If the world has had enough of helping others, then somebody forgot to tell Spain.

Yes, Spain. The same country that, a little more than a decade ago, desperately accepted billions in bailout money from its European neighbors to keep its economy afloat. That Spain is now doing something almost unthinkable. It’s ramping up aid spending just as the United States notoriously retreats. And in the process, Spain is trying to remind the world why we give back in the first place.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) — the world’s largest humanitarian aid donor by far, whose work in recent years saved upward of a million lives per year — was officially dismantled earlier this month. Its scattered remains were subsumed by the State Department and its empty headquarters given to the FBI. But America isn’t the only one putting itself first these days. The UK, France, Belgium, and Germany all slashed their development budgets this year thanks to a wave of right-wing populism painting foreign aid as an unnecessary expense against the national interest.

The crisis is steep. The pot of money going to global development is set to shrink by 17 percent, or $35 billion, in 2025, on top of a $21 billion drop the year before, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That’s a $56 billion funding vacuum where global aid for mosquito nets, vaccine research, and food assistance used to be. And the declines are likely to become even steeper in the years ahead, as cuts in the US take full effect.

But while President Donald Trump was gutting USAID, Spain made moves to rebuild its aid agency and committed to more than doubling its aid budget by 2030. Nor is it alone: Ireland, South Korea, and Italy also all made recent pledges to boost their foreign aid budgets.

It’s far from enough to fill the foreign aid gap, however. And while the pain will fall primarily on impoverished recipient countries, foreign aid doesn’t just help the countries that receive it. It helps everyone.

Diseases and conflict don’t recognize legal borders and aid helps keep these deadly problems at bay. Every $100 million spent on preventing tuberculosis, HIV, and malaria helps prevent about 2.2 million new infections total. And global cuts are already expected to exacerbate the spread of diseases; former USAID officials anticipate cuts from the US alone could cause 28,000 new cases of infectious diseases like Ebola and Marburg each year. “Even if you’re in this isolationist mindset, you can’t actually isolate yourself from the rest of the world,” said Rachael Calleja, a research fellow at the Center for Global Development.

The fact that some countries have managed to fight the impulse to isolate — convincing their citizens that problems abroad are interconnected with our problems at home — could help reshape the future of aid for the better. Their decisions point to the possibility of a new future for foreign aid that could be more collaborative and less paternalistic than before.

Aid has long been dominated by a small club of wealthy nations — chief among them the United........

© Vox