FOREIGN POLICY

NUMBER 73 WINTER 1988-89

THE FORGOTTEN HUMAN AGENDA

by Larry Minear

Peace is breaking out all over, it seems. Intractable conflicts are on their way to settlement in such regional trouble spots as Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, southern Africa, and Indochina. "American-Soviet relations are the best they’ve ever been since World War II," President Ronald Reagan told the 1988 Republican National Convention. This is good news indeed. Yet despite these recent developments, the 1980s have been, in human terms, a disaster. The decade has claimed as casualties growing numbers of poor, hungry, and uprooted people around the world. The casualties have included as well the mechanisms for responding to human suffering and America’s humanitarian traditions themselves.

U.S. foreign policy, always an arena of tension between political and humanitarian goals, has recently elevated the ideological over the humane. However successful the Reagan administration’s anticommunist foreign policy has been, its impact on human beings has been grave. Aid to meet human needs has become politicized. Foreign economic and military policies have compounded human suffering and deprivation. Respect for international humanitarian institutions and laws has ebbed.

The challenge to a new administration and a new Congress is to identify the United States once again with humane values. Reaffirming the American tradition of solidarity with humankind deserves centerpiece status in American thinking about national security and in the day-to-day conduct of foreign policy.

Looking back on 8 years in office, Reagan told the Republican convention that "you don’t become President of the United States.

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You are given temporary custody of an institution called the presidency, which belongs to our people." A review of humanitarian interests during the Reagan years reveals sizable damage for future custodians to repair. The decade itself has been a disaster for the world’s poor people. Countless incidents of hunger and malnutrition, social injustice, population displacement, human rights abuses, and battlefield barbarities all have afflicted the world. Worsening endemic violence and proliferating crises have eroded the quality of human life and threatened the common bonds of humanity.

Poverty has risen. Excluding the People’s Republic of China, the number of people with inadequate diets increased from 650 million to 730 million during the 1970s. "Since 1980 matte" have turned from bad to worse," the World Bank reported in 1988. "Economic growth rates have slowed, real wages have dropped, and growth in employment has faltered in most developing countries. Precipitous declines in commodity prices have cut rural incomes, and governments have reduced their real spending on social services." Compounding the crisis, monetary flows have turned against the poorer countries. Developing countries, with debts reaching almost $1 trillion in 1987, now provide developed countries with twice as much in debt, trade, and other payments as they receive in aid. Large U.S. budget deficits and high interest rates have further reduced the availability of funds worldwide for Third World investment. The prime casualties of austerity are the world’s poor, particularly women and children.

During the decade, massive and perhaps unprecedented numbers of people have fled their homes, their communities, and their countries. Today’s emergency needs are more often associated with armed conflicts than with natural disasters such as droughts and floods. The African countries yet to recover from the 19801985 drought are those also wracked by civil strife: Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Sudan. Conflict, along with chronic food shortages and negative payment balances, has become a structural fact of life for many developing countries.

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Historically, responding to human needs has been an important aspect of U.S. foreign policy. Americans have consistently supported governmental and private programs that express compassion and moral concern. At the same time, American humanitarian traditions have served important political objectives and enhanced U.S. international standing.

More than other recent administrations, Reagan’s has approached developing countries from an East-West perspective. "The premier challenge facing the United States, its allies, and the entire globe," stated the 1980 Republican platform, "is to check the Soviet Union’s global ambitions." Developing countries have been an arena for battling communism, and foreign aid has provided a means to that end. Humanitarian activities have been an extension of the cold war by other means, with the result that political goals have been pursued largely in a humanitarian vacuum.

Of course, the cold war has been a central feature of U.S. foreign policy since World War II. Nonetheless, beginning with the Marshall Plan, American foreign aid has reflected an amalgam of humanitarian concerns and political interests. Above all, what has distinguished the Reagan administration from its predecessors is not its preoccupation with East-West issues, but the degree to which its anticommunism has played havoc with humanitarian interests and traditions. This administration has elevated ideology over humanity to an unprecedented extent.

