America gives foreign aid and supports various international bodies with the best of intentions. And yet, international aid, by its nature, usually goes to war-torn areas and places with terrorist insurgents and similar groups. And there is a growing consensus among foreign policy and national security practitioners that, as professor Jessica Trisko Darden of Virginia Commonwealth University put it, “Humanitarian aid has a terrorism problem.”

Indeed, in 2019, I documented seven specific instances where funds from the United States Agency on International Development went to organizations that, at minimum, do business with terrorist groups and, in some cases, were actually designated by the U.S. government as terrorist entities.