Massie Warned Us About Foreign Aid to Egypt. The Region Just Proved His Point
For fourteen years in Congress, Thomas Massie cast the same vote on foreign aid packages, over and over, regardless of which country was asking. No. Not to Egypt. Not to Syria. Not to Israel. Not to Ukraine.
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He said it plainly to CBS News during his final campaign. No country is special, and no country deserves my constituents’ taxpayer dollars. It cost him. AIPAC and allied pro-Israel political action committees poured more than fifteen million dollars into defeating him this spring, turning his Kentucky primary into the most expensive House race in American history. Massie lost. But losing an election doesn’t make a position wrong, and recent events out of the Middle East suggest his instincts on Egypt specifically were sharper than almost anyone gave him credit for.
Why does that matter now?
Because just weeks after Massie’s defeat, a prominent Israeli nationalist activist stood on stage at the Jewish News Syndicate’s International Policy Summit in Jerusalem and said something that should stop every American taxpayer funding foreign aid programs cold. Fifteen years from now, Israel will have a war with Egypt, said Amiad Cohen, CEO of the Herut Center for Israeli Liberty. He went further, predicting the Muslim Brotherhood would eventually retake power in Cairo, effectively ending the 1979 Camp David peace treaty that has anchored the region’s fragile stability for nearly half a century.
That’s not a fringe voice. Cohen shared a stage at that summit with a sitting Knesset lawmaker and a senior Israeli security researcher. His comments reflect a genuine and growing current inside Israel’s political and security establishment, one that increasingly views Egypt, a country the United States has funded with billions in military aid for decades specifically to preserve peace with Israel, as a future adversary rather than a permanent ally.
Isn’t that exactly the scenario Massie spent over a decade warning Congress about?
His argument was never that Egypt or any other recipient country was uniquely villainous. It was structural. When our government meddles in the internal affairs of foreign countries, he said, it invites those governments to meddle in our affairs. Foreign aid doesn’t buy permanent loyalty or lasting peace. It buys temporary alignment, propped up by billions in American taxpayer dollars, that can shift the moment political winds inside those countries change. Egypt’s government today isn’t guaranteed to be Egypt’s government in fifteen years, and Massie’s entire foreign aid philosophy was built around not betting American treasure on assumptions that fragile.
Cohen’s own remarks underscored the deeper instability Massie always pointed to. America is growing weaker, Cohen argued, urging Israel to diversify its alliances rather than depend on a U.S. partnership he considers increasingly unreliable. That’s a foreign policy insider, from a country that has received more American aid than almost any other nation on earth, openly telling his own audience not to count on Washington’s commitments holding steady. If that’s the honest assessment even from allied voices, what exactly was the argument for locking American taxpayers into decades of open ended funding commitments to begin with?
Massie’s answer, consistent from his very first term to his very last vote, was that there wasn’t one. Every dollar sent overseas was a dollar not funding a bridge in Kentucky, not paying down a national debt that’s ballooned past forty trillion, not reducing the tax burden on the constituents who actually elected him. He wasn’t asking Egypt or Israel or Ukraine to fend for themselves out of hostility. He was asking why American families should keep footing the bill for alliances that foreign policy insiders themselves now openly describe as unstable and temporary.
Massie may not hold a House seat anymore, but the vote he cast, again and again, against foreign aid to Egypt looks less like stubborn contrarianism with each passing month and more like a man who read the region correctly before most of Washington was willing to say the quiet part out loud.