In the first few weeks of his new administration, President Trump has implemented broad policies where narrow measures would have been the better approach.
It is a practice that has produced some positive results, to be sure. His executive order enforcing Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to protect girls’ and women’s athletics and private spaces, for example, is an unqualified good. Similarly, the president’s various actions related to federal abortion policy are almost entirely praiseworthy. Indeed, he has even more work to do on these policies.
But in other areas, the president is cutting down entire forests where trimming, pruning and controlled burns would be the better approach. When he or his subordinates identify an undesirable outcome of some policy or the disagreeable action of some agency, his reaction is to reverse the entire policy or eliminate the agency, without regard to whatever good is swept away with them.
The president’s overly broad orders related to the Refugee Admissions Program and the United States Agency for International Development are two such examples. Rather than target waste and fraud (which, indeed, are rampant in USAID), the president has essentially gutted both programs, throwing out the good with the bad. This has had a devastating impact on foreign aid and refugee asylum programs, including many that are administered through the United States Council of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Relief Services.
These shortsighted actions portend future international costs greater than immediate domestic benefits.
No allies, only interests
Henry Kissinger is supposed to have said somewhere that America doesn’t have friends, only interests. Like many such “quotes,” it isn’t clear whether he actually said it. But the sentiment was articulated by 19th-century British Foreign Secretary Henry John Temple, also known as Viscount Palmerston.
Palmerston had been harshly criticized by future prime minister Benjamin Disraeli for his interventionist foreign policy. Palmerston responded in a famous 1848 speech to Parliament. “I hold that the real policy of England … is to be the champion of justice and right,” he said. This entails pursuing foreign intervention “with moderation and prudence.” England should not be “the Quixote of the world,” he contended. It should, however, use “the weight of her moral sanction and support wherever she thinks that justice is, and wherever she thinks that wrong has been done.”
Then Palmerston uttered the lines that seem later to have been put in the mouth of Henry Kissinger: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies,” he asserted. “Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”
I am not interested in defending this attitude as a statement of prescriptive foreign policy. As an articulation of political realism, its reasoning is thin and perhaps even cynical. But Palmerston’s speech does illustrate why carefully targeted foreign aid is often good domestic policy. A robust Christian theology of solidarity and subsidiarity provides a moral foundation more sturdy than Palmerston’s realpolitik.
Responsibilities of solidarity and charity
The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that “[r]ich nations have a grave moral responsibility toward those which are unable to ensure the means of their development by themselves or have been prevented from doing so by tragic historical events. It is a duty in solidarity and charity” (No. 2439). It is not enough merely to provide direct aid in response to acute emergencies, however. “It is also necessary to reform international economic and financial institutions so that they will better promote equitable relationships with less advanced countries” (No. 2440).
These principles are expressions of both the solidarity of all humankind and the subsidiarity mandate for assistance. Providing assistance for acute emergencies is an expression of solidarity; building organizations and structures to address chronic poverty and oppression is rooted in subsidiarity. Both are, of course, consistent with the order of love. Proximate obligations have logistical priority. But that does not exclude the necessity of remote assistance. Good foreign aid and immigration policies recognize that these responsibilities must be harmonized, not opposed. As Pope St. John Paul II put it in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (“The Social Concern”), “true development must be based on the love of God and neighbor, and must help to promote the relationships between individuals and society” (No. 33).
One cannot deny that USAID has been the vehicle for grants and programs that are detrimental to authentic development, as well as opposed to American interests. We should not be supporting abortion, contraception, transgender ideology or any other program that is inconsistent with the dignity of the human person and authentic human development.
And it may be arguable that our foreign aid budget is disproportionate to our ability to provide for the common good at home. This is a legitimate area of debate. But the arguments should be in the context of the mandate for international aid and development, not a denial of these important obligations.
Perhaps nations do not have permanent friends or enemies. But we are all better served by relationships that encourage the former and mitigate the latter.
