International Triage

As we continue to pour trillions of dollars into Afghanistan, run by a corrupt government of questionable legitimacy after an apparently fraudulent election, and trillions more into Iraq, where the Sunni and Shia political factions still regularly murder each other, and trillions more into Africa and Haiti and a number of other third world nations which have already absorbed our money for decades with little or no evident progress, I begin to wonder if we ought not to apply some hard-headed triage to our aid money and military involvement.

Triage is the concept of putting limited resources where they will do the most good. On the battlefield, triage means ignoring those who will certainly die, and also those who will recover without help, and putting what resources are available towards those who could be saved with help.

In the international arena, there are, quite frankly, nations who cannot be helped – whose circumstances and/or cultures and/or religions are simply too inflexible to be adapted to a modern world. I know it goes against the grain – especially for liberal Americans - to write any nation off, to admit that any nation or peoples are beyond help, but it is so nevertheless. Or perhaps more accurately, some nations are beyond OUR ability to save them – if they are saved or modernized it will only be because they save or modernize themselves. Afghanistan and Iraq and Haiti almost certainly fall into this category, despite international efforts to prop them up.

In a world with unlimited resources, we could help everybody. We don’t have unlimited resources, so we would do well to be more selective in our aid. And in fact, we would do well to give help closer to home before spending trillion abroad. Our own national infrastructure is crumbling, our own schools are substandard, our own manufacturing capability has been gutted, our own national finances are in shambles, our own drug problems are out of hand. It is, frankly, an act of insufferable and patronizing arrogance for us to lecture other nations and other cultures on how they ought to change when we ourselves are in such need of reform at home.