The conservative case for foreign aid

There’s nothing fiscally conservative about starving our foreign policy budget of a billion dollars today only to spend a trillion dollars years later in armed conflict. Every day, the State Department leads operations that strengthen our security. Diplomats and development experts support counterterrorism efforts in countries like Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Programs to destroy caches of small arms, shoulder-fired missiles and mines deprive our enemies of the tools they might use to attack us, our allies and our partners. Teaching foreign military officers American values and skills creates additional defense capacity so that we can fight together, with burdens shared equitably…

Our global presence does something else: It creates jobs. Through our contributions to international financial institutions like the World Bank, we don’t just lift the economies of low-income countries but we open markets for American businesses. That’s one reason why Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has elevated economic statecraft to a top priority, recognizing the connections between promoting our businesses abroad and creating jobs at home. We’ve got a tax code that spans more than 72,000 pages and a federal budget of $3.8 trillion—surely we can find enough tax loopholes to close and wasteful spending to cut in order to preserve the $57 billion required for our global investment…

In addition to these strategic efforts, foreign assistance programs that vaccinate children against polio, engage at-risk youth in Central America, give young girls in Afghanistan the opportunity to go to school, or provide HIV/AIDS treatments to millions in sub-Saharan Africa do more than just ease suffering and increase opportunity around the world. They also promote core U.S. national security interests by stabilizing regions that could otherwise become incubators for radicalism.