'Friendship' not the issue in providing foreign aid

In his speech to the U.N. General Assembly this week, President Donald Trump explained that he had directed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to review America's foreign aid budget. The President declared that in the future America would only give aid to our friends or nations that "like us."

Two weeks ago, on the anniversary of 9/11, former Congressman Lee Hamilton and former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, the original authors of the 9/11 Commission report, issued an updated report under the auspices of the U.S. Institute for Peace, a U.S. government-funded think tank.

Hamilton and Kean have argued that it was in the U.S. interest to put resources into "fragile states" lest societal breakdown lead to, for example, the evolution of terrorist organizations or uncontrolled flows of refugees. However, they were loath to call this kind of effort "nation building."

That is not surprising. Several months ago, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius spoke at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs about the turmoil in the Mideast and what might be done about it. I noticed that he almost uttered the words "nation building" but never allowed that specific phrase to pass his lips.

I got the chance to ask him about it afterward and he said - with a clear note of exasperation in his voice, "That is because no one wants to do it."

The United States spends roughly 1.3 percent of the federal budget on foreign aid, or just over $30 billion. Just over a third is for development assistance. Another third is for military aid (essentially, purchases for U.S. arms manufacturers), and the remainder is for emergency aid and contributions to international organizations. The President doesn't like international organizations either and no longer wants to be bound by defined assessments.

However, if one looks at development aid as a percentage of gross national income, the U.S. ranks about 20th at about 0.17 percent, with Sweden leading at 1.4 percent. The U.N. has urged rich countries to give at least 0.70 percent of GNI.

From a political standpoint, foreign aid has never been particularly popular. The argument is, why should we be building schools in other countries when our own schools need help? The late North Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms, as chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, called foreign aid "money down a rathole" and did what he could to shrink the U.S. Agency for International Development. Today, the agency is largely a check-writing body that contracts out development work to non-governmental organizations.

When I studied national security at the National Defense University, the subject of foreign aid came up in unusual ways. One professor, a retired military officer, noted the imbalance between U.S. military spending and diplomacy/foreign aid and said "when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail."

Another telling incident came when our seminar sat down to write our own national security strategy, One Army colonel proposed taking $50 billion from the Pentagon budget and giving it to the State Department to do "civil affairs." He argued that they were warriors. Ask us to blow things up and kill bad guys, but don't ask us to build roads and schools and organize local governments. It is not what we do.

I had to argue - reluctantly - that you could not effectively double the budget of the Agency for International Development in a short time without a gross wasting of tax dollars. Yet, his point was well taken. As current Defense Secretary James Mattis has testified "if you cut the State Department budget, I have to buy more ammunition."

National security has a broad definition and can encompass everything from our education system to climate change to countering terrorism to national infrastructure. What Hamilton and Kean argued in their report is that investing money to prevent problems down the road is smarter than waiting for things to explode. They warn us that the standard for our investments in national security should be based on impact and effectiveness and not "friendliness." As Lord Palmerston famously observed, nations don't have friends, they have interests.

Keith Peterson, of Lake Barrington, served 29 years as a press and cultural officer for the United States Information Agency and Department of State. He was chief editorial writer of the Daily Herald 1984-86.