Trump administration officials said on Monday they sought to increase Pentagon spending and offset that with sharp cuts in other areas. One official familiar with discussions about the State Department budget said the agency could see spending cut by as much as 30 percent.
Other officials have speculated that the total cut in the combined budgets of the State Department and the Agency for International Development could be as great as 37 percent.
This is the best idea I’ve heard in years. The central purpose of the federal government is to protect citizens from foreign invasions and terrorism. Our diplomacy should be based on our defense needs. Particularly during the Obama years, this became completely reversed. The Obama administration decided who our friends were, based on obviously pro-Islamic, pro-Arab and anti-Jewish/anti-Western biases, and then determined defense policy from there.
Instead, our federal government should look at what objective threats to our safety are, and tailor its policies accordingly. There’s basically one purpose: Preventing our enemies from destroying us, and destroying them first, if necessary. That’s why the State and Defense departments exist, not to nation-build or act as trillion dollar “humanitarian” and dictator-enabling social workers. It should not even be controversial, but under the last Democratic administration, self-defense and self-interest became controversial. In fact, you are vilified by leftists and Democrats if you even question appeasement of enemies like Iran, since Democratic politicians themselves are tyrants at heart — not unlike our worst enemies, if we’re honest about it.
Agencies like the Agency for International Development are — at best — charity agencies and — at worst — enablers of terrorist regimes and other thugs who seek to undermine all human freedom, particularly in the United States. It should be a no brainer to cut if not eliminate these departments and programs. To those who will shriek we’re abandoning humanitarian aid, we should remind them: If you want to help them, nobody will stop you. If it’s truly humanitarian aid you want, you will find plenty of willing parties to voluntarily contribute. Charity is not an obligation under the law. The Constitution does not mandate that U.S. citizens must be one another’s keepers, much less the keepers for the entire planet. Particularly when most of that aid goes to manipulative, despotic and toxic regimes that do far more harm than good, including to their own subjects and citizens we claim to be helping.
Cut the State Department 37 percent? Get rid of as many Obama appointees as possible, in the process? A winning idea! Use the money not to start unnecessary wars, but to return the United States to a foreign policy of peace-through-strength, the same policy that brought down Soviet Russia and won the Cold War. It’s an absolute no brainer.
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