How Paul’s Policies Would Punish, Not Protect

Presidential candidate Ron Paul wants to remove all foreign aid payments from the US Government budget. Sure, the US has funded nasty, anti-democratic regimes like General Musharraf in Pakistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, but our foreign aid programs quite often help people in dire situations. Cutting off all foreign aid could throw some countries into unnecessary civil strife or famine, and this would have real world consequences that Ron Paul seemingly does not take note of. Paul’s “non-interventionist” foreign policy would undoubtedly improve some countries’ situations, but we cannot therefore implement this ideological strategy across the board, and hope that the world gets better on balance.

Taking his isolationist stance one step further, Paul wants to end US involvement in the United Nations. As he reports on his campaign website, and as Citizens for Global Solutions has reported via the “’08 or Bust!” Campaign, Paul has said some quite radical things about the role of the United States in the world, including this tidbit :

“The more we involve ourselves with the UN, the more we entangle ourselves in the affairs of other nations to our own detriment. America has nothing to show for our 60 years in the UN except for tens of thousands of dead or injured soldiers, and hundreds of billions of wasted tax dollars. The 20th century-- the UN century-- was the bloodiest in the world’s history. We must stop fooling ourselves that the UN is an instrument of world peace.”

Sure, the American public will save some money by withdrawing from the UN, but there is a world out there that beckons our attention, and if we ignore it, it is sure to only become more instable. It’s possible for the United States to make positive changes in the world via the UN, but how can we make these changes if we cut ourselves off from the world’s largest civil society? Paul wants churches and nonprofits and corporations to do the reaching out on behalf of the American people, but perhaps these interests do not represent our nations. The neoconservative foreign policy that Paul wants to replace is not working well, but that does not mean that Paul’s ideas are our solution. Far from it. But the four or five percent of the Republicans who support Paul don’t seem to understand this. They represent a significant portion of American opinion which thinks that the US should go it alone—or better yet, just not go at all.

The truth is that in order to deal with global problems and undemocratic nation states, the United States must change the incentives around—and not delete them altogether  We must use aid to our advantage, and not simply shy away from our moral responsibility to make the world a safer and more humane place. We are the richest country on earth, yet we spend less than almost every other industrialized nation on foreign assistance as a percentage of GNP. So instead of funding regimes that harbor terrorists or their sympathizers (such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan), we should fund real democratic movements, and be proud of our actions. What’s not to like about helping out the right people, Mr. Paul? It surely is not impossible to make the world a better place.