The resulting politicization is most apparent in the area of humanitarian assistance. The designation as humanitarian assistance of what the administration requested and Congress provided for the contra rebels of Nicaragua violates American custom and international practice. Humanitarian assistance in the tradition of the Geneva Conventions and Protocols of 1949 and 1977 is for the urgent human needs of civilians and captured and wounded soldiers on both sides of conflicts without political or military objectives. But the Reagan view was aptly espoused by the Washington Times in a May 10, 1985, editorial: "Any aid directed at overthrowing communism is humanitarian aid."

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The allocation of emergency aid has also become politicized. The administration has sought ample disaster assistance in situations of comparatively modest need where friendly governments are concerned, such as Grenada in the wake of the 1983 U.S. invasion or El Salvador after the 1986 earthquake. Yet people in substantial need in communist countries have fared less well. For example, the United States did not join other countries in relieving recent drought-related food shortfalls in Vietnam. "While politics have always been a factor in U.S. responses to disasters," says Jeffrey Clark, an aide on the House Select Committee on Hunger, "we’ve never seen such a consistent pattern of disproportionate responses, either overestimating questionable needs or failing to respond to legitimate needs."

Still, humanitarian considerations have on occasion overridden the cold war calculus. The policy enunciated by Reagan in 1984 that "a hungry child knows no politics" represented a major, though delayed victory for U.S. officials who regarded helping starving people in Marxist Ethiopia as a humanitarian imperative. Backed by heavy congressional and public pressure, they prevailed over other officials who held that hungry Ethiopians were a Soviet problem. The decision to aid Ethiopia facilitated later assistance to Mozambique.

Aid that spans idealogical divides has brought significant political benefits. The United States gained international acclaim for helping to save an estimated 1 million Ethiopian lives. Aid "created a fragile bridge between ... two antagonists–a Soviet client state controlled by a Marxist and the world’s richest capitalist nation led by an outspoken antiCommunist.¹ Emergency aid to Mozambique, the State Department concluded in a June 1987 report, bolstered "a conscious decision by Mozambique to reduce its dependence on Moscow and [improve] relations with the West."

A related casualty of the Reagan stewardship of humanitarian interests has been the treatment of refugees fleeing Central Ameri-

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can violence. Again, humane values have been most severely tested by the needs of people across political barriers. For the past several years the United States has granted asylum to fewer than 4 per cent of Salvadoran applicants and fewer than 2 per cent of Guatemalans. Yet by 1987, nearly 90 per cent of Nicaraguan applicants were being admitted.² U.S. humanitarian traditions and obligations were superseded by a desire to avoid the appearance of undercutting friendly governments in the region. The foreign-policy gains from elevating humanitarian responsiveness above ideological tests for asylum could have helped to offset any political costs of conceding the danger to life and limb of citizens living under governments allied with the United States.

Aid and Anticommunism

Politicization did not stop with emergency assistance and refugees. Longer-term development aid also advanced an anticommunist agenda. The 1984 Republican party platform pledged that "a central element of our programs of economic assistance should be to share with others the beneficial ideas of democratic capitalism." Under Reagan, the Agency for International Development (AID) country programs stressed market forces and entrepreneurial activity, though this emphasis resulted in few major aid reallocations among countries.

The denial of nonemergency assistance to communist countries raises serious questions about whether U.S. assistance should be conditioned on a recipient country’s political and economic system. M. Peter McPherson, AID administrator for much of the Reagan administration, took equal pride in the administration’s private-sector emphasis and its "hungry child" policy: "Our policies were, from a humanitarian and developmental standpoint, fundamentally sound." He and other AID officials defend the insistence on private-sector activity as pragmatic rather than ideologi-

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cal. "A hungry child knows no politics–yes. But inasmuch as the [recipient] government’s structuring of agriculture may be not just inefficient but absolutely harmful, and inasmuch as you have limited resources, you put them where you can actually do some good," he said in an August 1988 interview with the author.

