Societies that scapegoat foreign powers for domestic problems erode their ability to solve those problems.
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There has been no shortage of explanations for the devastation wrought by the wildfires still burning across greater Los Angeles. Some commentators have argued that sclerotic local governance left the region unprepared to respond to such a large-scale disaster. Others have invoked the impact of climate change or the perils of the Santa Ana winds. And some have blamed the Ukrainians or Israel.
“We sent $250 billion to Ukraine,” Charlie Kirk, the CEO of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, wrote on X. “And yet we can’t get water to fight fires in California.” The post received more than 100,000 likes and 10 million views, and was echoed by other pro–Donald Trump surrogates. “California is literally on fire right now so of course Biden gave Ukraine more money,” quipped Not the Bee, a popular right-wing commentary site, in response to the administration announcing its final military-aid package this week.
On the other side of the ideological spectrum, a similar discourse has unfolded—but with a different culprit. “Sorry America, your government couldn’t afford water for fire hydrants and firefighting planes, they have to give billion of tax dollars to israel to kill innocent children in Gaza,” declared the activist Mohamad Safa, who runs a human-rights organization accredited by the United Nations, in an X post that garnered some 150,000 likes and 2.9 million views. In response to an NBC report that L.A.’s fire chief had warned that budget cuts could harm “response to large-scale emergencies,” the progressive commentator Mehdi Hasan appended this to the headline: “US spends a record $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel since last Oct. 7.”
Similar attempts to export accountability abroad emerged after September’s Hurricane Helene and are fast becoming a fixture of our post-disaster discourse. But whether left-coded or right-coded, such claims are equally misguided—and dangerous. California has the fifth-largest economy in the world, ranking ahead of the United Kingdom, India, and France. It is one of the wealthiest and highest-taxed states in America. Simply put, the federal government using a fraction of a percent of its $6.8 trillion budget for Ukraine and Israel is not why one of the richest state governments in the country was unprepared to deal with a very plausible emergency. Regardless of what one thinks of either conflict, they have nothing to do with what is transpiring in Los Angeles.
Bizarre theories like these are damaging not just because they misconstrue the nature of American governance or assail overseas targets, but because they undermine our society’s capacity to self-correct. In the aftermath of disaster, healthy communities ask themselves, What did we do wrong? Unhealthy ones ask, Who did this to us? Nations that externalize their internal issues lose the ability to address them. Blaming freeloading foreigners for the policy and governance failures that enabled the L.A. wildfires will not prevent future failures, but rather will allow the real causes of those failures to continue to fester.
For this reason, the historian Walter Russell Mead once warned that “an addiction to implausible conspiracy theories is a very strong predictor of national doom.” When people pin their domestic problems on foreign scapegoats—whether Ukraine or Israel or another country—they erode any effort to genuinely confront those problems. Which means that those who spread these arguments don’t just endanger their targets; they endanger us all.
