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Restoring Purpose to Foreign Aid
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15642 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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2 / 1989 |
4,976 Words |
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Nicholas Eberstadt
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American foreign aid policies must be made more effective. Their effectiveness cannot be increased, however, without an appreciation of the larger purposes to which they are to be applied. In principle, these purposes are clear. The first is to augment American political power throughout the world. The second is to support the postwar liberal international economic order that the United States helped create and is committed to preserving.
These purposes are closely related. With its particular political values, the United States can achieve greatest security under a world order that accepts as legitimate the free international flow of information, trade, technology, and capital; that does not question the right of people to act to improve their material well-being; and that embraces the rule of law and the propriety of enlightened governance. Conversely, the use of American power to protect a system that offers all nations and peoples opportunity--unmatched by alternative arrangements--to participate in broad-based material advance is not only a strategic goal but an objective dictated by U.S. moral and humanitarian concerns. The liberal international economic order America helped create remains the best broad hope for the world's poor and disadvantaged peoples. The United States should use its power--military, financial, moral--to protect it.
Just as the wedding of moral purpose and international power is fundamental to Americans' view of their own nation, so too should it govern the country's approach to foreign aid. In a consideration of foreign assistance, however, it is best to distinguish three separate concerns.
Humanitarian aid
As current events in Ethiopia demonstrate, much of mankind is still stalked by the prospect of famine and sudden, unexpected, life-threatening disasters. Both private voluntary organizations and the American governmental relief apparatus have developed impressive expertise in saving lives in such emergencies. These efforts have demonstrated that it is possible to prevent abnormal rises in death rates so long as donors receive early warning of the impending crisis and the government of the territory in question does not obstruct rescue efforts.
The American people have consistently proved that their compassion for those in distress abroad is mitigated neither by the ideology of the government of the stricken territory nor the relationship of that government with the United States. In the early 1920s, for example, private donations funded Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration as it worked in Soviet Russia to save, according to George Kennan, the lives of "several million children, who would otherwise have died." Americans are donating millions of dollars to support relief operations in Marxist-Leninist Ethiopia; these contributions mounted spontaneously after information on the famine was released. Ethiopia's ruling Dergue, like the Soviet Politburo, is systematically hostile to American purposes in the world, but this fact did not constrain Americans' charitable impulse. Americans' commitment to humanitarian relief is moral, not political, in derivation. It represents a basic commitment from one people to another and is based on the belief that the sanctity of life creates a transcendent obligation to act to save others.
American policies toward humanitarian
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