Over the past twenty or more years, I have often wondered what would happen if the US offered humanitarian relief to adversarial nations after natural disasters like earthquakes or floods or hurricanes. I imagine many of them like Iran or North Korea would turn them down. But as a democracy and a self proclaimed nation of all men are created equal, offering short term humanitarian aid would seem like the right thing to do. And yes I imagine some of the aid would disappear into the rabbit hole of local corruption but we piss away money on a lot of things that won’t do us any good either. But being an olive branch on the world stage in times of stress and disaster should be worth the effort.
