A Pro-Life and Pro-Family U.S. Foreign Aid Strategy

Over the last few weeks, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has publicized several examples of wasted taxpayer money, including funds devoted to foreign aid. In many cases, this aid was just cash thrown away in distant lands (for example, funding “net-zero emissions goals” in Vietnam). But at worst it undermined the stability of states we are supposed to help, spreading abroad the latest iterations of woke ideology, from DEI directives to an ever-mutating spectacle of sexual preferences. This woke imperialism was the perfect example of stupidity, as defined by economic historian Carlo Cipolla: It brought losses to others as well as to us.

But foreign aid has a role in our foreign policy. It can be a tool to shore up allies and partners that otherwise may become open to hostile advances. China and Russia are lurking along the long Eurasian frontline, happy to subvert and co-opt Western states whose societies may be divided and whose economies are brittle. 

The benefit for the U.S. is that foreign aid, when used properly, diminishes the necessity of much costlier, including military, interventions. Much of the post–World War II success in U.S. foreign policy in Europe, for instance, was due to well-targeted and tailored aid to weak countries that were teetering on the edge of economic and social collapse, under the rapacious eyes of their local communist parties. While our allies are in significantly better conditions than in 1945, American aid can still be a relatively cheap investment. Hence, after the current demolition of foreign aid, it is worthwhile to consider how to redirect it toward the right purposes. 

Two objectives in particular should motivate U.S. foreign aid: strengthening families and protecting life. These goals are good in themselves as they are in accordance with natural law. And because of this, they are also sensible national security objectives as they would shore up both American standing abroad and strengthen our allies. In fact, states lacking stable families are poorer and weaker, carrying a heavy welfare burden that even in periods of fiscal abundance cannot approximate the beneficial influence of the family. And societies that do not value human life, especially at its most vulnerable moments in the mother’s womb or in the last days, are dying (often quite literally) political entities that have lost their purpose.

A society based on stable families is better off along many metrics. UVA’s Brad Wilcox, for instance, has demonstrated that married couples are wealthier than singles or unmarried partners. Children that live with (notabene!) a mother and a father in an intact marriage are more likely to avoid prison and to finish college. As he puts it, “no family arrangement besides marriage affords children as much stability as does this institution.” Destroy the family, and you don’t have much of a society.

Supporting marriage and strong families abroad is good national security policy for the United States. We want our allies to be stable and cohesive—and for that, they need to have strong families. Strong families educate good citizens, without whom a state is an empty shell. And a stable family remains the primary rampart against the destructive tendencies of autocratic governments or post-modern woke viruses. The family is the necessary foundation of ordered liberty.

U.S. foreign aid should therefore be reoriented toward family and marriage promotion. Civic education programs to show the benefits—and the joys—of marriage and family, rather than grants for drag shows in Ecuador, will shore up our allies.

The second objective of U.S. foreign aid should be to support life abroad. It is unreasonable to advocate for liberty if one doesn’t begin with life. Under Democratic administrations, we actually promote the opposite, funding abortion abroad. President Trump, like previous Republican presidents, has reinstated the Mexico City Policy, prohibiting the use of American taxpayer money to fund abortion globally. This is good in itself, but Trump could take a step further and promote a positive message abroad, encouraging parenthood and advocating for life from conception to natural death. 

Promoting a culture of life abroad makes strategic sense. A vibrant culture of life is in our interest because it will shore up the cohesion and resolve of our allies, drawing also a clear distinction between Western respect for human dignity and the Russian and Chinese maltreatment of their subjects.

The most material interest is demographic. Our allies, and with them, the United States, are in a prolonged demographic winter. The E.U.’s fertility rate in 2022 was 1.49, well below replacement. And when compared to close to five in Africa and 3.14 in the Arab world, Europe is dying. Many European allies eliminate around three hundred human lives for every one thousand live births. The U.K. has about 330 abortions per one thousand live births; France just above three hundred, which incidentally is the same as Russia. (The U.S. is not far behind, with about two hundred abortions per one thousand live births.) The West is killing itself.

But the national security interest in a pro-life foreign policy is not simply in the improvement of demographic realities. That is, the goal is not to increase the numbers of customers for the economy or soldiers for military forces. The beauty of life does not lie in their contribution to the GDP or in being part of the resources at the disposal of the state. Rather, protecting and cherishing human life, from conception to natural death, are the very reasons for the existence of a polity. When a state does not fulfill this obligation, it abandons its purpose and ultimately turns into a brittle political construct with no great future. Positive demographic trends are in fact only a symptom of a culture of life that encourages societies to look at the future with confidence. 

An anti-life mentality is not just wrong—presenting children as a source of poverty and a risk to the global environment while treating their sick and elderly as a burden to be eliminated—but also a prescription for pessimism. So much of Europe, for instance, is gripped by such pessimism: Few are willing to trade the immediate satisfaction of their current material benefits for the betterment of a future generation, which increasingly does not exist. At this rate, Europe will have no one to defend, and certainly no one willing to defend it.

An American foreign policy promoting life and family would return to the good origins of foreign aid. The aid the U.S. provided during the Cold War to the nations under the Soviet yoke was effective exactly because it opposed a deeply unnatural ideology that put class struggle at the center of human life and treated people as cogs in the inevitable material progress of communism. American aid worked because it was congruent with natural law, while communism is based on a fundamentally wrong understanding of the human person. But in recent decades, U.S. foreign policy turned at least partially into a tool of woke imperialism, from BLM to transgenderism to abortion. It now had in turn a deeply mistaken anthropology behind it. Some of the current demolition, thus, may have been necessary, but let’s hope that the Trump administration uses this opportunity to restore a foreign policy, and foreign aid in particular, based on the defense of life and families. America’s greatness will see its full potential only as a pro-life and pro-family power.