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Edited by Lael Brainard

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Security by Other Means

Brookings Institution Press

Chapter One

Lael Brainard

The tragic events of September 11, 2001, together with the protracted unfolding tragedy of the HIV/AIDS pandemic have catapulted America's relations with poor nations to a high priority on our national security agenda. Heightened attention to the plight of the hundreds of millions living in poverty and more than 500 million threatened by infectious disease was discernible both at the highest levels of government and in public discourse in the late 1990s, but it took a fundamental disruption to the security environment to produce bipartisan support for commitment of substantially greater resources.

Since that time funding has grown, and programs and offices responsible for formulating and implementing U.S. policy toward poor nations have proliferated, but with little clarity of purpose and no comprehensive organizational design. Indeed, while development nominally has been elevated to coequal status with diplomacy and defense as part of the president's national security strategy triad, in reality a growing preponderance of funding is directed at postconflict reconstruction, strategic and security objectives, and humanitarian crises. Despite this multiplicity of objectives, critics loudly lament the poor "development" outcomes of assistance never originally designed nor deployed for purposes of long-term development.

Nation-states have been providing official assistance to other states as far back as the 1700s, for much of that time as a means of strengthening security allies. In fact, America first experienced foreign aid as a beneficiary, when it went hat in hand to request French assistance in the fight against the British. But the notion of using taxpayer monies to promote economic growth in foreign lands is a relatively recent one. The U.S. foreign aid enterprise got into full swing only in the wake of two world wars and with the threat of the cold war looming. Indeed, as Owen Barder points out in chapter 10, even in Britain it was not until the 1920s that British politicians began to debate directing resource flows into their much poorer colonies for development, in sharp contrast to the traditional emphasis on imperial security and markets for British trade. For the United States, the development enterprise did not begin in earnest until the Marshall Plan, where a complex mix of motives can be discerned, including the moral impulse but also the desire to build strong bulwarks against communism in Europe and to restore the critical trade relationships that were so vital to American manufacturing. Today that same mix of interests can be seen.

Foreign assistance is an instrument, not an end in itself. Foreign assistance variously serves to advance national security, national interests, and national values. It works best when there is clarity about the strategic objective it is designed to serve and well aligned with the other instruments of American power: military power, economic exchange, and diplomacy. Unfortunately, at present that sort of clarity and alignment is the exception rather than the rule.

Today, U.S. interests in the developing world have never been greater-in economic, security, and humanitarian terms. Tomorrow, U.S. interests in the developing world will be greater still, as demographic trends project the fastest population growth in those nations least capable of providing adequate economic opportunity, health care, and education to their citizens. A tectonic shift is under way in the global balance of power, as measured in population and resource use. Over the next four decades, the earth's population will grow by 40 percent, and developing countries will account for all of that increase, swelling their ranks to nearly 8 billion-86 percent of the world's population. Moreover, both developed and developing nations confront threats to their security that were scarcely imagined when America's foreign assistance statutory framework was enacted. Yet the United States continues to deploy its primary "soft power" tool through obsolete cold war-era structures. It is high time to step back from the urgent task of moving money out the door and focus on the important enterprise of reorienting American foreign assistance away from cold war tools and concepts and toward twenty-first century realities. This book seeks to respond to that need, starting in this chapter by constructing a unified conceptual framework for U.S. foreign assistance that encompasses strategic and humanitarian objectives and long-term development.

Back in the Spotlight

The international community has increasingly recognized the vital importance of foreign assistance in recent years. An ever-growing chorus of voices has mobilized to prod political leaders toward greater generosity, running the gamut from Christian evangelical groups to human rights activists. The Jubilee 2000 Campaign for third world debt relief was the first major example of the "big-tent" approach, whose success paved the way for subsequent campaigns, including the ONE Campaign in the United States against global AIDS and poverty, and the "Make Poverty History" movement in the United Kingdom.

Celebrity appeal has helped to transform foreign aid from a decidedly unglamorous bureaucratic backwater to one of the hippest topics around. The tireless work of Bono (from the rock group U2) against poverty earned him a Nobel Peace Prize nomination; Irish musician Bob Geldof staged six "Live 8" rockstravaganzas in advance of the 2005 G-8 summit; and MTV broadcast "The Diary of Angelina Jolie and Dr. Jeffrey Sachs in Africa." Public figures have also lent their personal renown to the cause, with Nelson Mandela urging young people to wear white armbands to demonstrate their commitment to combating poverty and Bill Clinton inaugurating the high-profile poverty-centered Clinton Global Initiative in New York City.

Many political leaders are heeding the call. In 2005 alone a trio of key international meetings centered on the fight against global poverty: the Gleneagles Group of Eight (G-8) Summit in July, where British prime minister Tony Blair pledged to put Africa's challenges front and center; the United Nations General Assembly's review of the Millennium Development Goals in September; and the World Trade Organization's ministerial meeting in December, where the fate of the Doha Development Agenda hung in the balance.

But celebrity appeal, international pressure, and powerful advocacy existed before the growing mobilization of foreign assistance in the United States. So too did alarm about the humanitarian calamity of HIV/AIDS and commitment at the highest levels of the U.S. government to combat global poverty, as demonstrated by U.S. support for the Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative; the UN special session on HIV/AIDS; establishment of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria; and agreement on the UN Millennium Development Goals. Yet political impediments proved more powerful still, such as the widely shared skepticism articulated by former U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Jesse Helms when he noted that foreign aid only "lined the pockets of...