President George W. Bush has proposed a huge increase in U.S. foreign aid, potentially reversing years of declining aid budgets. His new push for aid has only two parallels in modern U.S. history: John Kennedy's Alliance for Progress and Harry Truman's Marshall Plan. In those cases, the fear that poverty would breed communism, in the developing world in the 1960s or in Western Europe in the late 1940s, was the motivating factor. Today Americans have found a new reason to take poverty abroad seriously: It will breed terrorists who will strike them at home. Developmentalists, who have long pushed for greater foreign aid on various moral and practical grounds, are not entirely comfortable with the anti-terrorist rationale. But after years of losing arguments about the importance of foreign aid, proponents of aid are not about to look this gift horse too closely in the mouth.