantlement of the ethical framework of the New Deal in favor of neoliberal “markets” in which everything (and everybody) has a “price” opened the floodgates to open corruption, particularly because of 8 years of Shrub (the little Bush) war-profiteering. All branches of the U.S. government now work directly for the Military-Industrial-Finance Complex and not vice-versa. This is Inverted Totalitarianism in a nutshell.
The genocidal wars in “Ukraine” and Palestine/“Israel” are simply vessels for the looting — scaled-up from the successful experiments in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. We inconvenient “deplorables” and “woke-sters” must be robbed of our economic and personal security in favor of hoarding by Our Billionaire Overlords via the Military-Industrial-Finance Complex. This isn’t capitalism; it’s feudalism.
Looks like the world is entering a period of history where actually winning the war is important rather than extracting the maximum profit for whatever overpriced late and semi- obsolete product manufactured by the American MIC. Maybe Israel should form a working relationship with the Russian Federation Military Industrial Complex
“…This difference between the thesis of Mearsheimer / Walt and the argument made here may seem small, but it is crucial. With most US aid to Israel actually going to the American MIC, it can’t actually be claimed to be aid to Israel without a more robust accounting of the broader political economy embedded in the relationship…”
Thank you Mr. Urie, that is crystal clear to me.
Some say the Destruction of Iraq was all for Israel. That claim is quickly debunked by simply asking “cui bono?” Who pocketed the trillions spent on GWOT, Iraq, Afghanistan etc.? It was not Israel.
Also, the institutional corruption enables unlimited political bribery in the first place. Congress is bought and paid for by the Five Families of the Oligarchy (actually six): MICIMATT (MIC) BigFinance, BigOil, BigMedia/Tech, BigPharma; BigAg. In addition to MICIMATT, we can see that other “families” (epistemic communities) of the oligarchy also benefit as well.
I still see many people claim that it’s all Israel/The Lobby and that the US oligarchy/US gov. is hijacked and victimized. That’s a comforting and convenient claim: the assumption is that Congress is not corrupt and it’s only a few “bad apples” like The Lobby that corrupt us. That looks like an incredibly naive assessment that ignores most of the history of US foreign policy and also ignores flagrant corruption, ignores geopolitical/geostrategic factors.
Also, a point prof. Hudson makes: The US (and UK) are willing to fight until the last Ukrainian, last Palestinian and last Israeli. Some largely ignore the precarious geographical (and very strategic) location that Israel occupies. The US/UK enjoy the “splendid isolation” of geography, while Israel can be sacrificed if necessary.
Forgive my naivete but how is the location of Israel of strategic importance to the USA?
If it is about the control of Middle East Oil, why does the USA not grab the Middle East oil countries and control them directly?
The USA could unfurl the “bring democracy and human rights” banner prior to the invasion of those countries as a cover.
How does supporting Israel help the USA from a resource or world prestige standpoint?
As I recall, the loaded cost of Iraq/Afghanistan was about $8.8 Trillion.
That is a lot of expenditure that could have been used to control Saudi Arabia/Kuwait/UAE directly.
Installing and supporting a regionally disliked government in the middle east seems like a bad tactic if one wants to influence/control those surrounding countries that actually have the oil.
If Israel were evacuated and its land handed back to the Palestinians, one could suggest the Middle East would continue to sell their oil on the world market.
From Truman’s secretary of state former General George Marshall Wikipedia entry
“As Secretary of State, Marshall strongly opposed recognizing the newly formed state of Israel. Marshall felt that if the state of Israel was declared, a war would break out in the Middle East (which it did when the 1948 Arab–Israeli War began one day after Israel declared independence). Marshall saw recognizing the Jewish state as a political move to gain American Jewish support in the upcoming election, in which Truman was expected to lose to Thomas E. Dewey. He told President Truman in May 1948, “If you [recognize the state of Israel] and if I were to vote in the election, I would vote against you.” However, Marshall refused to vote in any election as a matter of principle.”
If you look at the various pinch points; once the canal was in, Mahan’s pinch-points were more up in the Persian Gulf & down the Horn, as we’re seeing? But, greater Israel conveniently consolidates everything?
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2020/1/13/us-military-presence-in-the-middle-east-and-afghanistan
https://theintercept.com/2023/10/27/secret-military-base-israel-gaza-site-512/
https://www.axios.com/2023/10/31/american-troops-middle-east-israel-palestine
“If it is about the control of Middle East Oil, why does the USA not grab the Middle East oil countries and control them directly?”
The US tried that in Iraq and it failed terribly.
