Totals since 2016
Country Total Spending
China $562,676,323
Japan $504,111,211
Liberia $432,968,270
Saudi Arabia $421,890,448
Marshall Islands $382,012,024
South Korea $363,237,700
Bahamas $293,205,139
United Arab Emirates $269,529,107
Qatar $269,260,794
Israel $215,168,616
So for small countries UAE and Qatar(no surprise here, they just gifted 1 billion airplane to Trump)
This excludes US based groups lobbying for Israeli interests, which does not count under official spending by Israel, so it is not an accurate representation of the lobbying effort in the interests of Israel.
That seems like the categorically correct thing to do, for the same reason that (for example) a domestic Korean-American nonprofit that lobbies for Korean interests doesn’t get counted as foreign money or influence.
(Perhaps it should be! But it should be consistent, whatever it is.)
> Perhaps it should be! But it should be consistent, whatever it is.
Agreed. Any lobbying that centers on the interests of a foreign country should IMO count as foreign lobbying, I have no problem in including Korean-Americans, Kenyan-Americans etc. in that too.
Well, so here's the question: what counts as the interests of a foreign country? AIPAC's entire lobbying stance is that its positions are mutually beneficial to both the US and Israel, and this is the stance that every other national/ethnic affinity group in the US uses as well.
Put another way: it seems very risky to allow the federal government to determine the propriety of political speech just because it happens to concern two (or more countries) at once.
The difference is the nature of the lobbying and the volume. Follow the rules.
An egregious, non-controversial example of things going poorly is NYC Mayor Adams and Turkey. He basically accepted bribes and favors from the Turkish government and their proxies for specific actions.
A “doing it right” example that wouldn’t have been controversial until recently is Denmark. They mostly focus on direct diplomatic policy lobbying, and leverage consultants to promote mostly tourism. Their affiliations are known and registered. Now they hire K-Street lobbyists to influence policy objectives re: Greenland, etc.
The difference is that when the papers found out about Adams being a crook… that didn’t turn into accusations of racism and fomenting sectarian hatred. In the AIPAC example, there will be a both a legitimate visceral response from Americans and astroturf from lots of prominent people.
I was adjacent to state level politics for a long time. The German, Korean and French economic development organizations would come around every now and again with promotional events coordinated with their embassy to promote partnerships and business opportunities. Sometimes they had lobbyists focused on general relationship building, more often for specific issues.
The Israeli ground game is different. American PACs affiliated with or specifically “not affiliated with, but always talking about” Israeli interests show up at every level of government - a good friend is a town board member of a big suburban town and they call on him, and he refuses the contributions so will likely get primaried.
The real difference is information awareness. There is a CRM somewhere the ground guys have access to, and relationships are cultivated and used. My buddy is being targeted becuase there’s a good chance he’ll be in the state legislature someday. There’s a pipeline to get targeted American politicians to tour Israel for whatever reason. When critical attention is focused on this stuff, the reaction is fast and painful for the media outlet or political actor.
The only thing close to this is China, who does similar stuff with a different playbook. They’ve been caught embedding agents of one sort or another in California and New York governments at a high level, as well as places like Florida or within government contractors with lower level people.
Note that we’ve purged the FBI counterintelligence division, so the brazenness of the “bad” stuff will get worse - nobody is watching.
These numbers are wrong. There is no possible way Liberia has spent 10% of its GDP on lobbying the US for the past 10 years. They just signed (May 2026) a lobbying contract for $1.2 million with a lobbying company in the US, which seems vastly more in proportion https://liberianinvestigator.com/liberia-ballard-partners-lo...
OpenSecrets laid off 30% of its staff due to financial problems [0] and I'm absolutely sure that site is AI generated. No idea what numbers are displayed there but no country can afford 10% of GDP for 10 years for influence in Washington.
Those numbers in no way indicate that Liberia spent 10% of its gdp lobbying the US. It looks like approximately 0.8%, which is still fantastically high
It works out to about 0.8% of Liberia's GDP. The Marshall Islands number works out to about 15% of the estimated value of the amount of financial assistance the US gives them.