It is difficult to argue that the United States should underwrite development strategies it considers ill-conceived. Yet to limit humanitarian concern to famine relief while refusing to encourage food self-reliance is counterproductive–unless the objective is to perpetuate dependency, as some suspect. In the case of Ethiopia, the administration went beyond congressional prohibitions against providing development assistance to consider as well making future emergency aid available only for hunger stemming from natural causes, not from government policies. Development assistance, even more so than humanitarian aid, intersects with the policies and practices of recipient governments on sensitive matters such as agriculture, human rights, and resettlement. Highly ideological American opposition to the Ethiopian regime, however, made an objective review of these policies impossible. A less politicized approach might have revealed ways to support not only famine relief but also famine prevention, with due respect for human rights.

The administration’s fight against communism also led it to commit disproportionately large amounts of development assistance to Central America, to a great extent at the expense of more populous and impoverished sub-Saharan Africa. During the first Reagan term, AID bilateral development assistance to

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Central America soared by 207.6 per cent. All of Africa received a 13.9 per cent increase, with its share of total AID bilateral development assistance declining from 23.5 per cent in 1981 to 19.8 per cent in 198S. Thereafter, Congress, over administration objections, boosted Africa’s share to 31.7 per cent for 1989.

Trade and investment relationships were also politicized, the administration’s commitment to free trade notwithstanding. Countries participating in the Caribbean Basin Initiative were promised greater U.S. market access, while Nicaragua lost most of its sugar quota. The United States refused to comply with a 1984 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) decision favoring Nicaragua, thereby departing from the U.S. tradition of relying on GATT to police unfair trade practices. In 1985 a formal trade embargo was imposed on Nicaragua. The reduction in foreign exchange and imports from the United States appears to have played a role in setting back nutrition and health among Nicaraguans, even though the embargo exempts food and medicines. Economic sanctions, even if preferable to military coercion, are of dubious value when exercised in support of policies lacking regional integrity and international credibility.

U.S. humanitarian interests were not only politicized but also denigrated during the 1980s. The hallmark of American foreign aid is now security assistance. Aid has come to be viewed primarily as an investment in the economic and military stability of allies, while the alleviation of human need has become secondary. During the Reagan years, developing countries have received a whopping $78.1 billion in security assistance compared with $51.4 billion in development aid–defined here as bilateral and multilateral development assistance, food aid (PL 480), humanitarian, disaster, and refugee aid, and the Peace Corps. Without congressional restraint the proportions would have been even worse, as indeed they were before budget austerity began to take its toll in fiscal year 1986. Virtually all foreign aid growth has taken place in security assistance. The Economic Support Fund (ESF), which grants economic aid to key

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strategic allies, has grown from $2.2 billion in the last year of the Carter administration to $3.3 billion for 1989. Military aid during the same period has risen from $3.3 billion to $5 billion, peaking at $6.5 billion in 1984. Development assistance, by contrast, has inched up from $5 billion to $5.9 billion, not enough to offset inflation and the falling dollar.

Characteristic of the way foreign aid has been tied to U.S. political and military objectives has been the new human needs activism of the Department of Defense (DOD). In 1986 Congress approved an administration request for the DOD to play a larger aid role. It now carries out a wide range of disaster relief, emergency and other medical exercises, and civic action work. The DOD also furnishes to private groups a broad array of services and surplus commodities. The DOD’s involvement, first in Central America and now worldwide, is orchestrated by its so-called Office of Humanitarian Assistance. The DOD describes its human needs work as integral to the U.S. strategy of low-intensity conflicts against communist forces.

U.S. policy toward Afghanistan illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of the Reagan approach. The more than $2 billion in U.S. military aid provided during the decade no doubt hastened the departure of Soviet troops. However, in favoring those resistance groups most hard-line in their anticommunism, the aid failed to lay a sound basis for postwar political and economic reconstruction and regional stability.

The $760 million in U.S. human needs assistance channeled through the United Nations and private agencies provided welcome aid. The DOD also assisted private groups operating in Pakistan by flying supplies from the United States and ferried wounded mujahedeen rebels to the West for medical treatment. But much of the U.S. government aid was in effect an extension of the war effort, with U.N. authorities pressured to consider fighters coming and going across the border as "refugees" and to assist them as well as their more sedentary families.

