Fighting the Four Horsemen
The Military Utility of Foreign Aid
I don’t think I could ever be accused of being a bleeding heart on foreign policy. I’m an extremely loud champion of warbots, armament expansion, and anything else needed to deter and defeat the global rise of authoritarianism. I wrote a whole book about it. Just about the only time I get accused of being a softy is when I overfeed pets with treats because I just can’t say no to our furry friends. My business, and the business of many of this Substack’s readership, is the lawful application of violence or adjacent activities. And so it might surprise you about how much I care about the utility of foreign assistance and how critical it is to victory on the battlefield. It is for others to write about the critical need to protect our institutions (though every one should be defended), about whether USAID belongs at State or on its own, about how best to direct foreign aid to support national priorities. Most of these are normal policy debates, this case is not that. I certainly believe benevolent foreign assistance is part of being exceptionally American, of being a good world leader, and following a strong moral compass. But plenty of others have made that case, so allow me to make the utilitarian case.
Compared to the Federal budget, the foreign assistance (not including the arms trade, which is handled by DoD/State) budget is quite small. Since 2001, it has hovered around one percent. For most of the Cold War, we spent almost 5% at our peak and by 1989, we were at about .9%. In other words, foreign aid has remained largely flat compared to other federal expenditures. A majority of Americans believe we spend roughly a quarter of our budget on the rest of the world, that is flat out wrong. There’s a few reasons for this belief, I think some of it has to do with scaling things in billions when the median American salary is in the five figures and because it’s always easier to take political shots at money going overseas than it is at waste or even effective similar programs deployed at home because the poor country overseas doesn’t have a seat in Congress. It’s easy for folks to forget in DC that the money that’s played with is on a scale that 99.99% of Americans will never touch, and it’s their tax dollars. We as Americans are perpetually caught in a push-pull between the righteous sense to help others, and to also feel that DC is neglecting us. In most other countries, when someone on the other side of the country gets federal help, it’s a three hour drive. In the United States, it could be a whole continent away. So when we talk about foreign aid, it might as well be talking about another planet. I say all of this because it’s important to contextualize what I’m going to say next: that foreign assistance saves lives, especially American lives, thousands of miles away.
About 3/4 of foreign aid is spent on economic development, humanitarian assistance, and health, split relatively evenly. Economic development can be anything from digital banking support to rebuilding businesses after war so people get on with their lives and don’t keep fighting. Humanitarian assistance can most famously be thought of giving out food and water to starving people, usually in the form of rice grown by American farmers. And then there’s health: which goes to things like vaccination programs, basic clinics, and PEPFAR (the HIV/AIDS prevention program started under President Bush) which is lauded as one of America’s greatest contributions to humanity. Now, if you know your bible, you know that the four horsemen of the apocalypse are war, famine, plague, and death. Foreign aid directly fights three of them, the DoD fights the other one. And when foreign aid works well, it even prevents war from breaking out or escalating by reducing the conditions for conflict (like say, who gets control of the limited food or water). So yes, vaccination programs, clinics, early monitoring programs, humanitarian assistance to conflict zones and the impoverished parts of the world all do good work and they are both morally good and good for America. Growing global economies, healthy people, less conflict, all means American can invest more in itself in the long run and can trade and grow with an ever richer list of friends around the world. But let’s say you don’t buy any of that, what’s something that really hits home? Let’s talk about how it could save you or your son or daughter on the battlefield when the war still breaks out (because while foreign aid is helpful, it is not a panacea.)
Let’s say the day has finally come and the PLA is making the run for the beaches of Taiwan. It didn’t matter whether we committed to the fight or not, the PLA didn’t care and struck a carrier in the Western Pacific. We are at war. An F-35 goes down over the South China Sea while slinging anti-ship missiles into the enemy fleet. They bail out over any of a half-dozen countries who may not be involved in the war but whose governments may lean one way or another. Your eldest son or daughter is wounded and limping in the jungle, the authorities after them because they weren’t cleared to enter their territory and are afraid of CCP retaliation. Desperate, your son or daughter seeks refuge in the local fishing village and is given aid and a place to hide at great risk because the family they stumble upon remembers how USAID or other assistance saved their own kid from dying of a preventable disease, fed them after a typhoon, or helped their kid go to school. Meanwhile, the combat search and rescue team dispatched to recover you is tipped off to your location by a local who remembers how they helped her leave her abusive husband and start a small business through a digital banking grant program. Your son or daughter gets to come home because your government gave help when they didn’t have to do so. Foreign assistance doesn’t come with a 10X return like a Silicon Valley unicorn because sometimes the ROI isn’t always quantifiable. But if I tried to quantify it, I would say that American foreign assistance buys us good will by helping foreign families, so Americans get to be home with theirs.
At scale, these programs make whole governments, today or in a decade, friendlier to the United States, to democracy, to our way of life. They become our allies in war, they make trade deals with us, and they fight the bad guys when we cannot. Countries saved from plague or famine, democratized by an educated populace, liberated from poverty by investment, join us when it counts. We rebuilt Europe after WWII to fight the Soviets and spread of communism. By today’s politics, the Marshall Plan would be condemned as Marxist or woke. Today as we fight for influence against the Russians and Chinese, foreign aid and the investments we have made for decades stack the deck against the tyrants. There’s a reason the Russians and Chinese have long spewed propaganda against USAID and American foreign assistance and are gleeful at its potential demise. The stories of American kindness spread and build good will, they build favor, and they fight the brutality and subservience that Moscow and Beijing hope to spread. We build alliances that deter and defeat the bad guys because we build a network of good guys. We help people, we kill commies. That’s the job. You give up on one part of it, the other is much harder.
There are countless stories like those above where we saved lives or found bad guys because people recognized America as the good guys, even by the smallest action. Ending foreign assistance, slashing it significantly, or turning it into a pay-to-play game puts us all at risk. Does it always work? No, no program does. But it’s a small risk to take for democracy, peace, prosperity, and health.
One last note: if you really don’t believe the profound impact that small kindnesses can have on someone’s life that they would risk theirs for a stranger, then I don’t know what kind of life you’ve lived.
If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict or what happens when we retreat from the world, check out my novel, EX SUPRA, about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It’s even an audiobook now! It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! If you have any suggestions for topics for future articles, please send them my way on BlueSky @tonystark.bsky.social. And don’t forget to subscribe!