Foreign Aid Pays Dividends

Foreign aid has never had much of a constituency among Americans, partly because most people have little idea of what it really costs and what it achieves. Polls consistently reveal a grossly exaggerated sense of the foreign operations budget’s size, often inflating actual costs 15-fold or more.

The truth is that overseas operations of all kinds, from running embassies and consulates to funding development projects, amount to about 1% of the federal budget. This isn’t a giveaway. It’s something that contributes significantly to the national interest. Many in the public may not understand that, but Congress certainly should. Alas, it doesn’t.

President Clinton vetoed the $12.6 billion foreign operations bill this week because it was wholly inadequate, providing 15% less than the bare-bones amount requested. The attack on the funding measure was led by a clutch of congressional leaders who apparently glory in provincialism. House Republican leader Dick Armey of Texas boasts that he hasn’t set foot out of the country since 1986 and has no use for a passport. Rep. Sonny Callahan (R-Ala.), who chairs the Appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations, opines that every foreign leader “wearing a turban on his head” who visits the White House walks out with a promise of aid. Talk like that may raise a yuck in Alabama, but it makes the world’s richest and most powerful nation look like a rube abroad.

Congress this year cut $300 million from the program to dismantle Russian nuclear and chemical weapons. It reduced by more than one-third funding for global development banks that encourage small-scale capitalism in Latin America and Africa. It refused to meet the U.S. commitment to underwrite the Wye River accord between Israel and the Palestinians. Each of these programs aims to achieve a safer and more stable world.

Clinton sees the bill he vetoed as evidence of a new isolationism. It’s more indicative of a self-satisfied ignorance in a Congress that is incapable of connecting the dots between U.S. security and what goes on in the rest of the world. Surely we deserve better than this.