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Assessing the Damage

Besides harming many Third World people, Reagan administration policies have weakened both the institutions engaged in international human needs activities and American humanitarian traditions themselves. These institutions and traditions, which over the years have advanced long-term U.S. interests, have been pressed into the service of short-term political objectives.

U.S. participation in international organizations was again reflected in the 1980 Republican platform. The party expressed a preference for bilateral over multilateral activities because they were more "fully accountable" and more "wholly consistent with our foreign policy interests." The 1984 platform claimed to have changed "the Carter-Mondale policy of channeling increasing proportions of U.S. assistance through multinational institutions beyond our control" and pledged to work to eliminate their aid to communist states. By the end of the Reagan years, however, the multilateral share of U.S. foreign aid was 11.1 per cent–close to the 11.8 per cent the administration had inherited in 1981.

Multilateral institutions have been approached less as bodies with global mandates and constituencies than as instruments of immediate U.S. foreign-policy goals. This strategy has, by and large, been severely detrimental to humanitarian values. Positioned to assist in regional conflict resolution, the United Nations still lacks the necessary American financial and political support. The very institutions the United States helped found and has consistently supported face major financial problems. The damage, though eased, has not been undone by Reagan’s September 1988 pledge to settle outstanding U.S. obligations to the U.N.

However uneven the effectiveness of U.N. agencies, the pattern of recent U.S. involvement contrasts starkly with that of past administrations. During the Reagan administration the United States has withheld contributions from the U.N. Fund for Population Activities, opposed the World Health Organi-

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zation’s infant-formula code, worked to block U.N. resources for Vietnam, rejected the U.N. treaty regulating exploitation of the seabed, and withdrawn from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Under heavy U.S. pressure, the InterAmerican Development Bank for the first time rejected a loan request–for agricultural development in Nicaragua.

With congressional backing, the administration has linked aid levels to U.N. votes. Zimbabwe was denied bilateral development aid in part for opposing the U.S. position on the Grenada invasion and the Soviet downing of a South Korean passenger airliner. Slated for private-sector agricultural development, among other programs, the aid would have contributed to what has become a Zimbabwean success story. Long-term U.S. interests might have been better served by insulating developmental aid from the views expressed by governments at the U.N. In any event, the cumulative damage from the administration’s politicized multilateralism has been substantial–to the developing world economically and to the United States politically.

The relationship between the U.S. government and American private voluntary organizations (PVOs) has also become politicized. Building on a long-standing government partnership with private groups, the Reagan administration has significantly increased the PVOs’ piece of a relatively stable bilateral AID development pie, from 16.2 per cent in 1981 to 24 per cent in 1987. The funds PVOs receive now also include substantial ESF resources, provided within a more explicitly political context.

With congressional encouragement, the administration has worked with PVOs like CARE, Catholic Relief Services, the International Rescue Committee, and World Vision to provide relief for the decade’s major human crises, such as the fleeing of Cambodian refugees, the Ethiopian famines, the Mozambican emergency, and the Afghan and Central American conflicts. In settings such as Haiti and the Philippines, where U.S. government aid presence for one reason or another was deemed inappropriate, PVOs have served as

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channels for such aid. Still, many PVOs have welcomed the added resources, responsibility, and visibility.

Expanding the traditional partnership appears to be a win-win situation for both parties as PVOs extend their work and U.S. aid reaches the poor more efficiently. As U.S. policy becomes less guided by humanitarian imperatives, however, the independence of PVO collaborators is at greater risk. The partnership holds dangers for government as well, since not all PVO activities are appropriate for public support.

A case in point is AID’S Children’s Survival Assistance Program, enacted in April 1988 to assist Nicaraguan children affected by the war. In the absence of an AID presence in Nicaragua, U.S. officials sought PVOs as intermediaries and implementing agencies. The administration narrowly interpreted congressional ground rules, which prohibited funds from going to or through the Nicaraguan government so as to require Nicaraguan children to receive U.S. assistance independently of government health facilities or outside Nicaragua altogether. Yet many PVOs regularly interact with Nicaraguan health authorities, under whose aegis most health services are provided, and are committed to strengthening the country’s indigenous health care capacity.