On the contrary, the Destruction of Iraq was a GREAT SUCCESS for the MICIMATT as this article indirectly alludes. Want a piece of the action?
https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/industrials/defense-stocks/
But the USA had some long time control of some Middle East oil via the installation of the Shah of Iran .
That left a host of problems when it collapsed.
One can wonder how much better off the USA would have been if it simply followed a practice of “we don’t care who owns the oil, just that they sell it to us.
It appears to me that all oil bearing countries, of all stripes, (democracies, military dictatorships), around the world, are willing to sell their oil on the world market.
Furthermore, if the USA had gone on a “restricted oil” diet, that could have helped prod the USA populace into some early positive actions on resource shortages/climate change.
Did you read this article? By your rhetorical questions it appears not. Mr. Urie’s article makes it pretty clear. You do not address my main points either.
The US has installed dictatorships and supports highly unpopular regimes, a perusal of the history of US and British foreign policy makes that clear.
The US already controls the oil in the middle east via dictatorships and support of non elected govts. Besides, forcing the use of the USD for oil purchases by all is control. The support for Israel is a reminder to the neighboring countries that the US power will strike if any of these countries get out of line.
Part of what came to light with Iran/Contra was that Israel was a chief sales outlet for the MIC. They could sell weaponry to countries the US theoretically could not if weapons were likely to be used for purposes forbidden by US law.
Israeli purchases go beyond use of foreign aid received. Israel profits from sales of arms vended on behalf of the MIC. Moreover Israel’s arms industry is an extension of the US’s MIC.
US “inability” to supply Ukraine to the level demanded by Zelensky, for example, is not so much the incapacity of the MIC to produce weaponry, as that doing so would cut into existing markets. Plus, revenue from such is hard cash, not the iffy stuff of loans that will have to be repaid from liquidation of national assets.
Good point. And of course this is all in USD. Israel supported US/UK ally, Apartheid South Africa, and also helps out in other places as well
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2003/6/5/israels-latin-american-trail-of-terror
Breaking news.
The Supreme Court just handed down a ruling that gutted the federal law that criminalizes
donors giving money to politicians in exchange for favors. The 6 to 3 Snyder ruling effectively legalizes bribery. The ruling was engineered by conservative justices who have accepted gifts from billionaires as they have been ruling in favor of billionaire’s interests.
We can only expect more of the same corruption!
I would say that “unlimited political bribery” and de-facto oligarchy was formalized even earlier:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/03/carter-says-campaign-finance-2010-citizens-united-ruling-legalised-bribery
https://theintercept.com/2015/07/30/jimmy-carter-u-s-oligarchy-unlimited-political-bribery/
Re; Diana Johnstone’s article, linked in Mr Urie’s article, on Consortium. She quoted my comment in her follow up article and implied somehow that ideological “Marxists” use imperialism/colonialism to explain Israel. (I’m paraprhasing) https://consortiumnews.com/2024/03/12/the-debate-over-israel-as-us-aircraft-carrier/
However, one does not have to be a so-called Marxist, radical leftist, to be an anti-imperialist. Sam Clemens/Mark Twain and the US Anti-Imperialist league of the late 19th century were not Marxists, for example. More recently, Ron Paul is an anti-imperialist as well. We certainly cannot call him an ideologically hidebound Marxist – quite the contrary. He may be anti-authoritarian, but his economics are firmly right-wing.
“Missing is that corporations within the MIC can coerce Congress into starting wars and destroying nations through legal bribery.”
An alternative interpretation would be that our modern U.S. state (post-1947) rather than particular corporations, first initiates the doctrines that end up starting wars as well as destroying or containing particular nations, with many of the benefits of such particular U.S. state initiatives then flowing to designated U.S. corporate interests.
An excellent example is the policy of containment first articulated by George Kennan, who was the initial head of the Policy Planning staff of the Dept. of State in the late 1940s. However his policy planning staff in the State Department never made a move without the CIA (dirty tricks and plausible deniability) as well as the Department of Defense also being notified and involved in such foreign policy initiatives (like overthrowing governments, assassinations, destabilization campaigns etc.)
Just think of what went on in U.S. foreign policy, say, between 1948 and 1975, when there was no oversight of the intelligence community (not that the oversight created after 1975 made any difference)!
To be fair to Kennan, what he argued for was to reach entente with Soviet Union by confronting it if the need be, to force Soviet Union to negotiate. What he missed completely, and why his argument was totally misused, is that it was the USA who was pushing for eternal conflict, not Soviet Union.
There were basically two simultaneous developments going on in post-war USA politics. To avoid another depression USA needed other countries to buy stuff (but those countries were war torn and had no dollars or means to get dollars) so foreign policy was taken over by Wall Street and simultaneously the possession of atomic weapons caused US to morph from federated semi-democracy to a security state with powerful (as in the only person with authority to launch) president (technically) in control of a growing security apparatus.
