When and why did Republicans stop complaining about foreign aid?

[darklordoftech]

Throughout the Cold War, Republicans often tried to cut foreign aid. What happened to that?

[Agonized-Statism]

Like all foreign policy debates in the party, it's tied to factionalism, namely a split that we've called at various points Establishment vs. Trumpists, Neocons vs. Paleocons, Eastern Establishment vs. Isolationists, and Imperialists vs. Anti-Imperialists if you wanna go all the way back to the 19th century. The establishment of US hegemony at the end of the Cold War, attributed to Reagan's rollback doctrine and put to the test with Bush's War on Terror, made international involvement of all kinds toward the protection of this hegemony the position of Republican leadership.

That's changed though with the collapse of the party's Reagan Era consensus. The foreign aid debate got ripped back open with emergence of the (ostensibly) anti-deficit, anti-big government Tea Party and particularly tense with the rise of Trump: remember when Lindsey Graham said in 2017 that Trump's proposal to cut the diplomacy and aid budget by one-third would "gut soft power". You'll see a lot more contention among conservatives on the issue going forward as the position of the US as hegemon is questioned in a bigger way from the right, although I think international involvement and empire-building definitely isn't down for the count among Republicans in favor of MAGA isolationism either, the counterpoint being that US soft power is an important counter to China.