Given these constraints, some reputable PVOs, such as Lutheran World Relief and Church World Service, opted against using U.S. government funds; others proceeded despite reservations. In any event, the program was banned by the Nicaraguan government in October 1988, apparently to show displeasure with the passage of legislation that provided for $27 million in nonlethal aid for the contrast The government’s action underscored the highly politicized environment in which PVO human needs programs sometimes operate.

Although their overall financial dependence on the U.S. government appears not to have deepened during the decade, many PVOs have become a more integral part of U.S. foreign policy. The PVO activities that the United States does fund are increasingly limited to countries and priorities of AID’s choosing;

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privately donated matching funds gravitate there as well. Even PVOs that do not use government resources have been affected, particularly as they run the gauntlet to acquire the Commerce and Treasury Department licenses required of private American aid bound for "unfriendly" countries.

In retrospect, fundamental aspects of the traditional public-private aid partnership have for some time needed review. Rethinking the partnership has become more necessary as the government, motivated in part by East-West concerns, has exercised a heavier hand in its dealings with PVOs. While the administration has intimated that private agencies questioning its aid policies have a political agenda of their own, many PVOs have simply become more outspoken to ensure that in highly politicized situations they function with integrity.

More difficult to measure than the impact of politicized assistance on aid agencies, but perhaps ultimately more important, is the damage to American humanitarian traditions. As Lawrence Pezzallo, executive director of Catholic Relief Services, has observed: "We have, as a people, tended to be suspicious of foreign policy goals framed in terms of unalloyed self-interest. Americans, it seems, do not simply want to do well for themselves, but also to do right by others." This concern for the world’s less fortunate people has not emerged from the 1980s intact.

In spring 1976 a series of State Department town meetings demonstrated a widespread sense that U.S. foreign policy should, but did not, reflect the moral concerns of the American people. Many Americans wanted to see a greater emphasis on meeting human needs, especially hunger. They opposed limiting aid

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only to those countries that helped the United States or had democratic governments. Another survey in 1986 found a similar interest in providing relief.³ Almost 9 out of 10 people interviewed agreed that "wherever people are hungry or poor we should do what we can to help them." Emergency relief elicited the greatest support, but development programs also received high priority. The desire to assist people reflected humanitarian considerations rather than economic or political ones like promoting growth or discouraging communism. At the same time, however, the survey found "a growing degree of pessimism" about whether aid was reaching those in need and making a difference in their lives.

These polls suggest considerable constancy in American humanitarian instincts but growing disenchantment with aid policies and programs. This conclusion is reinforced by the broad constituent support during the 1980s for aid activities with a human face. These include the Children’s Survival Assistance Program, PVOs, and U.N. agencies such as the United Nations Children’s Fund, the International Fund for Agricultural Develop meet, and the U.N. Development Fund for Women. Military aid has consistently been the least popular.

The growing unpopularity of foreign aid reflects changes in American perceptions as well as in aid programs themselves. The debate for many Americans has shifted from providing food aid to growing more food locally, encouraging sustainable agriculture and population policies, supporting land reform, regulating multinational corporations, reducing arms transfers, and restructuring the international economy. Consequently, sup port for foreign aid among hunger and development groups has eroded.

The Reagan years have done considerable harm to the image many Americans had of their country as the acknowledged leader in trying to build a more humane world, as

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indeed it no longer is. The administration’s actions have eroded the collective American identification with humane values abroad. Why does the United States continue its "constructive engagement" policy toward South Africa, many at home and abroad now ask, when 100,000 civilians in Mozambique have been slaughtered by South African-backed rebels? Why does the U.S. government block American youngsters from sending school kits to Cambodian children? Why does it thrust PVOs forward in response to Vietnam’s request for humanitarian assistance while itself providing no aid? Why has the United States put a financial squeeze on some of the best U.N. agencies? And why has the administration chosen to support the brigands in Central America rather than join the fire brigade? Rather than allowing the Veterans Peace Convoy to reach out to Nicaraguans, the United States turned it back at the Mexican border, interpreting too narrowly, a federal judge subsequently ruled, the law governing humanitarian aid. Rather than assisting those fleeing violence, the U.S. government has infiltrated and prosecuted the sanctuary movement.

