Secretary of State Kerry Opens Lobbying Campaign for Foreign Aid

“Deploying diplomats today is much cheaper than deploying troops tomorrow,” Secretary of State John Kerry told an audience at the University of Virginia in his first speech in his new post. The foreign aid budget, including the State Department budget, is about a penny of the each U.S. federal budget dollar, the secretary said, according to the Washington Post's Anne Gearan. The costs of turning inward away from the world would be huge, Kerry said, while “the vacuum we would leave by retreating within ourselves will quickly be filled by those whose interests differ dramatically from our own.”