Foreign Aid and National Security

There’s an interesting new site that everyone should check out (just a touch of self promotion here).  It’s an online community called Next America, run by CSIS, that facilitates foreign policy debates on some of the hot topics in this election.  Each week they feature a debate between two contributors with varying opinions on a given topic.  This week’s debate is on whether development assistance should be a tool for promoting national security.  Here’s my opinion piece arguing that development is and should be a tool for national security, but check out the other article plus the ongoing debate through comments here:

One of the major foreign policy developments of the 20th century was the advent of foreign assistance as a major endeavor of the developed world. Unlike other instruments of foreign policy, including diplomacy, military force, and strategic alliances, all of which are explicitly designed to further a country’s national interest, development aid is normally characterized as a moral obligation to help the poor and feed the hungry in the developing world. Despite this perception by policymakers and the public alike, development assistance is and should continue to be an important tool for promoting U.S. national security interests.

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More Jobs for D&G Grads

To honor the first graduating class of Georgetown’s Democracy & Governance program, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has requested 1,100 new State Department Jobs and 300 new USAID positions. Per ‘Leezza:

“We are also requesting in this budget 1,100 new positions for the State Department and 300 new ones for USAID. This represents a rebuilding, if you will, of our civilian capacity to manage programs, to engage in diplomacy. I felt that it was important that we first do some important reallocation and redeployment of our people to demonstrate that we were prepared to make tough choices. And by moving close to 300 people out of Europe and into places like India and the further reaches of China, I think we’ve demonstrated that we are prepared to do what we can with the resources that we have. But the truth is that the diplomatic corps is stretched, USAID is even more stretched. We went through a period in the ‘90s of almost six years where we didn’t hire, didn’t bring in a single Foreign Service Officer. And so we do need to rebuild.”

In fact, the USAID staff has seen tremendous staffing cuts over the past two decades.   And with the inclusion of USAID into the State Department, foreign assistance has become a pretty unwieldy bureaucratic endeavor, although the new framework for foreign assistance (known as the F-Process) seems to be a pretty good start to sorting it out.