The case for persisting with foreign aid

IT IS disgusting to read the boast of the world’s richest man that “we spent the weekend feeding USAid into the woodchipper”. That this raises constitutional and legal issues for the US republic is quite clear. Indeed, it is evident that those now in charge would be quite happy to dispose of such tiresome constraints altogether. But there are also moral issues. Should the US effort to succour the world’s poorest have been fed into a “woodchipper” at all? The answer is “no”.

As Paul Krugman notes in an exceptional recent piece on his Substack, the United States made a huge effort after World War II to be a new and different sort of great power: it sought to create allies, not tributaries; economic development, not predation; global institutions, not imperial rule; and international law, not the old idea of “might makes right”. There was, inevitably, much backsliding. But in all, the US has indeed been a strikingly benign and successful hegemon.

The explosive growth of world trade, the rise of once-impoverished China and India, the peaceful fall of the Soviet Union and, not least, the decline in the proportion of human beings living in extreme poverty – from 59 per cent in 1950 to 8.5 per cent in 2024, despite a trebling of the world population – are proof of its success. The US should be hugely proud of its achievements as world leader, and not seek to imitate the bullying of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, instead.