Just to add context to this comment - The US spends about $60b per year in aid to other countries. How much is wasted is another debate but it's probably a lot.
It's more like 50, and of that 50, probably 30 goes to middle eastern countries for strategic reasons and is only called 'aid' so it looks better on the balance sheet.
Military aid to Israel, making Israel the the only nuclear power in the Middle East in opposition to every other country there (they all support a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East), is not "Foreign Aid"; it is pure (misguided) self-interest.
Are there other instances of Foreign Aid that also align with self-interest? Sure; but calling the funding of a proxy military in the most resource-rich area of the world Foreign Aid is really stretching the semantics. Why not go ahead and classify the entire military budget as foreign aid, since we only ever do things with noble intentions?
The other large portion of "foreign aid" used to go to the dictatorship in Egypt...
It's not just Israel, we didn't make Israel a nuclear power (they built the nukes in the 60s using a french reactor design IIRC), and if the Saudis had nukes and Israel didn't, then their positions on a nuclear free middle east would be reversed.
What's not just Israel? I mentioned Egypt. The two make up the bulk of the foreign aid (or at least did before the Arab Spring; I haven't looked at it since then).
We don't know the details of Israel's nukes, but you are right that the Washington consensus is they developed them themselves.
The only thing preventing a nuclear-free Middle East is our veto in the UN.
Yeah, close enough. The key point though is that the figure includes military aid and even for non-military aid, most of it goes to strategically important states. Top 5 are Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan, before we finally get to purely humanitarian aid for Haiti at #6. Nigeria's got oil, or they wouldn't be getting any aid.
