On July 14, 2026, former CIA officer Andrew Bustamante went on the PBD Podcast and claimed that Israel is a bigger threat to the United States than China in the realm of influence and propaganda. Why? Because Israel is “more capable” than China or Russia at these operations, and “more difficult for us to track.”

His conclusion was that Israel can’t be trusted like other U.S. allies and needs to be “kept at arm’s length.”

But when you look closely at the facts, Bustamante’s own logic makes the opposite case. Israel isn’t the ally America needs to worry about. It’s one of the most transparent, most restrained allies the U.S. has.

Everyone Runs Influence Campaigns. The Question Is How.

Foreign influence in Washington isn’t unique to any one country. As Vice President JD Vance has acknowledged, plenty of U.S. allies spend heavily to shape American policy, media, and public opinion. The real question isn’t whether a country tries to influence the U.S., but how much, how openly, and toward what end.

Take Qatar. It is routinely ranked among the top foreign spenders on U.S. influence, often trailing only China. Doha built one of the largest foreign lobbying operations in Washington history, hiring 31 firms registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) — with an eye-popping 71% of them headquartered right in D.C. That’s a direct pipeline into the people who write American policy, cover American news, and run American institutions.

Qatar is also the single largest foreign donor to U.S. higher education, having funneled somewhere between $6.3 and $6.6 billion — and likely more — into American universities since the early 2000s. That figure dwarfs what Israel, China Saudi Arabia, or other countries have disclosed.

Now compare that to Israel. Israel spends far less on influence operations than Qatar, and it does so in the open. Its lobbying activity is registered under FARA, and that information is publicly available for anyone to see. 

Even AIPAC — a pro-Israel lobbying group that is entirely American-run and has no formal ties to the Israeli government — is arguably the most scrutinized lobbying organization in the country. Every move it makes is picked apart in the press and by watchdog groups.

This isn’t the quiet, multi-billion-dollar university influence campaign Qatar has run for two decades. It’s not even in the same category.

China Is Playing an Entirely Different Game

If you want to see what a real influence threat looks like, look at China. Beijing runs an expansive, multi-layered influence operation against the United States, orchestrated largely through the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department (UFWD).

Here’s what that actually looks like on the ground:

Flooding American feeds. Through platforms like TikTok (owned by ByteDance) and WeChat (owned by Tencent), along with coordinated fake-account networks such as the “Spamouflage” operation posing as American voters, China spreads disinformation, deepens political divisions, and gathers data on millions of U.S. users. The risks range from election interference to mass surveillance of the Chinese-American community itself.

Targeting the Chinese diaspora. The UFWD runs “overseas Chinese work” programs that reach into Chinese-American communities through hometown associations, cultural groups, and organizations that appear independent but are quietly tied to the Party. These networks have organized things like Chinese flag-raising ceremonies at U.S. city halls — including in Philadelphia in 2017, 2019, and again in 2025.

The broader goal is to pressure diaspora critics into silence, build “elite capture” through business relationships, and gain local political influence.

Secret police stations on American soil. China has operated more than 100 unofficial “service stations” around the world, several inside the United States, including in New York City. Officially, they exist to help Chinese citizens abroad renew documents. In practice, they’ve been used to monitor and harass dissidents and pressure them to return to China. In 2022, the FBI raided one such operation tied to Manhattan’s American Changle Association, resulting in arrests. The Department of Justice has since charged dozens of Chinese officers with running transnational repression campaigns on U.S. soil, a direct assault on American sovereignty and free speech.

Stealing American technology. Through cyber espionage, insider recruitment, and talent programs like the Thousand Talents Plan, China has spent decades draining U.S. innovation. These programs recruit scientists and engineers — often, but not always, ethnically Chinese — with high salaries and fully funded labs back in China, frequently without disclosing the arrangement to their U.S. employers. Harvard professor Charles Lieber’s prosecution is one high-profile example. The scale is staggering: estimates put annual U.S. losses from Chinese IP theft somewhere between $225 billion and $600 billion. That theft has directly fueled China’s military modernization and its “Made in China 2025” ambitions.

Reshaping American classrooms. Confucius Institutes once operated on more than a hundred U.S. college campuses, officially teaching Chinese language and culture. In practice, they came under fire for CCP influence over curricula and self-censorship on sensitive subjects like Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. By 2023, 104 of 118 U.S. Confucius Institutes had shut down amid academic freedom concerns and new restrictions on Defense Department funding — though many quietly reemerged under new names and partnerships.

Fueling America’s fentanyl crisis. China remains the primary source of the precursor chemicals that supply Mexican cartels manufacturing fentanyl for the U.S. market. Even after 2019 restrictions on fentanyl itself, the precursor chemicals keep flowing, openly sold on Chinese platforms. The result is tens of thousands of American overdose deaths every year.

The Real Takeaway

Line up Israel’s influence footprint next to China’s, and there’s no comparison. One country registers its lobbying and spends a fraction of what other allies do. The other runs secret police stations on American soil, steals hundreds of billions in intellectual property every year, and floods American communities with the chemicals fueling a deadly overdose crisis.

If Israel truly possessed the kind of world-class influence capability Bustamante describes — and simply chose not to unleash it on the United States the way China has — that is proof of restraint and proof of trust. It’s proof that Israel has consistently acted like exactly what it claims to be: America’s ally, not America’s adversary.

Sources

PBD Podcast, Joe Rogan Experience, Washington Examiner, Open Secrets, Quincy Institute, Newsweek, House of Representatives, House of Representatives, DOJ, CSIS, FBI, GAO, Taipei Times, NPR, WSJ, ISD, NBR