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):
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