Meanwhile, the U.S. aid program has been progressively gutted and the remaining portion increasingly concentrated on the Middle East. In 1968, Israel and Egypt combined received less than 3% of U.S. aid. That percentage soared as a result of Kissingerian diplomacy, reaching new heights after the Camp David agreement. When the current Congress finishes its work, two countries, Israel and Egypt, may account for as much as 75% of U.S. aid. Obviously, such priorities mean a good deal of U.S. influence in the Middle East but much less elsewhere.
As for threats, Morganthau's last category, these are discarded in a post-Cold War world, where trying to use force as a diplomatic tool does not mean raising the defense budget but deploying troops to messy internal conflicts--which every public-opinion poll suggests Americans will not support, and, in most cases, should not support.
