The Pax Romana was a two-hundred-year period during which Rome’s influence led to a time of relative peace and prosperity as BC transitioned to AD. It wasn’t a Roman welfare program that did it. It was that Rome, by creating a stable empire, quashed most regional conflict and enabled enriching trade.

I had the same understanding of the Pax Americana that has existed since the end of World War II. Although America did not create a geographic and political empire in the way the Romans did, we took it upon ourselves to keep the peace around as much of the world as possible, allowing trade to flourish. The trade certainly benefited us, but it also came at a price, for we funded the free world’s wars against communism, both with blood and treasure.

One would think that enabling large swaths of the world to remain free, and fighting and/or funding their wars, would be enough. However, according to leftists, it’s not enough.

Image of a British missionary society postcard from 1905. Library of Congress.

As we’ve long heard, America also has a moral obligation to accept the illegal entry of every person in the world who finds him or herself living in a dysfunctional Third World country—dysfunctional, I might add, through no fault of the American people.

Now, though, leftists are claiming another item for the endlessly long checklist of things America is responsible for around the world: We are responsible for keeping people alive.

Just the other day, Monica Showalter wrote about the latest anti-Elon Musk narrative: DOGE, by finding wasteful spending, has killed 300,000 people. No, not just people. He’s killed 300,000 children!

As it turned out, there were no instant deaths; only projected ones. And we know this because Brooke Nichol, who holds the title of associate professor of global health at Boston University, set up an “Impact Metrics Dashboard,” which purports to show all the people who will die, thanks to USAID’s closed checkbook.

I’m impressed that Nichols knows with so much certainty that every USAID dollar was and will be well-spent on the claimed health projects. The reality is that most evidence, both hard and anecdotal, says otherwise, with graft and wokism siphoning off huge sums of money, but that’s a subject for another post.

In any event, solely for the sake of this essay, I’m going to accept as true the claims that Nichols’s little dashboard makes. Without our money, he says, tens of millions of people of all ages around the world will die in the next five years from malaria, tuberculosis, diarrhea, malnutrition, pneumonia, neglected tropical tiseases, etc.

My question for you, and it’s a serious one, is how great is our obligation to provide healthcare to the world’s poor? Once, I know that this was considered to be something of a moral personal obligation, especially amongst Christians, who donated money for various health-related missionary programs. But do we as a nation bear this obligation that taxpayers must be forced to fund at the point of a gun?

I value human life, I really do. And as a parent, I recognize how vulnerable children are, and don’t even want to think about the horror of losing a child. I am grateful every day that I was able to raise my children in America rather than in an impoverished country.

But still, do we have an obligation to maintain the health of the world’s poor? I don’t have an answer, but I don’t see anyone even asking the question.