By the time I was sworn in as U.S. Agency for International Development administrator in May 2001, there were just 1,150 USAID Foreign Service officers—the personnel who manage health, agriculture, education, and disaster-relief programs, among others, in developing countries. By contrast, at the peak of Vietnam, there had been more than 12,000. The aid reductions in the 1990s put the United States at a disadvantage into the 2000s. The circumstances that gave rise to the September 11 attacks, for example—al-Qaeda rose out of several fragile and failing states—were best addressed by experienced aid workers and diplomats. But by the time the attacks happened, precious few were left at USAID or the State Department. The Bush administration began to staff up the Foreign Service in 2003, the year the Iraq War began and the first year since Vietnam that there were more officers than there had been the year before.

The post-September 11 USAID-State Department infrastructure that the Trump budget proposes to dismantle deals with the challenges of small wars and crises, and aims to prevent them from becoming regionalized and internationalized. It was designed to address threats that are short of war, but in wartime necessitate a team of State Department and USAID officers ready to serve on the front lines.

Today, the notion that threats to American national-security interests don’t merit a robust foreign-aid program is preposterous. The spread of infectious diseases, such as Ebola and Zika; the threat of radical Islamist terrorist movements across North Africa, which are destabilizing to our friends and allies; the mass-migration crisis that is changing the face of American and European politics; an aggressive and expansionary Russia that’s preying on weak states, such as Ukraine; and the growing number of fragile and failing states are all direct threats to the national-security interests of the United States.

In public, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has argued that the State Department budget he inherited from the Obama administration was a war budget, and was “unsustainable”—because the United States will be involved in fewer wars in the future, higher aid spending and staffing levels aren’t needed. But how the White House can anticipate future wars is a mystery, as experienced foreign-policy experts over the past century have failed at this task more than they’ve succeeded. Most of the wars of the 20th century, large and small, were not anticipated by anyone, least of all by the U.S. government.

Further complicating the matter, the president has ordered Defense Secretary James Mattis to develop a plan to destroy ISIS. In the unlikely event that it works, and some sort of peace is fashioned in Syria and Iraq, do the United States, Russia, and our allies simply intend to walk away after the military campaign is over and leave behind the wreckage of the war—and the 10.9 million displaced people and refugees to fend for themselves?