>You make an interesting argument, though I cannot imagine how any foreign power would have a greater influence on politics than the existing farm lobby (, as i

>You make an interesting argument, though I cannot imagine how any foreign power would have a greater influence on politics than the existing farm lobby (, as is true both in the USA and Europe). Perhaps not, at least not in modern times. However, a powerful, even corrupt, farm lobby is preferable to a suzerain, which is what any third party who you rely on to feed your people would be. For the rest of your post, I agree most foreign aid is money not well spent, at least in the case of the US. But, that's only because most of the money spent by the US government is not well spent, because it is corrupt beyond redemption. It's not clear that propping up Saudi Arabia decreases the price of oil for the US. It's not clear that keeping Israel around as a destabilizing presence in the Middle East, decreases the price of oil for the US. Hell, it's not even all that clear to me that the Middle East is so strategically important when it comes to oil in the first place - we get more oil from Canada than from the ME, and Latin America as well, after all. Not to mention domestic production. It figures largely into the political calculus nonetheless - I never said American leaders were smart. Perhaps our actions in the ME are more about denying resources to others, than securing them for ourselves. Perhaps, more than anything, they are the result of a world power being run into decline by a pack of short-sighted fanatical xenophobic fools (and here, I am not referring to the American political establishment).