Humanizing Aid

The next administration will face the challenge of revitalizing humanitarian values as a central element of American foreign policy. It will need to replace reflexive anticommunism with a philosophy that seeks to affirm the intrinsic value of all humanity. "There is a painful gap in the Reagan foreign policy legacy of militant anticommunism," the columnist Stephen Rosenfeld wrote in the August 19, 1988, issue of the Washington Post. "The element missing is a commitment to social justice, and its absence casts a shadow over the gains recorded and promised in the Reagan years." Noting that "there must be more to a great nation’s foreign policy," Rosenfeld pointed to "the formidable next phase task of moving beyond anticommunism to a deeper concern for the quality of international life." In tackling that task, the experience of the 1980s is worth pondering.

Americans retain a quality of basic decency

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and compassion. It is reflected in the heritage of helping people through public and private channels simply because they are people, not because of their politics. Such concern is not a strategy to convert them to American values, strike a blow for freedom, win their gratitude, or assert U.S. leadership. It affirms America’s vision of itself as a "city upon a hill" and is reinforced by the country’s immigrant past and caring traditions.

There is abundant evidence for the notion that bedrock American values are contravened when emergency assistance is subject to a political calculus. As Reagan himself said in connection with the issue of compensation for the families of the passengers of the Iranian airbus that was mistakenly shot down by the U.S. missile cruiser Vincennes, "I don’t ever find compassion a bad precedent." Compassion is reflected most directly in humanitarian assistance devoid of agendas other than helping people in need whoever and wherever they are. It is time for humanitarian assistance to become, quite simply, humanity-affirming assistance.

Responding to urgent human need in Ethiopia and Mozambique reflects American values more faithfully than does equivocating in Vietnam and Nicaragua. Moreover, as Representative Mickey Leland (D.-Texas), chairman of the House Select Committee on Hunger, has stated, "While it is unarguable that providing humanitarian assistance promotes the interests of the United States, it is equally unarguable that aid delivered in a nonpolitical manner makes the greatest contribution to our national credibility." Advancing one country’s security in an increasingly interdependent world by withholding from neighbors the fundamentals of life is not only morally wrong but also politically counterproductive.

The concern for humanity shown in the president’s comment on the Iran Air tragedy needs also to influence U.S. policy in more complex instances of human need. Assisting people today involves knotty matters of economic policy, human rights, and political priorities. Given the perennial tension between political objectives and humanitarian imperatives, the task is not to depoliticize U.S.

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policy but to humanize it.

Human values belong at the core not only of humanitarian assistance but of other policies as well. U.S. policies are frequently implicated even where there is no smoking gun–as there was in the shooting down of the Iranian airliner. "Must we starve our children to pay our debts?" an anguished Julius Nyerere, then president of Tanzania, once asked. This question deserves more than the doctrinaire condemnation of socialist agricultural policies or the standard defense of World Bank structural adjustment lending and International Monetary Fund stabilization schemes. Indeed, were the United States less driven to impose political or economic models on developing countries, it could support a broader range of effective poverty-oriented development programs.

Such an approach would place solidarity at the center of U.S. foreign policy. Pope John Paul II has called for restructuring international relations around the concept of universal human solidarity. "Solidarity," he explains, "helps us to see the ‘other’–whether a person, people or nation–not just as some kind of instrument, with a work capacity and physical strength to be exploited at low cost and then discarded when no longer useful, but as our ‘neighbor,’ a ‘helper’ ... to be made a sharer on a par with ourselves in the banquet of life to which all are equally invited by God." Greater attention to the humanity of all people, including the poor, might help to avoid the polarized extremes of "compassion and guilt on the left [and] suspicion and hostility on the right" that make it "very difficult for any American administration to maintain a balanced approach toward Third World countries," as Charles William Maynes wrote in the Summer 1988 issue of FOREIGN POLICY.

