So, is this a good time to rethink American foreign aid? You bet it is!

For the correct reasons, and not the wrong ones.

We don't want to reduce foreign aid because of the isolationist and Tea-Party nutcases.  Nor because of any stupid idea that this and cuts to NPR will somehow wipe away the trillions of debt.

It is time we re-configured the foreign aid because almost always we have been spending money on the wrong people.  I really like the points Ken Adelman makes:

Four of the largest U.S. foreign-aid recipients today -- Egypt, Israel, Pakistan, and Afghanistan -- all take contrary positions on issues of critical importance to the White House. South Vietnam once got gobs -- gobs upon gobs -- of U.S. foreign aid. That didn't help much. Likewise with Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Zaire (now the "Democratic" Republic of the Congo), and other "friendly" (read: graciously willing to take U.S. money) countries.
The conclusion seems clear: The relationship between "the United States' ability to positively influence events abroad," as Nye puts it, and the amount of U.S. foreign aid a country receives is unclear at best. For decades now, the United States has been the No. 1 foreign-aid donor -- it has given the most money to poor countries -- so it can't move up any on that scale. But this hasn't translated in making America the most popular or most influential country around the world. Quite the contrary.
Even the all-time No. 1 recipient of U.S. aid, Israel, rebuffs Washington constantly, on momentous issues of peace. Moreover, Israeli polls show the lowest approval for the U.S. president of nearly anywhere in the world.

Most of what Adelman writes is not new, of course.  His is a response to this piece by Joseph Nye.  Adelman has lots of examples, of which I liked this the best:

Let's recall: The State Department agreed to the Mubarak government's request for its approval before any U.S. democracy programs for Egypt got launched. To put it simply, the soft-power agency consented that anti-dictator programs appropriated by the U.S. Congress first get approved by that dictator.

Awful how we were all cuddly with dictators and showered them with gifts.  That certainly didn't buy us popularity with the people, did it?  Adelman concludes:

I've come to believe that liberals focus primarily on intentions, while conservatives focus more on results. No doubt the soft-power goals of the State Department and USAID on diplomacy, foreign aid, exchange programs, and the like seem wonderful. They're peaceful, caring, intercultural, and so on. They signal the right intentions.
The hard-power association with Pentagon budgets, weapons, and soldiers seems quite contrary. They signal the wrong intentions. But looking at the actual results of soft power versus hard power may yield results that make today's fashionable thinking seem soft, if not altogether squishy.

Nope, I don't want to increase spending on the hard-power--we have way too much already, and one only needs the graphic on the right to be reminded that both in absolute and relative terms we are over-emphasizing the defense budget.  And, if we go by outcomes, well, being stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan for this long tells us that in these days of asymmetric warfare the inexpensive IEDs seem to give our gazillion dollar hard power one hell of a competition, do they not?

What we really need to cut is the size of the defense budget.  But, unfortunately, there are not enough people with the cojones to go after that one.  In fact, it seems like there is always an overwhelming majority that is ready to increase the defense allocation.