Foreign Affairs and Foreign Aid

Too many of our presidents and top foreign policy advisers, from both parties, seem to want to go down in history as great world statesmen and be seen as new Churchills. We need national leaders with more humility and should never be anxious to go to war. Evan Thomas of Newsweek wrote this past summer that leaders “have gone to extraordinary lengths to be seen as Churchill, not Chamberlain.” Chamberlain was the British Prime Minister who signed a peace agreement with Hitler in Munich in the 1930s. Mr. Thomas wrote that, “It is important to understand why the Munich analogy is almost necessarily flawed. In the 1990s, President George H.W. Bush compared Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to Hitler and President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, argued that allowing Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic to commit genocide in the Balkans was to invite ‘another Munich.’ But the only real Hitler was Hitler. Saddam and Milosevic were murderers, but at most local menaces.”

Because those who favor foreign aid found out years ago that it was very unpopular, most of our aid is now done through the Defense Department. However, almost every federal department or agency spends big money in other countries so they can feel more important and powerful and have larger budgets. We are spending many billions in this way each year. The problem is that we are borrowing much of this money. Anyone who opposes this wasteful spending is looked down upon and labeled as an “isolationist.” Yet we could have trade and tourism, and cultural and educational exchanges, and help out during humanitarian crises without spending several hundred billions 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. A very good and detailed example of this is in a nationwide best-seller by New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer called All the Shah’s Men. 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 a few months ago 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.”

A huge chunk of the debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, our two mortgage giants, is owned by foreign governments, their central banks, and their citizens. The total comes to about $1.5 trillion, an astounding and incomprehensible figure. The three largest owners are China ($376 billion), Japan ($228 billion), and Russia ($75 billion). Peter Costello, the longest-serving treasurer in Australia’s history, was quoted in the Washington Times as saying, “We now know who has the risk: the American taxpayer.” At the same time, some major U.S. banks may only recover a small portion of their investments in the two firms. Brad Setzer of the Council on Foreign Relations, a very liberal organization which would, I am sure, favor taking care of foreigners first, said: “I suspect this is the first case where foreign central banks exercised their leverage as creditors to push the U.S. Government to make a policy decision that protected their interests.”