Foreign Affairs and Foreign Aid
People who favor foreign aid will always say that it is only about one percent of our budget. This is very misleading.
Actually, about half of what the Defense Department does is foreign aid, building schools, bridges, power and water systems, training police and even farmers. Almost every other federal department and agency spends big money in other countries.
We really spend several hundred billion all over the world each year – money that we really cannot afford.
I am opposed to running and building other nations, and believe we need a more humble foreign policy.
We could have trade and tourism, and cultural and educational exchanges, and help out during humanitarian crises without spending several hundred billion each year that we do not have. The U.S. is the most generous nation in the world. Unfortunately, sometimes we are too generous for our own good.
Most of our spending in other countries has done us very little good because we have also taken sides and intervened in far too many religious, ethnic, and political disputes around the world.
Conservative syndicated columnist Steve Chapman summed it up best in this way:
“If there has been a flaw in U.S. foreign policy in recent years, it has not been an excess of disengagement, but the opposite: an irrepressible urge to use force for purposes that do not enhance our security but expose us to needless risk. The result has been that we find ourselves with more enemies, weakened influence, higher costs, greater strains on our military and less safety. After the Iraq debacle, you would think our leaders would be willing to undertake a fundamental examination of the long established and broad-based folly that made it possible. Not a chance.”
The U.S. has some type of military presence - often very large - in almost every country. Conservative Columnist Charley Reese wrote about the many problems this causes:
“Americans had better get shut of their imperial delusions and fast, because we are following the path of every empire that has ever existed toward bankruptcy. Do you really want high gas prices, food rationing, healthcare rationing and unbearable debt? What kind of standard of living do you think we can maintain with a collapsed education system, a broken infrastructure, a debilitated manufacturing sector and a debt-imploded failed economy…. One reason we are so in debt is that the brainless in our country have been paying for the defense of Europe and Japan ever since the end of World War II.”
Georgie Anne Geyer, a foreign policy columnist, wrote several years ago that Americans “will inevitably come to a point where they will see they have to have a government that provides services at home or one that seeks empire across the globe.”
