I attended a panel forum the other night titled “U.S. Foreign Assistance and the Obama Administration: The Challenges Lying Ahead”. Much of what was said was covered in my earlier post — emphasizing the point that we don’t know much about what to expect. During the Q&A part, a man stood up and asked about “transformational diplomacy” and the interlinkage between development and national security. He then got quite the applause when he shouted “We should be doing development for development sake”!

On my first day in Irving Rosenthal’s class, “Rethinking US Foreign Assistance”, I remember having this same discussion and I got some scowls when I declared it doesn’t matter how we justify aid in rhetoric so long as the money is appropriated and the projects are properly executed — it’s politics!

With this in mind, I thought I’d post my midterm paper for the class on the inseparability of US Foreign Aid and National Security (if you are wondering why I formatted my sections this way, we were given a list of questions to answer 3 — I tried to make it flow, though):

Executive Summary
The focus of this paper is to illustrate the inseparability of US foreign assistance and national security objectives. National security, in the case of this paper, incorporates physical, economic and political security, as all three are heavily reliant on global stability. The paper begins by examining the idealist and realist approaches to US foreign assistance programs by presenting the two frameworks, providing a historical perspective, and arguing that using either framework as a lens in appropriating foreign assistance can be damaging as the two are inseparable. The second section of the paper uses the Cold War as an example of how US foreign assistance was used as a foreign policy tool and show that the post-Cold War decline in foreign assistance proved to result in a new threat to national security interests. All of this culminates in the third section to very recent history in a post-9/11 world, where emphasis on US foreign assistance and its correlation to national security objectives is at an all-new high.

Idealist versus Realist Approach to US Foreign Aid
Idealism and Realism are the two fundamental paradigms through which all issues pertaining to international affairs can be viewed. Both derive from the notion of American exceptionalism, but differ in both their views of the world order and what the fundamental role of US foreign policy is within that world order. With respect to US foreign assistance programs, both paradigms offer rationale for why such programs are necessary.

The idealist approach argues that foreign assistance is a humanitarian act and that through our altruistic benevolence, we will be rewarded by a better world. Within the world order, it is important for the United States to lead by example, and use its tools of foreign policy and foreign assistance to create a more democratic and economically prosperous future for all.

Realism, however, typically centers on the idea that underlying national security interests or imperatives always drive foreign policy and foreign assistance actions. The realist framework would argue that by providing assistance to foreign countries, we leverage our influence over that respective government. Under this approach, the US would use its foreign assistance programs as a means to create stability or leverage control on natural resources vital to the economic operations of the United States. Under a strict realist approach, one would expect to see a close integration among State Department, Department of Defense, and US foreign assistance programs.

It is often heard echoing off the walls of the palaces of third world dictators or from the rope lines of anti-West activists that Western countries have no interest in lifting the global south out of poverty because we benefit from their being poor. There is no argument that could be further from the truth. Poverty alleviation and development initiatives have stark implications in terms of national security, economic prosperity, and worldwide political stability.

The history of US foreign assistance has been a theoretical and practical battle among those attempting to convince the nation that it is in our best interest to invest in countries and in people around the world. Foreign assistance began with a realist-motif with the “lend-lease” program to the Allied nations during WWII. After the war, the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan after the war to re-develop Europe falls between the realist and idealist definitions, as it was in our national security and economic security interest but was also in part a moral imperative. Aid flows then began to go to Turkey and Greece to counter Soviet influence. After WWII there was politically a hard push toward liberal institutionalism, the hope to establish an international order based on law and institutions and transcending power politics. But the Cold War pervaded this hope, as the West battled the Soviets for the hearts, minds, and ideological influence of all that lay in between.

President Kennedy supported US foreign assistance programs while waving the idealist mantra. He said during his 1961 inaugural address, “To those people…struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves…not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.” He created USAID and sought to separate military assistance and development assistance. But up unto the end of the Cold War, the realist paradigm for foreign assistance continued to hold in Africa, South Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. The continuance of those initiatives post-Cold War hinged largely on the idealist rationales. But if one looks at the case of Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion, we provided military assistance but failed to provide the necessary development assistance and today we find ourselves back in the country fighting a new brand of ideology – showing us that realism and idealism, while being two difference frameworks, are practically inseparable when it comes to moral imperative versus strategic interests.

