During Bill Clinton’s presidency, our economy was a-boomin.’ According to BBC News, the economy expanded by 50 percent, the United States had a gross national product of $10,000 billion (one-quarter of the entire world economic output), and the stock market was growing at over three times the normal rate, turning thousands of middle-class stockholders into millionaires nearly overnight.

But now, we have no such luck. With the outstanding public debt at $12 trillion, according to the U.S. Department of Treasury, deficit spending to help police foreign countries is nowhere near what we should be doing. In order to save our free-falling economy, politicians need to be following the key rule we’re given when sitting on an airplane: “In case of a crash, put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.”

I’m in-between when it comes to supplying foreign aid when we have money to spend, but why now? Why help other countries when we’re falling apart from the inside? While we’re trying to set up democracies in countries that have been known as hostile states for decades, our own unemployment rate has skyrocketed.

If we keep putting other countries’ needs before our own, we’ll be the ones asking for foreign aid in time.

Countries can be categorized into three groups: passive, peaceful and aggressive. How appropriate the method with which the war on terrorism was executed is something to be debated, but we needed to do something to show that the United States isn’t a passive country. At the same time, we don’t want to become known as aggressors.

As Theodore Roosevelt said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”

The problem now is, if we decide to focus on our own economy instead of those of other countries, we can’t pull out of the war too quickly. For the most part, a stable country is a peaceful country, and pulling out too quickly will send the message that we’ve given up on stopping terrorism, even if that isn’t really the case. If we do so slowly but surely, however, we can make sure to not disrupt the partial peace we’ve created, or else prevention of sudden anarchy from breaking loose will be impossible. That will mean that all we’ve done has gone to waste.

In the end, we must take care of ourselves before we can help anyone else. We need an exit plan for Iraq so that we can begin to recuperate to the point where we’re strong enough to even think about supplying foreign aid. And even then, we may want to consider the warning George Washington gave the country so many years ago: Stay away from foreign affairs.

Reach Brian at brian.p.anderson@asu.edu.