Those who make decisions that affect entire societies, or the world, must constantly weigh the benefits of actions against their costs. Certain policies are simply not worth pursuing. That is especially true when it is plainly obvious that enacting them will do a great deal of harm and little good.

Someone in the White House or the Department of Commerce should have gone through that calculus in April when the administration was thinking about imposing tariffs on Lesotho, a tiny African nation. Lesotho exported goods worth about $235 million to the U.S. last year, while its imports from the U.S. totaled around $3 million. Because the U.S. ran a trade deficit with the country, President Trump decided to impose a 50 percent tariff on its exports to the U.S.

In 2000, the U.S. Congress passed the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which allowed duty-free access to the U.S. market for over 1,800 products from sub-Saharan African countries. AGOA jumpstarted Lesotho’s textile industry, which quickly became the lifeblood of the nation’s economy. Until early this year, it provided 90 percent of industrial jobs in the country.

The tariff announcement instantly brought Lesotho’s textile industry to a halt. U.S. retailers canceled orders or stopped placing new ones. Garment factories were forced to shut down, leading to thousands of layoffs. Three months after the 50 percent tariff was imposed, the administration lowered it to 15 percent. But a lot of damage had already been done, and the industry may not fully recover.

The New York Times tells several harrowing stories to paint a picture of the devastation. A 30-year-old single mother who earned $7 a day at the factory where she worked is now out of a job and cannot pay her son’s school fees. He is now at home and she struggles to find food for him. Another woman, who is 36 and similarly lost her job at a garment factory, is so desperate that she has resorted to prostitution—at the suggestion of a friend. It is the only way she can pay her rent and buy groceries for her three children. Can any of us imagine our mother having to make such a decision? And having to actually engage in that line of work so she can feed us?

Sadly, there are some greedy people in this world who have absolutely no qualms about profiting from other people’s misery. The Wall Street Journal reported that a lobbying group claiming to have access to some prominent members of the Trump family told Lesotho’s trade minister that for a fee of $1.5 million, the group would campaign for tariff relief for his country. According to the minister, the lobbyists wanted payment upfront but weren’t prepared to guarantee results so he refused the offer. There is something quite unseemly about folks from a wealthy country trying to take even the little that people in a place like Lesotho have.

It is one thing to take measures to address unfair commercial practices of China and other major trading partners. But Lesotho? Why on earth should a $232 million trade deficit matter to a country with a $30 trillion economy? We should be picking our battles a bit more wisely than that. Our thinking increasingly seems to be that other people’s problems are theirs to solve and not for us to worry about, and that we are so rich and powerful that we don’t need friends anywhere. A bit of humility would do us a tremendous amount of good. We shouldn’t be alienating the rest of the world so needlessly and with such carelessness.

Because of my background, I am quite familiar with the conditions in which those desperate women in Lesotho now find themselves. The people at the highest levels of our government may not have experienced that level of poverty ever in their lives, but that is no excuse for their callousness. No matter who we are or where we live, we are required to put ourselves in other people’s shoes every once in a while.