I have, like I suspect many readers, been in quite a bad mood for the last two months. My go-to joke explaining why — which I feel like should land with readers of this newsletter — has become: “I didn’t realize quite how much my overall optimism about the state of the world depended on the fact that Lindsey Graham likes foreign aid.”
To unpack that a bit: For many years, the US spent tens of billions annually on foreign aid, including billions on vaccinations, preventive gear, and treatments for cheap-to-treat killers like HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis.
It did that not because a bunch of bleeding-heart liberals have been in power continuously for decades, but because a critical mass of conservative Republicans like Graham (and former President George W. Bush, and former House foreign affairs chair Michael McCaul, etc.) genuinely supported foreign aid, often out of sincere moral conviction. Aid actually grew dramatically under Bush, and remained roughly constant through President Barack Obama’s time in office and during Donald Trump’s first term.
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This, obviously, has not been the story of foreign aid under Trump’s second term. Already, his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, acting as the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) interim head, has canceled programs amounting to at least a third of USAID’s annual spending. Some areas were hit even harder: Efforts to improve maternal and child health are in for an 83 percent cut, and pandemic prevention is getting a 90 percent cut. (On Wednesday, a federal judge said that the Trump administration’s efforts to close USAID were likely unconstitutional and ordered the government to reinstate USAID systems, though it’s anyone’s guess how meaningful that ruling will prove to be.)
Despite Elon Musk’s lies that the cuts in funding haven’t killed anyone, the lack of funds at HIV clinics caused by Musk, Rubio, and Trump has already led to children dying. Journalist Nick Kristof has some of the names of the dead. Working with the Center for Global Development, he estimates that more than 1.6 million could die within a year without HIV aid and prevention from the US.
Graham, to his credit, has been pushing back, particularly in defense of PEPFAR, the US’s wildly successful anti-HIV program. So has McCaul. It just hasn’t mattered: The administration has seized control of spending from Congress, particularly on foreign aid matters, and so the bipartisan coalition that kept aid programs alive for decades has been largely helpless. Graham liking foreign aid has proved to be a less important positive for the world than I had thought.
This is an example of a broader, alarming trend in American politics that has been slowly unfolding over the past 10 or 15 years. At least going back to the 1980s, there was a kind of informal, cross-party consensus in the US around a set of policies that opened the US economy, and sometimes government coffers, to the world.
It was an era of elite cosmopolitanism, and that era feels like it is coming, or has come, to a close.
The globalist golden years
There were, of course, important and significant differences between the parties on a huge variety of issues during the period I’m talking about (let’s say 1986 to 2016, roughly, though I’m not wedded to either specific year). But on many international economic questions, there was broad consensus.
Both parties championed free trade. Ronald Reagan negotiated a tariff-reduction pact with Canada, and instead of reversing course, Bill Clinton followed that up with NAFTA and the creation of the World Trade Organization; Bush and Obama followed up with trade deals of their own.
Both parties championed immigration. In 1986, Reagan signed a law providing amnesty for undocumented immigrants, and both Bush and Obama supported bipartisan congressional efforts to give legal status to those who came after that year.
The foreign aid part of the consensus is more recent. In the 1990s, USAID was hollowed out in terms of both staff and funding, both due to the end of the Cold War (removing a geopolitical reason for it to operate in countries at risk of Communist takeover) and due to a sustained assault from Senate Foreign Relations Chair Jesse Helms (R-NC), a dedicated foreign aid opponent and outspoken racist.
But foreign aid got a surprise second act under George W. Bush, who not only created and poured billions into PEPFAR, but also launched the President’s Malaria Initiative (which became one of the world’s leading anti-malaria funders) and made the US the first country to donate to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, a major multilateral funder. Obama and Joe Biden supported these efforts, and they survived budget cut proposals during the first Trump term due to bipartisan congressional support.
Despite the slightly different chronologies, I think lumping these three areas of bipartisan consensus — trade, immigration, and aid — together makes sense.
