It’s no surprise that foreign aid (USAID) was the first target of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), since foreign aid yields no immediate return for dollars invested. In other words, foreign aid is not “transactional,” which made it low-hanging fruit for DOGE, despite it’s costing less than one percent of the annual budget.
It’s a big loss. Our 80 years of non-transactional foreign aid has given us an abundance of “soft power.” Unlike hard economic and military power, soft power is intangible, diffuse, cumulative, and only realized over time. It is part of our nation’s long game and includes the immense attractiveness of our universities, our scientific and medical research, our democratic political values, and much else.
Commerce, in contrast to foreign aid, is generally transactional. It operates by the law of quid pro quo, this for that. You give $10 and you get a pair of socks. When it goes well for both parties, commerce is the ultimate model of an orderly set of transactional operations.
This is a good thing, but our soft power has helped lay the foundation of trust that has given deep support for our commerce and much else. Little wonder that China, following its long-term strategy, is moving in where USAID has packed up and left.
Trump, a self-described deal maker, has often been called our “transactional president.” But the distinction doesn’t apply, since transactions require trust and credibility, while Trump’s transactions often slip and slide as he seeks to get more for less. Worse is his bent for making deals that cannot be refused. This is the dark side of economic relations where Putin and the Mafia abide and where a more accurate word than transaction would be extortion.
Whether it’s withholding $400 million in military aid to Ukraine in exchange for dirt on Biden, or unilaterally slapping surprise tariffs on our trading partners, or cutting funding for universities unwilling to adopt his educational agenda — these are not transactions but demands.
There is, however, an opposite and much brighter mode of economic relations that also lacks transactions. This is where those abide who help their neighbors as they would themselves. The best example is the story of the Good Samaritan that Jesus told when a lawyer asked him what he meant by “neighbor.” (Matthew 22:39-40)
To care for a stranger who was beaten and robbed and already “half dead,” to bind his wounds, carry him to an inn, and, believe it or not, leave money with the innkeeper should further care be needed — this is the behavior of someone Trump would call “a loser.”
Note, too, that this “loser” is not even from Judea, but Samaria, neighboring people long hostile to the Jews of Judea. You don’t have to be a Christian to see the wisdom of crossing tribal lines to care for a stranger. It’s in the Old Testament as well as the New , and it’s also in the Quran where we are told to “do good” to both the “neighbor who is kin and the neighbor who is a stranger.” (Nisa: 36)
Loving your neighbor as yourself can certainly be difficult. I’ve had neighbors who would be very hard even to like, much less love. But I’m sure many of those fired from USAID must have had something of the Samaritan’s attitude, helping strangers to help themselves.
By contrast, in our own land the very wealthy celebrate an openly transactional politics in which campaign support is given in exchange for an increasing share of the country’s wealth.
It is certainly a case of national insanity when a President will go all the way to the Supreme Court to keep food from those who need it just to live. And, as if that is not enough, that same President would threaten to punish states who find ways to meet that need, even with their own funds.
So, how do we restore our healthy balance of trade, our soft power, and our democracy? The prospect is not good right now. Our current polarization is a vivid reminder that we are a tribal species, even though we no longer live in small groups of hunter-gatherers, when tribalism made sense. We stuck together and at the same time we imagined other tribes as not quite human. When we and our resources were threatened, this made it easier to fight them off.
But in this century we are facing global enemies in which we are deeply implicated: pandemics of increasing virulence and scope, and global warming that is still increasing faster than it has in the last million years. Neither of these are hoaxes, as some would hope to believe.
So, the big question is: Can we put aside our nationalistic rivalries and learn to behave as one tribe, the tribe of humankind? To adapt the words of Benjamin Franklin, either we fight these battles together or we will lose them all together.
