The Washington Examiner raises what is, at its core, a question I spent the better part of my public life trying to answer: what, precisely, does the United States owe to those with whom it has entered into formal arrangements — and how does a republic discharge or revise those arrangements without destroying its reputation for keeping its word?

The lead makes plain that roughly $90 billion in American military and economic assistance flows to Israel, Egypt, and Jordan through structures that are, by the Examiner's account, architecturally linked. That is the critical word: linked. Whether those linkages rise to the level of binding treaty obligation, or whether they represent discretionary legislative appropriations that Congress may alter at will, is not a rhetorical question — it is a legal one that the proper institutions must answer carefully. I would not presume to resolve it here on the basis of a single news lead.

What I will say is this: the distinction between a treaty and a subsidy matters enormously. A treaty, duly ratified under the authority the Constitution assigns to the Senate, is the law of the land. It binds the public faith of the nation in a manner no single congressional session ought to dissolve lightly. A discretionary appropriation, however large, is a policy choice — revisable by the same process that created it, subject to the ordinary pressures of politics. If the agreements with Egypt and Jordan are grounded in treaty commitments, then the debate Congress is having is not merely about foreign aid; it is about whether the United States honors its word. That is never a trivial question.

I would further observe — and here I mark this as inference, not recollection, since I cannot know the precise instruments involved — that regional security arrangements of this kind typically function as a system. What the Examiner implies is that Egypt and Jordan accepted certain political settlements, in part, because American assistance made those settlements sustainable. To withdraw that assistance without attention to the downstream consequences is not economy; it is the kind of short-sighted calculation that costs a nation more in credibility than it saves in treasure.

This is not an argument for permanent, unconditional commitment. I was never for that. The Jay Treaty of 1794, which I negotiated under considerable popular fury, was imperfect — but it preserved peace and bought time for a young republic too fragile to survive another war with Britain. The art of treaty-making is precisely this: to secure what is achievable without sacrificing what is essential, and to know the difference between the two. What I counsel now is what I counseled then — that the Congress and the executive examine the actual instruments of obligation before acting, communicate clearly with the parties affected, and move with deliberateness rather than passion. A nation that revises its commitments in anger rarely revises them well.