The Strategic Case for USAID

 There are many Americans who believe we should look after ourselves first, before we look after others.  I have heard this argument all of my life.  While I acknowledge that balance is required and that our government does need to look after its citizens, people who have this argument are generally unfamiliar with the poor we help in foreign countries and are also unaware of the strategic advantages of foreign aid.

 

Since many supporters of President Musk and his side-kick trump don’t concern themselves with core Christian values such as mercy, compassion, love and giving despite the fact many go to church each week, I will focus on the strategic importance of foreign aid.

 

When USAID was founded by Kennedy in 1961 to counter the Soviet Union, Kennedy realized that the Soviet Union and Communism was gaining traction in poorer countries.  This is because the philosophy of Marxism appealed to the poor, just as it had in Russia and China.  Communism appeared to offer a political movement that cared for the poor and which aimed to raise the living standards of the poor.  At the time, this traction was so great, it seemed to many that the red tide, as it was called, was unstoppable and inevitable.  Back then, we saw insurgencies in poorer countries such as the Shining path in Peru, MPLA in Angola which eventually ruled the country, Khmer Rouge in Cambodia which led to the Pol Pot massacres, and of course Cuba.  Their big brothers of China and Russia promised the poor in those countries a paradise of equality and the poor fell for it.  These movements all have one thing in common, which is that the people who ruled in these countries did not pay enough attention to their poor and did not provide their poor with the basic necessities of life.  And so their poor gravitated toward these leftist movements.

 

But Communism was not alone.  Osama bin-Laden was involved in building infrastructure projects in Sudan as well as some hospitals.  Al-Qaeda gained a foothold precisely because the rulers were unable or unwilling to adequately look after their poor.

 

And let me tell you, if you knew how poor the people in the Sudan in general are, you would understand.  I can say with confidence there is not a single one of the 334 million Americans who is as poor as they are.  Whether it is the French Revolution, or the Russian Revolution of 1917, or the Chinese revolution run by Chairman Mao, the seeds of these revolutions stem from the unwillingness or inability to attend to the poor.

 

Thus, when we have boots on the ground, and care for the poor, we not only alleviate their suffering, but we highlight a system of government that is able to care for its own and reach out to help others.  Most of the people we help wish they were as lucky as us.  They wished they lived in a land governed by a system that provides for its people, and provides some type of stability and provides pathways of opportunity for themselves or their children to rise out of the poverty that surround them.  Foreign aid is about promoting an ideology.  The fulfilment of that ideology may prove elusive, but it points people in the direction we want them to go.  And because the poor look upon us with more favor than they might otherwise have toward us, it allows us to invest in their countries and gain strategic footholds.

 

Closing down USAID works against this.  China is now in a position to move in and gain all of these things so that the people of those lands will soon believe that a strong authoritarian government like that led by President Xi is a better way forward.  And when this happens, we have returned to square one, back to 1961 when Kennedy sought to counter this very thing.