In addition to being a former State Department diplomat, I’m a proud alumnus of USAID and am married to someone who served twenty years (until its untimely demise) with the Agency, so the future of American foreign assistance is something I take very personally.

When USAID was unceremoniously blown up earlier this year, we were overseas, and our family lived through the uncertainty (and the cruelty) of the process first-hand. I’ve had a lot of time to think about how something so consequential was allowed to happen with barely a murmur from the public, let alone from a Congress that, for most of my career, had religiously guarded its prerogatives and authorities.

My first job at USAID, shortly after 9/11, was as a public affairs officer trying to explain to the American citizenry why our international engagement—and our foreign assistance—was so vital to U.S. national security. It turned out to be a far tougher argument than I expected.

To me, it was obvious that our network of alliances and relationships abroad was central to our political stability and economic well-being at home, and that the attacks of 2001 were, in many ways, the consequence of us taking our eye off the ball. But to many Americans, policy makers had been failing, since the end of the Cold War, to keep making the case why this work mattered to the country as a whole.

The problem is that the relationship between government policy and our individual lives is complex. People don’t have a lot of time or patience for complexity these days. It is far more comforting to pretend the world is simple, that bureaucrats are overcomplicating things, and that a purely transactional, tit-for-tat approach is more effective and therefore preferable. The reality, however, is that life is inherently complex, despite what TikTok videos and YouTube shorts would have us believe. When we deny this, we are setting ourselves up for disappointment.

The Centuries-Old Tension Between Isolationism and Engagement

For as long as the United States has existed, our foreign policy has swung between two poles: isolationism and engagement. That tension isn’t new; it’s as old as our Republic itself. At times we’ve retreated behind our oceans; at others, we’ve projected power and ideals across them. The difference has never been whether either of these impulses existed, but only which side made the stronger argument.

For half a century after World War II, that argument seemed settled. The Cold War supplied a clear adversary, and with it, a clear rationale for internationalism. Americans understood why we needed to lead abroad: our security, prosperity, and values were tied to events elsewhere. Democrats and Republicans might have disagreed about the means, but they broadly shared the premise.

In hindsight, we should have viewed that consensus as the exception, not the rule. For the past thirty years, we’ve been living off its fumes. The Soviet Union collapsed, yet the increasingly rickety scaffolding that justified American engagement remained in place—at least for a while. We talked about globalization, democracy promotion, humanitarianism, and development as though their virtues were self-evident. For a time, it seemed enough to say we were helping others because it was “the right thing to do.”

That moral argument still matters. Americans are an unusually generous people. Our culture of philanthropy and civic giving is quite literally unmatched in the world. But in foreign policy, we’ve relied too heavily on that instinct while neglecting the other half of the equation: why helping others helps us.

The Balance Between Interests and Ideals

Franklin D. Roosevelt understood perhaps better than any other president before or since the need to appeal to both Americans’ interests and their ideals to achieve foreign policy goals. In the years before World War II, when public opinion was stubbornly isolationist, FDR cautiously and meticulously laid the groundwork for the case that America’s safety and prosperity were tied to the fate of other democracies. He didn’t tell the farmer in Kansas or the factory worker in Ohio that Europe merely needed saving out of principle; he told them that Americans’ future prosperity and stability—and their livelihoods and their children’s futures—depended on a world where free nations and open economies thrived.

That’s the argument that has sort of been lost in the decades since the end of the Cold War. And into that vacuum has stepped a new strain of isolationism, embodied most dramatically by Donald Trump. His administration revealed how fragile public support for foreign assistance had become. With little public outcry, the minions of DOGE unilaterally canceled most foreign aid—and for many Americans, it barely registered. That should alarm us.

The near-total elimination of U.S. foreign assistance proposed under Trump—echoed by Secretary Marco Rubio’s across-the-board cuts to the soft-power programs of the State Department—shows how far we’ve drifted from that understanding. These moves don’t simply gut humanitarian and development programs. They dismantle the quiet web of relationships, trust, and reciprocity that has underpinned America’s ability to act effectively abroad—the invisible connective tissue of engagement that only becomes visible when something goes wrong.

Foreign Assistance is About Helping Others and Helping Ourselves

Foreign assistance rarely yields quick, linear returns. Its benefits are diffuse and deeply woven into the fabric of our global relationships. The dividends appear not just in trade figures or GDP multipliers, but in moments of crisis—when Americans need help in places where few U.S. institutions exist beyond an embassy, a USAID mission, or a local partner trained through years of cooperation.

