On page 572 of President Nixon: Alone in the White House, Richard Reeves says the following:
"What
America did not seem to want was the aid Nixon had pledged to Vietnam,
both South and North, in the peace agreement...[E]ven J. William
Fulbright said aid should not be considered until after impounded
domestic funding was released by the President...[Newsweek]
quoted a Republican leader in the Senate as saying privately: 'It won't
wash. How can a senator support cuts in hospital, flood and education
spending at home and then vote money for the same thing in Hanoi?'"
The
conflict between domestic and foreign policy has perplexed more than
one Administration. That Republican Senator wondered how a Senator
could support cuts in government spending for hospital, flood, and
education, while voting to increase spending on those very same things
in Vietnam. Well, more than one person asked during Hurricane Katrina
how our government could get supplies so quickly and efficiently to
Afghanistan, but not to people suffering from the effects of Katrina.
More than one person has asked how the U.S. Government under President
George W. Bush could spend money on universal health care in Iraq (see here), while opposing the notion that health care is a right here in the U.S. And Richard Nixon, in No More Vietnams,
argues that President Lyndon Johnson held back from waging the Vietnam
War aggressively because he was trying to safeguard his Great Society
legacy.
Those who support spending money on programs abroad, while not
supporting the spending of more money on similar programs at home, could
perhaps argue that they're not supporting foreign aid programs just
because they are nice people. Rather, they're doing so because those
other countries that they want to support have a strategic importance.
I'm not certain that they argue this, but I can imagine it. Perhaps
they would have a point about those countries' strategic or geopolitical
significance, and yet I still can't help but ask: Why are certain
programs acceptable for people in foreign countries, but not for people
in the United States?
The thing is, do we have to choose
between foreign aid and domestic programs? There are times when we do
feel that we have to choose. I remember watching the West Wing,
and President Jed Bartlet told Zoey's French boyfriend that the reason
the U.S. does not spend as much money as France on domestic programs is
because the U.S. is spending money protecting Europe! Do we have to
choose? Well, if universal health care actually saves money, as some progressives like to argue, maybe we can have our cake and eat it, too. I don't know.