Imagine the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testifying that if defense funding were reduced, seven hundred thousand people in Libya would die, and tens of millions elsewhere in the world. It would be considered fear-mongering of the most repulsive kind. In fact, it would be considered a threat to the integrity of our civilian-led military to  attempt such a blackmail of the Congress.

But that's exactly the approach USAID Director Rajiv Shah took last week testifying before the House Appropriations State and Foreign Operations subcommittee. He said that if proposed reductions to USAID's budget go into effect 70,000 children will die. He added that he considered that a very conservative estimate, and that among other effects, another 800,000 recipients of our international disaster assistance in Darfur would be at risk.

Shah testified that 30,000 deaths would come specifically from scaling back anti-malaria programs, 24,000 from lack of immunization, and 18,000 lack of skilled attendants at births. All this from cutting 16 percent of the Obama administration's international affairs budget request.  

Hard to say which is more offensive, Shah threatening Congress will have blood on its hands unless it continues to fund USAID programs, or the bureaucratic and cultural mindset that considers increased spending the only solution to a multivariate problem.

USAID was created as an entity separate from the State Department (and military assistance) in 1961, in order to remove from development assistance the taint of being provided in order to advance America's interests. USAID's official history rather unselfconsciously states that "It was thought that to renew support for foreign assistance at existing or higher levels, to address the widely known shortcomings of the previous assistance structure, and to achieve a new mandate for assistance to developing countries, the entire program had to be 'new.'"

The whiff of sanctimony pervades USAID still, which is part of why it is so unpopular on Capitol Hill, where elected representatives often find unpersuasive that the spending of their constituents money abroad should have no connection to our national interests.

Providing money through the Agency for International Development is by no means the only -- or even the most effective -- way to alleviate disease and poverty in the world. Case in point: funding for AID was dramatically cut in the 1990s, and yet that decade saw nearly a billion people lifted out of poverty by actual economic development. USAID's funding has been increased by 150 percent in the past decade -- most of that coming with the advocacy of a Republican president and his secretaries of state. 

There are many ways USAID could compensate for reduced government spending:

• USAID could build coalitions of like-minded governments to share the burden of funding.
• USAID could reach out into American society for private-sector partners to fund programs.
• USAID could use its power as a convener and facilitator of non-governmental organization involvement in programs.
• USAID could develop performance metrics that ensure it is using what money is available to greatest effect.
• USAID could prioritize its own activity to close down programs of lesser immediate importance.
• USAID could discontinue development projects in countries like China and Brazil that, as a result of their own economic development, are now providers of development assistance to others.

In fact, USAID's Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review champions all these approaches. USAID just doesn't practice them.  

Secretary of Defense Gates is right. It would be a tragic irony if, having come this far in Iraq, the United States faltered and failed to fund adequately the next phase of the mission. Even with adequate funding, the mission will be hard enough.

Congress is right to take a hard look at the Iraq situation. The security needs in Iraq exceed anything the U.S. State Department ever has dealt with in the past. The current plan, which will shift the burden almost entirely from the Department of Defense to State, is distinctly inferior to the original plan, which envisioned a renegotiation of the Status of Forces agreement to allow a modest U.S. military presence as a stabilizing factor. The administration fumbled the original plan and while Gates hints at the possibility of reviving it at the eleventh hour, it may be too late. The current plan relying on the U.S. State Department to do more than it ever has done before is a barely satisfactory Plan B. But it is manifestly superior to Plan C, which involves walking away from Iraq entirely and hoping for the best. I believe once Congress has looked at and thought about the situation carefully, it must conclude that funding the State Department plan is the only responsible course of action available at this point.

I understand the frustration of people who believe the Iraq war was a mistake from the start, but I do not understand their desire to compound what they believe to be one error with strategic blunders of comparable proportions: abandoning Iraq or failing to provide the resources necessary to keep Iraq on a successful trajectory.

Foreign aid is once again under fire. Every so often a few politicians -- usually Republicans -- get up in arms about our government's gift of large amounts of money to other countries. Equally often, media stories appear detailing how ineffective aid supposedly is. The picture emerges that foreign aid is unnecessary, ineffective, and wasteful.

For example, the Republican Study Committee (RSC) released a proposal last week to cut the budget for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) by $1.39 billion as part of a broader package of deficit-reduction proposals. (Hat tip to our friends at The Cable for their post on the subject.) There were similar rumblings after the Republican takeover in 1994. Republicans seem to have an inborn suspicion -- usually dormant, but one that fitfully flares up once per decade -- that aid is just a handout from rich countries to poor ones to help the former ease their consciences.

