Posting #36 The story of foreign aid and securing the nation (Part I)

(This is the first of a two-part posting that makes the case for Development/Foreign Aid as a crucial component of national security. Part II will be published on March 12, 2025.)

The story: The story we Americans are told now with the “America First” mantra is that foreign aid is unnecessary, frivolous, fraudulent, “criminal,” and wasteful. This story tells us that foreign aid has nothing to do with national security and instead is only a “vanity project,” a way for the United States to feel good about its power-flexing in the world. Instead, we are told, we mustn’t apologize for the power-flexing; we should continue increased funding of the coercive, “warfighting” Department of Defense and we will have all the national security we need.

My take on the story: This story couldn’t be further from the truth.

US national security has three main components which operate for different reasons: Defense (including intelligence), Diplomacy, and Development. The US spends about a trillion taxpayer dollars annually on this priority, but those dollars are disproportionately divided among the three components. This disproportion tells us what is most valued and what is least.

Defense

The first component, defense, is housed in the Department of Defense (DoD), known as the War Department until 1947. It is allocated the vast majority of those trillion dollars. According to USAFacts, “Since 1980, defense spending has risen by 62%, climbing from $506 billion to $820 billion by 2023, after adjusting for inflation.” For the fiscal year (FY) 2025, DoD was appropriated by Congress and President Biden $884B, a $40B, or 2.2%, increase over FY2024.

The military has been made into the primary option to ensure national security by virtue of the taxpayer dollars it is given—even though it cannot account for how those dollars are spent.

Not only is DoD appropriated by Congress the most of that trillion dollar annual budget, since at least 1980 it has been appropriated a disproportionate amount of the national budget: “Since 1980, the percentage of federal spending for the military has fluctuated between a height of 27.9% in 1987 and lows of 11% in 2020 and 2021.” By 2023, the US spent 13.3% of its annual budget on DoD.

Still, that immense amount of money was not enough to pay for the recent post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The cost of those wars, amounting to about $8T, were put on the national credit card, with interest payments adding up to $6.5T by the 2050s.

Furthermore, though more than half of the DoD budget already is outsourced to private military contractors and defense contractors, all indications are that the recently confirmed and exceptionally unqualified Secretary of Defense Hegseth—who is beholden to and can unilaterally be fired by the president who nominated him—is likely to dish out more of that budget to the civilian contractors (including Elon Musk) because he wants to focus on “strengthening the defense industrial base,” as Project 2025 instructed.

Thus, not only is American national security dependent on DoD, the American economy itself is dependent on the dominance and vitality of the defense industry. (Case in point: Trump recently declared that he would work to halve the defense budget. Defense stocks plunged.)

So why do Americans put all of their trust for national security in an institution that is given a huge amount of taxpayer dollars, can’t account for how those taxpayer dollars are disbursed, and wants to give more and more of those taxpayer dollars to private corporations…who don’t contribute their fair share to the taxpayer pot? Even more importantly, if the US primarily relies on the hard power of military coercion and force to protect itself, Americans are vulnerable to constant, expensive conflict that is likely to increase the national debt and to trusting whomever is currently in the CINC role to use the military judiciously.

As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In other words, if you put most of the US national security budget into the Defense Department, for national security you’re going to get mostly conflict.

Diplomacy

The second component of national security, diplomacy, is housed in the Department of State, until 1789 known as the Department of Foreign Affairs. The Department is responsible for all foreign affairs issues, meaning it handles negotiating all treaties and agreements, representing the US abroad and at the UN, issuing passports and visas, managing the embassies and consulates, and advising the president on foreign affairs issues. It is important to note that State’s work, therefore, happens less with ordinary citizens and more with a country’s elites. “Diplomacy,” as the Brookings Institution states, “is driven by short-term crises and relations but also seeks to promote long-term partnerships and stability. The time and attention of diplomats is spent primarily at the governmental level.”

According to the Congressional Research Service (who works exclusively for the US Congress), in a pre-Trump-inauguration report it says that, for 2025, State was appropriated by Congress and President Biden $18.78 billion, a 6.1% increase from total FY2024-enacted levels. This appropriation to diplomacy represents about 1/46^th of what is allocated to Defense and is about .5% of the total federal budget.

In terms relative to how DoD is funded: not valued.

The Secretary of State, however, like the Secretary of Defense, is nominated by the current president, confirmed by the Senate, and “serves at the pleasure of the president”—which means the Secretary can be fired unilaterally by the president. (For instance, in his first term, President Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, by Twitter, after Tillerson had served about a year.) Consequently, not only is the Secretary likely to serve only for a single president, the Secretary also is beholden to the president and so typically represents the current president’s preferred ideology…which doesn’t necessarily conform with the United States’ or its Constitution.

Furthermore, much of State’s business is conducted through its embassies and consulates. According to the post-Trump-inauguration 2025 State website, it has 271 embassies and consulates in 173 countries. Each embassy is staffed by career foreign service officers and civil servants, people whose profession is diplomacy, and so they typically spend their careers bridging and adjusting to several presidents. More, though, each embassy or consulate also includes an ambassador or consul general who is in charge of the other staff and so can fire them. Thus, the professional diplomats staffing the embassies and consulates are beholden to the ambassadors or consul generals.

Ideally, moreover, the person chosen to be an ambassador or consul general is someone who already has a long record of foreign service and the diplomatic skills that come with that service, since they are “the President’s highest-ranking representative” to the recipient country. Consul generals typically are professional diplomats, but they answer to the country’s ambassador. Unfortunately, the long service or diplomatic skills are not a requirement for ambassadors; the primary requirement is that they agree with and convey the president's interests, policies, and viewpoints. Consequently, presidents often reward “campaign donors, fundraisers, and friends with ambassadorships,” not people who are professional diplomats.

In his first term, 43.5% of the ambassadors serving President Trump were big-dollar-donor “political appointments.” 39% of President Biden’s ambassadors were “political appointments” and not professional diplomats. This practice of rewarding deep-pocketed friends is likely to continue. Witness, for instance, Trump’s recent nominations without qualifications except they support Trump in his second term: former-fiancée to Donald Trump, Jr., Kimberley Guilfoyle, nominated to be the ambassador to Greece (even though as a Fox News host she insulted Greeks and Greece); former NFL football star, Herschel Walker, to the Bahamas; and Trump’s son-in-law’s pardoned-by-Trump-felon father, Charles Kushner, to France.

There is, then, an immense difference between a Career Diplomat and a Political Appointee.

My point is that ambassadors are not necessarily diplomats, are not chosen from those most qualified, and instead are the primary emissaries for the ideology of whatever president is in power. And that ideology can vary widely in a short amount of time, so the State Department is focused on short-term goals. As the Brookings Institution puts it, “Diplomacy seeks closer relations with foreign governments so as to encourage alignment with U.S. foreign policy.” That is, the intent of US diplomacy is to enhance, with elites, short-term commercial and foreign policy American interests abroad.

Consequently, while the diplomatic arm of national security is not hard power, like the coercive force of military defense, neither is it soft, like Development. Diplomacy not only has the power of financial and political force behind it, it is also backed by the hard power of military defense.

But the hard power of Defense—or even the medium power of Diplomacy—alone cannot provide the security Americans expect. Soft-power Development is crucial to providing the security that emerges from trust in the United States.