Last year, the Trump administration cut off funding for foreign language education and area studies, and there’s no need to weep. These programs are “inconsistent with Administration priorities and do not advance American interests or values,” and that’s true enough. The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has published several reports on how Middle East Studies Centers have become politicized vessels for foreign powers to exert soft power influence upon America.

These programs were created to educate a cadre of Americans prepared to serve America’s national interests by providing our government with information about the nature of the different regions of the world. Instead, they largely serve to staff a web of nonprofit organizations dedicated to frustrating the exertion of American power or subordinating it to the desires of our foreign rivals and clients. As a cherry on top, these programs staff universities with large numbers of professors and administrators intent on imposing a toxic combination of identity politics and anti-Americanism on our universities. Defunding these snake pits is a no-brainer.

What is more difficult is to figure out what to replace these programs with—and, indeed, whether to replace them at all. Does America still need to pay to educate citizens to learn about the outside world?

America’s Year Zero of 1945, as it prepared to establish its postwar global hegemony, was an extraordinarily different world. Vanishingly few Americans spoke Russian, much less—even including our plentiful missionaries—Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, and all the other languages of the world. Nor did many inhabitants of those countries speak English. A world of peasants with a veneer of thinly Westernized elites, raised in remarkably alien cultural milieus, thought and acted in unfamiliar and unpredictable ways. An America preparing for global leadership and the muffled combat of the Cold War needed to educate its citizens with knowledge of the world’s languages and ways.

2026 is a different world, however. Several generations of government-subsidized professors succeeded and provided America with small libraries of English-language scholarship on just about every country and culture in the world. American culture has conquered much of the world: billions now recognize American tag phrases, hundreds of millions speak English, and much of the half-Americanized world can communicate with us easily enough. Their acquaintance with America’s deepest cultural roots may be superficial, but we at least have many foreign interlocutors with whom we can begin to converse.

Meanwhile, OCR, Google Translate, and AI can give us the gist of a foreign country’s documents in seconds. Study of foreign languages in American universities is cratering, presumably because American businesses and citizens feel ever less need to learn about the outside world, as the outside world melts into a larger America. The American government, too, can handle much of its ordinary affairs as if foreigners and foreign governments are basically Canadian—scarcely foreign enough to notice.

That is not the entire truth, of course.

Double-double means different things in America and Canada, and Americans still need to know a host of subtle and not-so-subtle differences between their country and the world. Samuel Huntington argued for the enduring strength of distinctive civilizations, and only a fool would ignore that contention. The globalized, Anglophone world contains traps: foreigners who speak English and their native language will have the advantage of information asymmetry against Americans who only speak English. Practically speaking, the success of the opening campaign of the US-Israeli war against Iran depended significantly on Israel educating a large cadre of Persian-speakers for its security establishment. We need knowledge of Sh’ia Islam and modern Iranian society and culture, and of the Arab, Kurdish, Turkish, and Hebrew worlds, to help conduct our war and diplomacy in the coming months. Knowledge of foreign languages and cultures still matters.

Where it matters most, however, is to prepare America to navigate a world where we have lost our postwar hegemony and operate against rivals who are our near-peers, or even our superiors. The postwar world assumed that we needed information to guide our overwhelming power and technological superiority, faced only with the opposition of half-barbarous Soviet Russia. Now we need to know Chinese to keep up to date on AI research, and even Iran has tricks in drone technology we need to learn. In 1914, and even in 1939, America’s professors needed to know German to know the latest scholarship; now, even with the general adoption of English as the international language of science, they need to know Chinese, Hindi, and an ever-lengthening number of languages. At any rate, Langley and the Pentagon need personnel who know those languages.

We could use new area studies centers that are actually focused on the civilizational roots of different areas of the world—Islamic Studies centers that focus on teaching Americans classical Arabic and the Koran rather than Politics of Gender and Women’s Rights in the Middle East. But the government most needs to fund foreign language and area studies focused on learning about the technological and military capacities of great power peers, whose capacities well may exceed ours in a wide variety of endeavors. We are not sahibs creating a new empire, but competitors on an all-too-equal playing field.

We most need a corps of deeply knowledgeable professionals who love America all the more as they immerse themselves in a foreign culture. These professionals should acquire native proficiency in foreign languages, with parallel knowledge of high technology, national security requirements, and foreign culture. In-house education by the Department of War and other federal agencies should provide the capstone for this education.

If the government is to support this education track at the undergraduate level, it would do better to create portable undergraduate fellowships than to subsidize our universities to pay more disaffected radicals. The federal government could work to direct these fellowships toward Americans who truly love and wish to serve their country. Their choices surely would fail some portion of the time, but that would still be a better success-rate than with the guaranteed failure that would come from continuing to support our university establishment.

In an increasingly dangerous multipolar world, defunding anti-American area studies programs is imperative. Whatever we choose to replace them, it should be created with an acute sense that we are not trying to learn about the Odd Ways of Natives, but about the formidable excellences of our strategic rivals.

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