When I was assigned to Madagascar, two American hikers went missing in a remote corner of the country. Within hours, Malagasy authorities launched a full-scale search—helicopters, gendarmes, logistics few governments could have mobilized so swiftly. They did it not because of a treaty obligation, but out of respect for what the United States had done for Madagascar and the importance they placed on that relationship. Of course, there was also an element of self-preservation: missing visitors were hardly an effective tourism promotion tool. But it was more than that. They wanted to protect their bond with us—to honor what we had been doing to help them by responding in kind. That is the kind of goodwill no transactional policy can buy. (Incidentally, the couple were eventually found safe and sound.)

Years earlier, as a young consular officer in Israel, I saw a different dividend. The State Department had for years been sponsoring law-enforcement exchanges between local officials and their U.S. counterparts—low-profile, technical programs that never made headlines. Yet those relationships mattered every time an American teenager was detained for protesting or was caught with contraband in Jerusalem. (Both types of cases happened with frustrating frequency, often on weekends and evenings.) No matter the time of day, I could get expedited access to the (often teenage) detainee, ensure their welfare, give them some essentials for their jail stay, and reassure their parents back home that their child was safe. Those exchanges were not charity; they were investments in mutual understanding that paid off when it mattered most.

More recently, during the 2021 evacuation from Afghanistan, when I was working in North Macedonia, we faced the daunting task of securing rapid overflight clearances from EU partners and permission for evacuation flights to land in Skopje—along with persuading North Macedonia’s government to provide temporary shelter for Afghan evacuees. Under normal circumstances, that kind of diplomatic choreography would have taken many days or weeks and might easily have resulted in a denial purely on practical grounds. But for years already, USAID and the Department of Justice had been working with Macedonian authorities to modernize procedures and equipment to improve airport safety and efficiency. Meanwhile, the State Department, working with the Department of Transportation and the FAA, had hosted International Visitor Leadership Programs for aviation officials from across the region. In the middle of the Afghan crisis, it was those alumni—the relationships built quietly through exchanges and professional ties—who answered our calls, cut through bureaucracy, and helped us clear every hurdle. Those connections turned what could have been an intractable diplomatic and humanitarian bottleneck into a solvable problem in a matter of hours—and with no time to spare.

These are small stories, but they illustrate a larger truth: foreign assistance is not a handout. It’s a strategic asset—one that sustains the web of trust, influence, and cooperation that makes America’s global role possible. It is complex, non-linear, and sometimes doesn’t yield dividends for years. But when we cut out this investment, we don’t save money; we corrode the system of relationships that, in subtle ways, protects our citizens, our values, and our ability to lead.

Rebuilding a Bipartisan Foundation for Foreign Engagement

Part of the problem is that we in the foreign-policy world grew a bit complacent. We talked mostly to one another, assuming a shared understanding of why America should lead abroad. We built elegant moral and strategic arguments for diplomacy and development but didn’t always effectively connect them to the lives of ordinary Americans. We also over-intellectualized what could have been simple arguments, trapped in a self-reinforcing bubble of confidence that because what we were doing was “right,” it would also be seen as such.

Why should a farmer in Kansas care about U.S. aid to Ukraine or Africa? Why should a shipper in Louisiana see a stake in global health or agricultural development overseas? These aren’t rhetorical questions. And there are real answers: because those relationships create markets for American goods; because setting global standards—on food safety, health, digital governance, or climate—has helped make the United States secure as well as prosperous.

Foreign assistance, done right, is one of the smartest, cheapest investments we can make. Yet we allowed it to become an orphaned idea—defended mostly by those inside the system. And this permitted a handful of mostly uninformed and conspiracy-theory-addled activists (combined with a few bitter partisans with personal scores to settle) to unilaterally disarm us. Rather than work to fix the problems—which many of us would have acknowledged and would have happily helped address—they first blew up USAID (without thinking through any of the ancillary consequences) and then destroyed a great deal of the soft-power tools of the State Department and other foreign-affairs institutions with barely a second thought.

If we want to rebuild a bipartisan foundation for engagement, we’ll need to relearn what Roosevelt understood: that Americans must be persuaded not only by appeals to our better angels, but also by appeals to our collective self-interest. Idealism alone isn’t enough. The case for foreign assistance must again become the case for America’s place in the world.