Foreign policy should have nothing to do with cruelty or compassion — only the national interest.

The Sermon on the Mount is not a political platform. There’s a good line for a speechwriter. (It even happens to be true.) Peter Wehner said something like it during an interview in 2011. He has written for Reagan and for both Bushes. He was the second and last person to lead the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives. He has directed a conservative advocacy group co-founded by Jeane Kirkpatrick. For most of his career he has been on the right; now he’s in the wrong.

When he writes with approbation that “there is not a single area of development and humanitarian assistance USAID has not been involved in,” he might be saying more than he intends to. This taxpayer read it and wept. Is there any enterprise that would be improved by a lack of direction? Think of a military force that seeks to defeat all threats to all things simultaneously. A retailer whose business model is to sell everything to everybody. (Amazon might prove me wrong, but, then again, no government has forced me to cover its start-up costs.) Even charities tend to delimit their scope if they hope to be effective, not merely affective. The immeasurable span of the U.S. Agency for International Development is to its debit.

Wehner shares the conservative instinct: distrust the disruptors. Breaking things can be fun for business and pleasure, but foreign policy is usually neither. In his defense of USAID, he could have pointed out that it was authorized by Congress in 1961. That it preceded the Departments of Energy, of Education, of Transportation, of Housing and Urban Development. That it’s older than Firing Line (not quite old as National Review). That longevity does, or can, imbue value because time is valuable. That we should honor the time-honored. That, as with all enduring human artifacts, we should approach USAID as Chesterton does his fence. None of this comes up.

Anecdote is a poor stand-in for argument. Wehner speaks to a contractor for the President’s Malaria Initiative who says that she’s “aware that foreign assistance improves America’s image” but “that’s not why she’s doing what she’s doing.” She calls on the divine, wonders how anybody can read Scripture and refuse to buy mosquito nets for Kenya. Good for her. As vocational ambitions go, hers is more noble than most. But it is not the purpose of the federal government to manifest anyone’s vocational ambitions or to reify Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save (even if you’re somehow convinced by it). When it does, it should be incidental. Life and liberty for its people: securing these is the state’s job. The pursuit of happiness is on you.

USAID’s founding mandate was to train American soft power on creeping Sovietism. It should have found renewed purpose in the Chinese mutation of the same disease. (By the by, where does the Communist Party’s own foreign aid go, and why?) There’s still a place for softness. Ceteris paribus, a friend asks, would you prefer that immiserated people in this or the other hemisphere despise America, or would you prefer that they be obliged to her? Fair enough. How much is goodwill worth these days? Footing the bill for electric vehicle charging stations in Hanoi or diversity and equity “resources” for LGBT groups in Cyprus and the Caribbean, in Bratislava and Belgrade? Those who receive this munificence are grateful surely. Pecunia non olet. But the next vote on the governance structure of the national queer coalition of Peru is about as relevant to U.S. grand strategy as the Third Defenestration of Prague of 1618. It is absolutely the Serbians’ prerogative to play dungeons and drag queens in the workplace. You may even donate to the cause or help organize that fantasy league. But don’t for a moment tolerate the U.S. government’s making that decision for you.

Regard cruelty and sympathy — and especially accusations of such — with equal suspicion. These habits (at times useful, at others vicious) are proper to the person, not the state. USAID is becalmed, rudderless, unguided by foreign policy. It is bound to blame the faintest push in any direction on Aeolian caprice. But much of what it has been doing for decades now is superficial do-goodery. It’s pitypolitik. In the tedious lexicon of the benevolence business: it is not sustainable. The United States is omnipotent and can afford it until it isn’t and it can’t.