Conservatives have had to rethink (temporarily) the role of government in response to the coronavirus. Since there is a national emergency and arguably a government takings of income and liberty, limited-government advocates have made their peace with temporary things such as Paycheck Protection Program small-business loans, tax credits for households, and even the formerly unthinkable: temporarily increased unemployment payments.
As the coronavirus crisis transitions from a stage of quickly ramped-up responses and mitigation to (hopefully) one of vaccines and securing the world from this plague, conservatives also need to look at how we want to shape our global plan of action.
It’s no secret that conservatives have a long history of opposing “foreign aid,” and for good reason. Too often, this century’s Republican Party in particular has been marked by Woodrow Wilsonian bouts of foreign adventurism, leading to expensive and bloody quagmires. The last thing most conservatives want after two decades of Afghanistan and Iraq entrenchments (and decades more spent in Germany and North Korea) are more foreign entanglements.
Yet a focused and directed expenditure of funds has often led to good outcomes. After World War II, the Marshall Plan helped rebuild Western Europe (preventing a descent into Soviet client states and helping to resurrect the global economy at the same time). No one would argue that money to help the Soviet Union secure and dismantle some of its nuclear weapons at the end of the Cold War was a bad use of resources.
Is there a modern parallel as we go on the offense, globally, against the coronavirus?
It’s clearly in the direct national interest of the United States to take the lead on a global eradication of the coronavirus threat. It’s in our economic interest to open up international travel once again and facilitate free and fair trade better. It’s in our national security interest to make sure other countries are not left vulnerable to attack or invasion by countries hostile to U.S. interests. Acting here is a use of soft power that would be easily recognized by a President Ronald Reagan and is miles away from more recent neoconservative quagmire adventurism.
That doesn’t mean conservatives should write a blank check to globalists at the State Department.
The first pillar conservatives should insist on is that government or government-dominated recipients of aid should not be where the U.S. chooses to spend money. Too often, governments have hijacked foreign aid to their own self-interest. By way of a recent example, we can look no further than the Chinese-dominated World Health Organization, which President Trump wisely withdrew the U.S. from in July. Instead, nongovernmental organizations free of state control should be our well-vetted partners.
These nongovernmental organizations have three distinct advantages over government recipients of money. Aid to these entities will be more effective (by default) than dumping money in a bureaucratic sinkhole not answerable to the U.S.; aid will be more efficient since there are far fewer middlemen when nongovernment recipients of aid are involved; aid will be more transparent since nongovernment organizations can be required to disclose detailed financial statements and will be asked to trace how our money is spent. Conservatives should insist that all these potential advantages translate into actual ones.
The alternative to taking a leadership role is creating a vacuum that will be filled by the Chinese and their allies. China already saddled the civilized world with this Wuhan-grown virus that disrupted the planet like never before. We cannot let it also be in charge of cleaning up the mess and potentially profiting from it.
Trump made a mistake in dealing with the Chinese when he withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would have created a U.S.-dominated trade regime in the Pacific Rim. He later went tough on Chinese trade, which garnered mixed results. His decision to cut off travel from China in the early stages of the coronavirus plague was an essential step in mitigation, and he has been exemplary in holding the Chinese communist dictators accountable for their role in letting the Wuhan coronavirus turn into the new Spanish flu. The next step here is to make sure that the U.S. works with accountable, transparent, and more efficient nongovernmental organizations to combat the realpolitik practiced by the politburo in Beijing.
Ryan Ellis (@RyanLEllis) is the president of the Center for a Free Economy.