Or take the lengthy Wall Street Journal story last week that declares, "A massive U.S. aid program that has made Pakistan the world's second-largest recipient of American economic and development assistance is facing serious challenges, people involved in the effort say. The ambitious civilian-aid program is intended in part to bolster support for the U.S. in the volatile and strategically vital nation. But a host of problems on the ground are hampering the initiative." Despite billions of aid, the United States remains unpopular in Pakistan; thus, the article implies, aid is ineffective.

These criticisms of foreign aid rest on faulty notions of what aid is and what it is supposed to accomplish. There are two views of aid reflected here, neither of which are helpful.

• National bribery. Some people think that the United States gives money to other countries to be popular. On this view, if the United States lavishes the Pakistanis with enough money, they will respect the United States. The problem is that if someone did this on an individual level, the United States would call it craven, insecure, and insulting -- which is probably how it is perceived by the Pakistanis. Aid as bribery doesn't work. Money can't buy me love -- not individually, and not between states.
• Charity. Others seem to think that the United States gives money out of the pure, unalloyed goodness of our hearts. Foreign aid is an extension of private goodness. Individually, we give money to the Salvation Army or World Vision so they can help our fellow man on the far side of the world. Foreign aid is functionally the same thing: the United States gives our tax dollars to USAID to do the same kind of charity work as NGOs. But why should the U.S. be charitable to someone in Nepal just because they live in an exotic country when there are Americans who need help? Additionally, there is no logical limit to how far the United States's charity could extend. The United States could bankrupt itself trying to save the world.

I propose a third view of foreign aid.

• Strategic investment. Foreign aid helps countries whose interests align with our own increase their capacities. The United States gives money to help select countries -- not the entire world -- improve specific abilities, like their ability to provide public security, defend their borders, or buy and sell goods.

The advantage of this view is that it is realistic. The United States can actually do this. The U.S. is not trying to change people's heart or minds, contrary to the bribery view. It is only trying to change their capacity. Additionally, this view helps the U.S. prioritize which countries should get aid, and what kind, contrary to the charity view. Giving billions to Tuvalu would be a commendable act of charity for the Salvation Army, but it would be folly for USAID because Tuvalu is not a strategic priority for the United States.

(I am not arguing that we should never be charitable. Rather, every possible foreign aid program is an act of charity. Charity by itself cannot help us decide which charitable programs to undertake. The United States either has to flip a coin to allocate our charity randomly, or consult our own interests to allocate it strategically.)

The Marshall Plan is a good model. The United States gave something like $25 billion (in today's dollars) per year to Western Europe after World War II. It was undoubtedly an act of charity. The money helped the Europeans rebuild their economies and saved tens of millions of people from poverty or even starvation. But it was also a strategic investment. Policymakers at the time worried about a return of the Great Depression following demobilization and the Marshall Plan helped Europe become a strong trading partner for the United States. Most importantly, U.S. officials feared the rise of Soviet power and hoped the Plan would bolster European governments' stability and prevent the spread of communism.

This view of foreign aid would help protect it from the kind of cuts the congressional Republicans are proposing. Aid is hard power. It is a weapon the United States uses to strengthen allies and, thus, ourselves. But this view would also help save it from the kind of limitless, grandiose visions Democrats sometimes seem to have for it. This is the sort of view that I hoped Secretary of State Clinton would incorporate in the recent Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. But despite the document's many strengths it did not seem to offer a framework for prioritizing among the Unites States' many foreign aid opportunities.

The administration has decided that promoting economic development around the world is essential. Foreign assistance is a crucial part of how the United States relates to the developing world and plays a critical role in U.S. national security policy. To date, however, U.S. programs have not been as effective as they ought to have been. Aid flows through too many channels and there is poor overall coordination among the relevant agencies scattered through the government. It is time for this to change.

The preceding paragraph was pretty easy to write, since those were key themes of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2006. The paragraph works equally well this week, as the Obama administration unveils its own approaches. I'm well-versed in the earlier version, since I had the privilege of working on those issues as a member of her policy planning staff. After an extensive review of foreign assistance programs and countless intra- and interagency discussions about how the sprawling aid apparatus might be improved, Secretary Rice implemented a series of reforms, most prominently featuring tighter integration between the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department.

Skip forward four years. After not one, but two extensive and concurrent reviews, the Obama administration is poised to tackle the same problems. It is doing so in the context of a United Nations discussion of the (limited) progress that has been made toward the Millennium Development Goals. Herewith, some places to look for potential changes.

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