A familiar argument holds that, because the world's needs are limitless, governments should devote themselves exclusively to their own citizens. While I readily concede that a state's primary obligation lies with its own people, I cannot accept the further claim that it should disregard the world beyond its frontiers.
The case for domestic priority is not unreasonable. Citizens finance their government through taxation and are entitled to expect that revenue to be directed towards improving their own lives, be it through healthcare, education or infrastructure. Every nation, furthermore, grapples with formidable internal difficulties, from poverty to unemployment, and a government that lavished resources abroad while neglecting these would justly be accused of betraying those it exists to serve.
Yet to leap from this to the wholesale abandonment of other nations is, in my view, both shortsighted and morally untenable. Ours is a profoundly interconnected world, and its most menacing problems, pandemics, climate change and war among them, recognise no borders whatsoever. When affluent states assist their poorer counterparts, they help to build a more stable and secure global order from which they themselves ultimately benefit. Layered upon this pragmatic logic is an ethical imperative that is difficult to dismiss: to extend help to those in dire need is simply right.
My considered position, then, is that a government should certainly attend to its own citizens first, but that doing so is entirely compatible with offering measured assistance to others when it is able. I therefore disagree that governments ought to focus solely on their own country, for in an interdependent age cooperation advances the interests of all.