Let’s let good business replace bad diplomacy

skeptical American voters that such forays will keep them safe. From Pakistan to Syria, how has foreign spending under the guise of “development aid” made America more secure?

The Senate report states that Trump’s proposed belt-tightening “allowed America’s competitors, notably the People’s Republic of China and Russia, to hijack our national security narrative.”

In reality, it seems like less of a hijacking and more of a prevented foot-shooting. Maybe some countries would like to avoid getting into bed with the CIA (which has long been closely associated with USAID) and would instead favor the kind of mutually beneficial business partnerships that other nations are offering.

Trump’s budgetary thriftiness ought to have forced a massive strategy shift, from policies of foreign welfare and dependence to policies of mutually beneficial free enterprise. The problem is that Trump is one of the few successful businessmen serving in the federal government. Elected officials tend not to think of solutions in terms of business or capitalism because they inhabit a world of bottomless spending, special interests, corporatism and lack of accountability.

If results mattered, the authors of that Senate committee report would have been embarrassed to want to spend nearly $11 billion more of the American people’s hard-earned money without providing a thorough cost-benefit analysis on foreign operations.

Capitalism is the key to global prosperity. The more we use it to guide foreign policy instead of relying on underhanded, government-facilitated, military-industrial-complex cronyism, the better.

Entrepreneurs and businesses interested in helping themselves by helping other countries and their people should replace the intelligence officers who recruit foreign locals in order to obtain information — and government should focus on facilitating this shift.

American foreign policy isn’t working. Perhaps the senators who compiled that report should try behaving less like members of the clunky, cash-sucking bureaucracy of the former Soviet Union.