John Jefferson
“I think we are going to peel… more off the foreign aid handout program, and I hope the State Department will not accuse us of being Communist sympathizers if we do,” said Republican Congressman H.R. Gross of Iowa in 1963. Even at the height of the Cold War, when America’s foreign policy debate was narrow, Washington was divided over an issue that is igniting controversy again today: foreign aid. MAGA conservatives, like their Republican predecessors, are peeling more off the foreign aid handout program, a move that critics have branded as not only heartless but one that “helps the Chinese and their autocratic allies.”
Political debates over foreign aid arise from conflicting visions of America’s role in the world. If one accepts that the United States government should advance liberal modernity globally, then foreign aid is paramount. Such was the case for Cold War liberals, who viewed material want overseas as presenting fertile soil for the spread of communism.
However, if one believes that the role of America’s foreign policy is to protect core national interests, then foreign aid often appears wasteful and counterproductive. During the Cold War, conservative Republicans asserted that such aid wasted taxpayer dollars, subsidized authoritarian rulers, undermined a global order built on national sovereignty, and left Washington bogged down in foreign lands.
This fundamental debate has returned to American politics, more than three decades after the Cold War, which birthed the modern foreign-aid regime, and more than three years after the withdrawal from Afghanistan ended the Global War on Terror, which had sustained that regime long after the fall of the Soviet Union.
In the opening years of the Cold War, conservative Republicans tained earlier, more traditional assumptions about America’s role in the world. Drawn from the ranks of the “Old Right”—often associated with Robert Taft, who served as Ohio Senator throughout the 1940s—they continued to believe what conservatives had thought before World War II transformed the international order: that government aid to other countries constituted a type of foreign entanglement. Whether it was the Marshall Plan or the Truman Doctrine, Old Rightists warned that foreign aid enmeshed the United States in European affairs, cultivated dependency in recipient nations, and undermined America’s own geopolitical independence by creating institutional incentives to continue supporting foreign governments. For the Old Rightists, America’s mission in the Cold War was not to spread democracy and liberalism, but to defend the homeland against an aggressive and expansionist Soviet Union. And they believed that the nascent foreign aid regime served not as a useful counter to Soviet communism, but as a threat to the American republic and its sovereignty.
Even as the Cold War settled into a new status quo with the Korean War and Washington’s foreign aid response—the Mutual Security Act—opponents on Capitol Hill kept up their struggle to end U.S. government largesse overseas. The act, which regularized American foreign aid, quickly became H.R. Gross’s legislative white whale. During debate on the House floor, he groused that among the act’s beneficiaries was Franco’s Spain, “a regime of tyranny,” in Gross’s estimation. Other recipients, Gross wryly noted, were Europe’s colonial powers, Tito’s communist government in Yugoslavia, and illiberal regimes in South Korea and Taiwan. Gross argued that the client list demonstrated the “complete idiocy of the term ‘free world.’” And he asked how much longer his fellow Americans would have to “listen to the siren songs of these internationalists” and how long it was “proposed to make chumps of the American people.”
Republican opponents in Congress were joined by conservative lobbying groups like the Citizens Foreign Aid Committee (CFAC). Despite the ambiguous name, CFAC, which was organized in 1959 and drew from several alumni of the long-defunct America First Committee, opposed government foreign aid, overseas military basing, and other trappings of the Cold War. CFAC argued that foreign assistance contributed to an increasingly lopsided balance of payments, was unnecessary considering Western Europe’s economic recovery, and amounted to American taxpayers subsidizing that region’s post-war welfare states. The committee’s opening document, entitled “Foreign Aid and You,” declared that “Western Europe, more prosperous than before World War II, is not carrying its proportionate share of the NATO defense effort.”
Similarly, the committee resisted growing aid commitments in the postcolonial world. CFAC questioned a growing liberal consensus that held that material conditions lay at the heart of communism’s appeal. Instead, they asserted that foreign aid boiled down to a wasteful program fueled by confiscatory taxes “bestowed by our government bureaucrats upon a foreign government to do with it as it pleases.” Lastly, CFAC, recognizing profound differences between nations, argued that foreign aid unfairly imposed Western modernity “upon underdeveloped countries with less complex living standards, slower tempo, and different cultures,” all while flooding tottering governments with cheap money that incentivized corruption.
Republican opposition to foreign aid continued into the 1960s as the incoming President John F. Kennedy saw reason to expand the Cold War. Accelerating decolonization, White House officials believed, left more of the globe open to Soviet influence, which meant American influence was needed to counter it. The administration was influenced by modernization theory, a social-science model that construes modernity as universal, rational, and therefore exportable. In pursuit of its Cold War aims, the Democratic administration sought to expand the scope and ambition of foreign aid. The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which established the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), became a cause célèbre among conservatives who opposed the foreign-aid aspects of the Cold War state.
Due to the anguish of the Vietnam War, former Cold War liberals joined Gross in his crusade. Among these Democratic turncoats was Senator Frank Church of Idaho. In addition to his more famous change of heart vis-à-vis the intelligence community, Church became an outspoken critic of American foreign aid. In a speech entitled “Farewell to Foreign Aid: A Liberal Takes Leave,” Church argued: “This country simply cannot afford to sustain such an outlay of habit” and that “the program is on the whole a proven failure, whose termination is warranted on […] empirical grounds alone.” In a cross-partisan gesture, Church sent Gross, one of the few members of a withering Old Right, a copy of his speech with compliments. Gross responded, “Welcome to the club.”
The partnership would not last long, as Gross retired from Congress three years later, completing a generational turnover in Republican Party politics. Into the vacuum emerged a New Right that made its peace with programs like foreign aid. By 1985, foreign assistance programs had risen to 0.6% of GDP, the largest share since the height of the Marshall Plan. The fall of the Soviet Union and the triumphalism that followed gave such programs an ideological second life, as they appeared to be an essential part of the West’s victory.
Today, as the Cold War and the War on Terror recede further in the rearview mirror, conservative efforts to curtail or eliminate foreign aid have reemerged. During the Cold War, ideological constraints hemmed in figures like H.R. Gross to some extent. In our own age of post-ideological global conflict and multipolarity, such constraints apply less than they once did. Still, foreign aid supporters similarly frame dissent as playing into the hands of foreign actors, especially China, which they believe will spread its influence more rapidly if the U.S. government doesn’t shower the world with American tax dollars. If America is to move on from an era of postwar empire, this aspect of past debates deserves to become history.
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