All of them involve American openness to foreign countries. All of them have benefited from “bootleggers and Baptists” coalitions combining moralists and baser economic interests.
Some activists supported migration on moral grounds, but the US Chamber of Commerce was arguably the biggest booster; reducing trade barriers obviously helped businesses importing tariffed goods or exporting to tariffing nations, but many architects of trade liberalization felt a moral duty to use trade to help poorer countries like Mexico and China to grow; foreign aid serves a national security purpose in boosting US soft power, but Bush’s main motive in reviving it, and the main motive of most pro-aid activists I know, was a sense of moral duty.
All three issues, then, reflected a kind of light noblesse oblige on the part of US political elites. They were willing to take significant actions to help people born abroad, either staying there trying to survive (aid), staying there and trying to work (trade), or coming to the US (immigration).
Their willingness was not purely due to altruism. There were economic and geopolitical motives at work too. But the positive effects on billions of foreign-born people were real nonetheless.
Why the consensus fell apart
If this elite cosmopolitanism was able to support large-scale immigration, low trade barriers, and generous foreign aid for decades, why has it not been able to stop the Trump administration from devastating all three?
It’s not because the public suddenly changed its mind. While the Biden term was a period of historic anti-immigrant backlash, the consensus started fraying in Obama’s second and Trump’s first terms, when anti-immigrant sentiment was, perhaps surprisingly, at a low ebb. In June 2016, only 38 percent of voters said that immigration should be decreased, compared to 65 percent in 1993 and 55 percent in 2024.
But while restrictionists were a minority in 2016, they became a much louder and more influential one. The mass refugee flows from the Syrian civil war meant that the topic had higher salience in the US and especially in Europe. Most importantly, Trump broke basically every social taboo about discussing the topic during his primary run, and not only didn’t suffer but won the nomination as a result.
It wasn’t a majority position — Trump would lose the popular vote after all — but it was clearly more potent than previously thought.
The 2016 race also scrambled the politics of trade. Bernie Sanders’s stronger-than-expected challenge to Hillary Clinton led her to come out against Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, an anti-China trade pact that she passionately advocated for as secretary of state; she clearly saw in the strength of Sanders, and Trump, evidence that trade restrictionism had become a political imperative.
Clinton’s eventual loss due to Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania led to a folk understanding among professional Democrats that not passing protectionist measures to help Rust Belt states would be electoral suicide.
This never made any sense; the shock of competition from China and elsewhere did hurt these places, but it’s long since over and no policy measures could ever bring manufacturing employment in Detroit back to where it was in 1970. But this conclusion meant that both parties were running away from open trade simultaneously, and as a result, the US as a whole has retreated from free trade over the last decade.
It is also possible, as political scientist Margaret Peters has argued, that immigration support has suffered precisely because trade was liberalized in the 1990s and ’00s. Historically, nativist forces have been kept at bay because of business lobbies supporting immigration, but the ability to offshore manufacturing to foreign countries provided an alternative for businesses to bringing in foreign laborers to the US.
Peters argues that this effect, not just of trade deals but of things like standardized shipping containers, has undermined support for immigration over time by taking business lobbyists off the board. There go the bootleggers.
The saddest case, though, is foreign aid. Why did this tiny portion of the federal budget come in for such a beating this year?
I don’t really have deep structural answers. Foreign aid has never been very popular, and voters routinely overestimate how much the US spends on it. It has always survived on elite, not popular, support, and was in a vulnerable position should someone like Elon Musk go after it. The declining religiosity of American conservatism also weakened the evangelical forces who so strongly supported PEPFAR under Bush.
As for why Musk had such a vendetta against foreign aid, the best explanation is that he fell under the influence of rabidly anti-USAID conspiracy theorist Mike Benz. He wouldn’t be the first dubious source who Musk decided against all reason to trust absolutely.
Put all together, though, and the picture looks bleak for anyone who thinks the US can play an important role in making the lives of people around the world, not just here at home, better. In three different domains, the fragile coalitions supporting that vision have cracked and been beaten back. I’m not throwing in the towel just yet. But the game is going very badly.
