I love the West. 

I love what it aspired to be after the fires of fascism and empire nearly burned the world down. I believe in the postwar institutions it built—NATO, the UN, the EU, the WTO—not because they were flawless, but because they were necessary. Because they said, for the first time in human history, that the powerful would be bound by laws, and that peace and dignity could be the basis for international life.

I love that in 38 countries I can marry who I love. I love that the press can hold power to account. I love my right to vote. I love that since 1990 over a billion people have been lifted out of poverty. I love that I can travel to just about anywhere in the world and walk in someone else’s shoes. I love the West for things big and small.

I believe in the liberal world order, not as some abstract concept, but because it was earned—in blood, in trauma, in resistance. Our ancestors fought for it. They died for it. And now, the current Administration is throwing it away.

USAID: The First Domino to Fall

USAID, created to fulfill the promise of that liberal order, was never just an aid agency. It was a commitment. A tool to help remake the world through education, food, medicine, and peace. To say to newly independent nations, to war-torn regions, to children and mothers and displaced peoples: You are not alone.

And now USAID is being dismantled.

Trauma clinics in Ukraine are closing. HIV treatment pipelines are collapsing. Food aid programs have vanished. Children will die.

The West's Enemies Are Wearing Its Flag

Political extremists claim to love the West. But when they talk about “Western civilization,” they don’t mean pluralism, democracy, or international law. They mean cultural supremacy. They mean race. They mean dominance.

They don’t want a West defined by shared responsibility and universal rights. They want a West where power is hoarded, where empathy is weakness, and where the most are left to rot because they dares to be poor, brown, queer, or free.

The politicians rising across Europe and North America aren’t fighting to preserve Western values—they’re fighting to erase them. They talk about saving the West, but what they love is the imagined West of colonial maps and imperial grandeur. Their “love” is not for justice. It is for control.

Yes, the West Has Sinned. But It Has Also Grown.

Let’s not be naïve. The liberal world order has always carried contradictions. The West preached freedom while backing dictatorships. 

But those failures came not from believing in liberalism too much, but from betraying it. From choosing dominance over principle. From forgetting that the entire point of the order was to restrain power, not worship it.

USAID was an imperfect institution. But it was part of that aspiration. It was a way to make amends and to build instead of conquer. To dismantle it now is not just reckless—it’s cowardly. It’s disgraceful.

The Human Cost, Then and Now

This order was not handed to us. It was built from smoldering cities and mass graves. It was built by Jews who crawled out of death camps and insisted “Never again.” By women who rebuilt bombed-out towns. By American soldiers and civil servants who believed that suffering should not be the world’s default setting.

And now? We throw it away?

We dishonor the dead when we treat this world as disposable. And if we’re not careful, we may be asked to build it all again—through blood, through ruin, through another unimaginable cost.

This isn’t melodrama. It’s history. And we are repeating it.

What You Can Do

The dismantling of USAID is not just a footnote in a policy fight. It’s the frontline in a war over whether decency, responsibility, and shared humanity still mean anything in the world’s most powerful country.

We have a choice. But the window is closing.

Please tell your Members of Congress to support humanitarian aid. You can find their name and phone number here.

And please consider joining us at the Alliance for American Leadership to help lead in the fight to preserve the West we love, not the myth dictated by extremists.

Don’t let this be the generation that forgot what was built—and how much it cost.