Academics love to think in terms of these frameworks, but I find it greatly damaging. Both frameworks shed light on important reasons as to why US foreign assistance programs are important, but a strict interpretation of either realism or idealism shapes policy in a manner that is self-defeating. First and foremost, the American exceptionalism approach to foreign policy leads to conditional assistance whereby a country must adopt certain political and economic policies in order to receive assistance. Empirically, the imposed conditions have resulted from naïveté and lack of understanding for different cultural norms and contexts, and also a lack of understanding of the full American experience. Second of all, both frameworks tend to get muddled in short-term and long-term goals. A strict idealist approach attempts to take on a near-impossible task of helping every single person in every single country – effective aid programs should be strategically implemented and built to become self-sustaining so that we can then target the next country or region. A strict realist approach runs the risk of getting caught up in the short-term strategic interests of the United States and can often run the risk of forgetting that it is in our long-term strategic national security interests to alleviate poverty worldwide, provide education, and help create prosperous economies where hope and aspiration drive peoples lives rather than hopelessness and destitution.

Cold War and Post-Cold War Impact on US Aid
Over the course of the Cold War, US foreign assistance programs surged as competition with the USSR counterpart fought to win over the hearts and minds of vulnerable countries around the world as each adversary sought appropriate spheres of influence both politically and economically (in terms of resources). The largest and most successful initiative was, of course, the Marshall Plan – designed to ensure the war-damaged states of Europe did not fall into the attractive communist ideology due to their hopeless sentiments and economic instability at the time. This drive was prompted by the famous telegraph of George Kennan warning of the vulnerable nature of many countries and the need for “containment”.

Outside of the Marshall Plan, the character of US foreign assistance was inconsistent and largely driven by short-term foreign policy decisions in the State Department. Development initiatives during this time were focused on “battleground states”, supporting anti-communist dictators such as Mobutu in Zaire, Marcos in the Philippines, and Suharto in Indonesia regardless of their abysmal domestic policies. US foreign assistance administrators treated states that appeared to be emerging democracies inconsistently. Also, a strong correlation exists between US foreign assistance initiatives and the countries where the Soviets were investing. Through this, countries like Ethiopia where dictators were taking foreign assistance from both sides were hugely empowered. Many of these countries fell into chaotic states when foreign assistance dried up immediately after the end of the Cold War.

After the end of the Cold War, hopes ran high among development specialists of continued foreign assistance that would not be weighted or determined by geo-political interests. Unfortunately, the attacks of September 11, 2001 charged the realist (and neoconservative) base, turning turned US foreign aid back into a geopolitical tool.

Linkages Between US Foreign Aid Activities and US National Security Policy
As has been stated thus far, US foreign assistance has long been closely associated with national security policy. I have pointed out that all foreign assistance has national security implications seeing as our physical, economic, and ideological/political security are all reliant on global stability, which can only fully result from the full integration of the developing world from the periphery into the core where hope and aspirations thrive. In the last section, we saw how US foreign assistance can and has been used as a tool for executing national security and foreign policy objectives. We ended that section with the mention of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

After September 11th, the world came to realize the ideological threat that had emerged over the course of the last decade or so. A new Cold War emerged. The reasons were numerous. The actors were diverse. But one thing was clear: radicalized Islam was feeding off of the poverty, illiteracy, and sentiments of hopelessness in the region. Development assistance became a central focus of President Bush’s administration. The administration has accepted the 3D approach: defense, diplomacy, and development. Incorporated in the theory of transformational diplomacy the US targets specific countries in which a combination of the 3Ds should be most heavily emphasized. Development assistance has become more and more intertwined with both foreign and national security policy. Development assistance (including health, education, and agricultural assistance) is even now explicitly part of the President’s National Security Strategy (NSS).

Under the Bush administration, foreign assistance has increased markedly (53% overall, and threefold in Africa). He has continually emphasized the importance and the correlation of development assistance and national (and global) security. Under this administration, idealism and realism have merged. Whether the politicization and low popularity of the President has a negative impact on this progress (as Madeleine Albright warned of in “A Realistic Idealism”) will be seen in the coming years.