What House Republicans can learn from David Cameron and the Tories.

As House Republicans press for deeper budget cuts, one of their top targets is foreign aid. It is a tempting candidate for draconian cuts—a soft priority in today’s hard fiscal times and a budget line with no strong domestic constituency. Before Republican budget hawks wield their knife, however, they should take a lesson from their conservative cousins in the United Kingdom: When belt-tightening gets serious, foreign aid should be improved, not gutted.

After coming to power last summer, British conservatives have not just talked about slashing Britain’s budget, they have delivered. They are well into the implementation of deep budget cuts which will average 19 percent across almost every area of government spending and are projected to eliminate the UK’s current deficit by 2015. These cuts dwarf any mainstream proposals currently under consideration in Washington, on either side of the political aisle.

The Tory-led austerity hits hard at Britain’s international affairs budget. Defense spending is down 7.5 percent over the next four years. The diplomatic budget will shrink by 24 percent in the same period. Yet note this: Spending on foreign aid has been “ringfenced” from reductions—one of only two areas of spending, alongside national health, to be spared. In fact, the British government will increase foreign-aid outlays by 37 percent in real terms over the next four years, even as the rest of the budget stabilizes or shrinks further. And British aid was hardly miserly to start with—it was already roughly double U.S. foreign aid as a percentage of GDP before the planned increases.

Why are frugal, hardheaded British conservatives carrying out one of the biggest non-crisis induced budget reductions in the history of established democracies exempting foreign aid from the axe? For three main reasons, all instructive in the U.S. context.

First, British conservatives recognize that cutting foreign aid is penny-wise pound-foolish for a power with significant, wide-ranging international security interests, especially relating to terrorism. What makes better financial sense—spending several billion dollars per year helping an array of fragile states in troubled regions build their state capacity or forking out tens or hundreds of billions of dollars on emergency interventions when one of those states collapses or erupts? The British defense review completed last October flags development aid as an essential tool in heading off trouble in a range of shaky states.