Both of those traits needed an external enemy to sustain themselves.
What is the genesis of these doctrines that you refer to? Prior to WWI, Woodrow Wilson was publicly lusting after then Russian (soon Soviet) resources.
US General Smedley Butler wrote War Is a Racket in 1935 claiming that US foreign policy was 100% imperialist looting. Having led the effort, he was in a position to know.
In a quote since disappeared from the internet, LBJ stated around 1965 that he couldn’t end the (Vietnam) war because ‘his friends were making too much money from it.’
At the outset of the Vietnam War documentary Hearts and Minds, Dwight Eisenhower can be seen stating that Vietnam was important to the US for its natural resources, tungsten in particular.
Over this history the US gave doctrinal reasons (domino theory, ‘freedom,’ mutual defense, defeating communism), to explain US foreign policy.
Note that the current conflicts in Ukraine and Israel can be, and are, explained in doctrinal terms— ‘containing Russia, ‘right of self defense,’ ‘self-determination,’ that only work with carefully selected starting points.
The case of Israel isn’t precisely the same as that of Ukraine (Johnstone’s argument). But there are economic reasons (the point of the essay) that complicate, if not outright contradict, the doctrinal explanations.
The US ‘invaded’ Ukraine in 2013 – 2014 when it ousted Yanukovych, after which the CIA built multiple facilities in Ukraine as it built the Ukrainian military to attack Russia. The New York Times eventually wrote this story, even while misleading about the US coup.
What is the point of the US subsequently claiming that Russia unilaterally ‘invaded’ Ukraine with its Special Military Operation? The explanation may be locally true— given a carefully selected starting point, but it is a lie given that Ukraine (and Georgia) are the final pieces to the US totally surrounding Russia on its Western border?
With respect to Israel, Iran was overthrown in 1953 under the ruse that the elected president was a ‘communist,’ or sympathetic to communism. This was a doctrinal explanation (stopping communism) given for straightforward imperialist looting.
Until recently, the only known nuclear reactor that Iran possessed was sold to it by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld under Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ program. Iran had filled a role similar to that which Israel fills today before it rebelled under the US-installed Shah’s fascist army and told the Americans to take a hike.
So, it is certainly possible to argue doctrinal reasons for US foreign policy— that is at least part of the reason for creating them. But economic interests have been the constant behind them.
Thanks Rob for this blog. Thanks Yves for posting it. Most people in Germany and other NATO countries think that the US is preventing Russia from invading their countries. They’re cutting their own throats by going along with sanctions on Russian NG and trade and paying several times for US LNG.
The second chart showing the countries recieving aid from US in the past 50 years or so, Egypt comes immediately after Israel, on the second place.
I would dare claim that all those 150USD plus billions are in fact to be tabulated under Israel as well, since that money just buys Egypt’s aquiescence and good attitude towards Israel.
Julian Assange gave the best analysis of what is going on over 10 years ago.
He said that all these wars are just money laundering operations by the US Militiary-Industrial-Complex, which is basically stealing US taxpayer funds by funneling them into forever wars that the MIC starts and then keeps going for the money.
I wonder how many of the US tech oligarchs running social media and search engines, such as the boy wonder, have shares in the US weapons companies.
Shame that the people of the US don’t see their taxes ever come back to them in roads and schools and hospitals and jobs.
And now the MIC is putting in place laws to steal US children. Ukraine has proven to the MIC that they can sacrifice all the young people to a futile war while making billions from guns and tanks and jets and ammo. The MIC now also knows that they can kill as many civilians as they like with no real consequences, courtesy of Gaza.
Personally, I think US oligarchs and those who work for them are all monsters.
I have just read that Gallant has vowed to “turn Lebanon back to the Stone Age” if Hezbollah enters into hostilities with Israel.
Curtis E. LeMay lives…!
Works for, or controls?
The last 6 months or so, the Israeli ‘lobby’ has revealed much of its power over the US, and other western governments, surprising and shocking many over the depth and extent of its reach.
Two features of this have struck me. Firstly, the Biden regime’s utter failure to stop the genocide, instead it funded and fueled it with money and weapons – despite public opinion. And secondly, the political hysteria amplified by the mainstream media about antisemiticism, accusing anyone and everyone who spoke up against the atrocities in Gaza as antisemitic, when in fact they were (mostly) nothing of the kind.
Antisemiticism, like everything else, has been weaponised. This isn’t new, but is now much more visible than before. And much much worse.