OPINION: American Dominance; American Struggles
The United States has long been the world's policeman. However, despite the nation's wealth, we can't police our citizens' healthcare.
By Jay Brock
GUEST COLUMNIST
The United States has been the world’s indispensable nation since World War One. There have certainly been costs for being the world’s policeman: we have expended both treasure and blood in keeping the world not only safe for democracy, but also safe for capitalism—the two institutions that have helped make the United States the wealthiest and most powerful nation in world history. Being the world’s policeman means that WE make the rules that everyone else has to live by. These rules have given us incredible gains and advantages over the past 100 years.
And these rules have also benefited other nations, allowing many to prosper along with us. Prosperous nations who enjoy the system we devised tend to become our allies who buy our products or sell us goods and materials important to our own economy, or who will join us militarily to protect our common interests in the name of maintaining stability, which enhances our shared prosperity. Even nations that view us as an adversary understand this. Given our financial and military power, there are limits to other nations’ abilities to break the rules as they feared American retaliation.
Why give up this distinct advantage?
However, many of those gains and advantages that have made us a wealthy nation have failed to trickle down to the vast majority of Americans, who are rightly resentful about their being left out while the few at the top do better year after year. For example, the three wealthiest people in America own as much wealth as the bottom half — more than 160 million people, who altogether own less than 3% of the nation’s wealth. Six out of ten of us live paycheck-to-paycheck.
Some Americans, perhaps encouraged by nations that are our rivals and would love to be our betters, are complaining that the costs of being the world’s policeman aren’t worth it; that we should stop giving other countries foreign aid or military assistance when there is so much we’re not doing for our own citizens.
But that resentment about being left out is aimed at the wrong target: rather than pushing to end foreign aid and foreign military assistance to our allies, we should be arguing for a much more equitable distribution of the gains of the past 100 years.
This raises two points.
First, what America donates in foreign aid or military assistance is small change compared to our total federal government budget, and even less so when looking at our entire economy: our GDP was $29 trillion last year. Our total federal government budget was approximately $6.5 trillion for 2024. In 2020, foreign aid (including military) costs were about $60 billion; in 2022, we gave $80 billion in such foreign aid.
Such costs can go up in certain years: for example, since Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, our military, financial, and humanitarian assistance to Kiev totals nearly $120 billion (the EU contribution approaches $140 billion since the war began). But as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R, SC) has said, Ukraine is his favorite kind of ally: it gets our aid and fights our adversaries without the need for American troops on the ground. According to that criteria, these are dollars well spent.
But the frustration and resentment of so many Americans who look at foreign aid on the one hand, and their rightly feeling left out on the other, is completely understandable—and justified.
And that brings us to the second point: our political leaders could easily make life easier for Americans at all economic levels—but don’t.
Just look at healthcare, which is No. 1 when it comes to kitchen table worries for most Americans. (With good reason: despite all our national wealth we are still the only advanced nation without universal affordable healthcare; three-fourth of Americans worry they won’t be able to afford to pay their medical bills if they get sick.) And although we spend huge numbers of dollars on healthcare—about $5 trillion this year—our dysfunctional health insurance system, between profits and bureaucracy, will waste close to $1 trillion of those dollars, even as 80 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured.
We could easily cover everyone here with affordable healthcare by switching to a single payer health insurance system, and still save hundreds of billions of dollars a year. But that is an issue that the majority of Washington politicians refuse to consider: only about half of Washington Democrats, and not a single Washington Republican, support changing to a single payer system.
Here’s the bottom line for resentful citizens, and for the politicians who represent them: We give foreign aid and military assistance because it serves our national interests. Reducing or eliminating these programs is not only self-defeating, it distracts us from the real problem here: the current system forgets too many Americans.
Sources
https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-foreign-aid-does-the-us-provide/country/united-states/
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-us-give-other-countries-in-military-aid/
https://nypost.com/2025/02/25/world-news/ukraine-war-has-cost-280-billion-whos-paying-the-most/
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Medicare for All a first important step to healthcare for all in my country, and most Americans support it . . .
"Medicare for All is supported by 69 percent of registered voters including 87 percent of Democrats, the majority of Independents, and nearly half of Republicans. Additionally, over 50 cities and towns across America have passed resolutions endorsing Medicare for All."
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