Stressing solidarity would lend prominence to PVOs as people-to-people agencies. The bridges they build across national boundaries identify Americans with humane values and already make a sign)ficant contribution to American interests without forcing their work into a foreign-policy straitjacket. At the same time, their activities do not relieve the U.S.

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government of responsibility in responding in its own right to human suffering. Solidarity would also require increased attention to joint problem solving. In addition to paying the rest of its U.N. arrearages, the United States should encourage the United Nations to exercise leadership in international human needs issues. The United States, as a responsible world leader with a deep interest in international order, should stop withholding U.N. contributions for activities it opposes.

A foreign policy reconceived along these lines would lead to major shifts in the foreign aid program. Aid allocations to particular countries could give greater weight to the severity of human need and the equity orientation of governments. Multilateral agencies, which now provide most of their resources to countries that also receive U.S. security assistance, could be expected to assist "unfriendly" countries and, where appropriate, even those producing competitive commodities. And PVOs could be encouraged to express solidarity with other peoples, whatever the composition of their governments.

As foreign aid levels dwindle in relation to total global economic activity, U.S. assistance becomes, paradoxically, more rather than less important. Representative David Obey (D.-Wisconsin) and the economist Carol Lancaster wrote in the Summer 1988 issue of FOREIGN POLICY: "Americans must recognize that foreign aid is little more than a grace note in their relations with most of the developing world. [It] is too small to make the difference between war and peace, friendship and enmity, or development and underdevelopment." Their data are correct but their conclusion is perhaps misdirected. Aid flows represent an expression of human solidarity more important than their amounts would indicate. As aid becomes less significant financially, its objectives should become more focused on improving the quality of human life. Human needs assistance should not be expected to wean countries from communist alliances or socialist economic models, to open up markets for U.S. exports, or to halt the export of drugs to America.

Moreover, the $130 billion in total foreign

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aid of the Reagan years is far too large to be considered merely a grace note. If effectively used to address critical human needs, even smaller amounts could generate impressive results. As Japan becomes the world’s largest aid donor, U.S. aid will be judged more by its character than by its scale. Why not then make the hallmark of future U.S. aid the effective empowering of the poor?

A stronger emphasis on social justice in dealing with other countries would at times complicate U.S. decision making. It would also call for greater public understanding of the complexities involved. Over time, however, it might reclaim a constituency alienated by and from current programs. The evidence suggests that a better-educated citizenry will support effective efforts to address longerterm, as well as emergency, needs abroad.

The United States is now entering a period in which East-West tensions seem to be giving way to more cooperative global problem solving. The Reagan administration deserves credit to the extent that it has hastened this development, though prolonged human suffering is a heavy price to pay. That a less adversarial superpower relationship can produce such positive and wide-ranging effects also confirms the superpowers’ role in prolonging and exacerbating those same conflicts. The stage is now set for a foreign policy focused on an active concern for human beings across ideological lines. The United States will not reclaim its traditional humanitarian values overnight. Yet in making a commitment to respect and advance the humanity of all the planet’s people, the United States will be true to its historical values and advance its permanent interests.

NOTES

Larry Minear has served in Washington since 1975 as representative for development policy of Church World Service and Lutheran World Relief. The views expressed here are his own.

1. Jack Shepherd, "A Fragile American-Ethiopian Bridge," New York Times, 31 October 1985, A27.
2. Sergio Aguayo and Patricia Weiss Fagen, Central Americans in Mexico and the United States (Washington, D.C.: Center for Immigration Policy and Refugee Assistance, Georgetown University, 1988), 36-37.
3. What Americans Think: Views on Development and U.S.-Third World Relations, prepared for the Public Opinion Project by Christine E. Contee (cosponsored by InterAction in New York and the Overseas Development Council in Washington, D.C., 1987), 10.