While we have no doubt that Bob Schieffer, the moderator of Monday night's foreign policy debate, will have plenty of material to choose from in formulating his questions for the candidates, we couldn't resist a chance to add our own suggestions. Following are some potential questions for the debate as submitted by the Shadow Government crew:

Peter Feaver:

1. Mr. President, is there any foreign policy challenge America faces that you would concede has gotten worse on your watch because of actions you have taken or not taken? In other words, is there any foreign policy problem that you would say can be blamed at least partly on you and not entirely on Republicans or President Bush?

2. Mr. President, what is the fairest criticism of your foreign policy record that you have heard from Governor Romney over the course of this campaign?

3. Mr. President, what is the most unfair criticism of Romney's foreign policy platform that you have heard your supporters levy over the course of this campaign?

4. Mr. President, why do you say that Romney is proposing defense expenditures that the military have not asked for when Romney is just proposing restoring funding to the levels you claimed were needed in your own budget a few years ago. That budget, which you asked for, reflected what the military asked for didn't it? And didn't you order the military to accept deeper cuts -- thus they can't now speak up and ask for those levels to be restored without being insubordinate, so isn't it misleading to claim that they are not asking for them when you ordered them not to?

5. For both: Both campaigns have featured senior retired military endorsements as a way of demonstrating your fitness to be commander-in-chief. Don't you worry that such endorsements drag the military into partisan politics, thus undermining public confidence in a non-partisan military institution?

Paul Bonicelli:

1. Mr. President, history tells us that prestige matters; that is, nation-states who are regarded for their power, whether military, economic or moral, are less often challenged by those who wish to upset the peace or change the international order that favors the interests of the great powers. Has your administration seen an increase in the prestige of the United States or a decrease, and why?

2. For both: Isn't a reform of our foreign aid system and institutions long overdue, and shouldn't reform have as its primary goal the promotion of direct and tangible US interests, such as more trade with more countries that govern themselves democratically? If this is truly the appropriate goal for international development funds, then why aren't all aid recipients required to practice sustained and real democracy?

Phil Levy:

1. For both: Do you believe that the economically endangered nations of Europe should adopt policies of austerity, as countries like Germany have argued, or that they should turn instead to more fiscal stimulus? If you prefer stimulus, is there any level of debt/GDP at which you get concerned about their ability to pay those debts? If you believe these countries should borrow more, from whom should they borrow? Should the United States be offering funds?

2. For both: There has been almost no progress on global trade talks since the summer of 2008. How would you assess the health of the World Trade Organization and the world trading system? Is this important for the United States? What would you do to strengthen the WTO, if anything?

3. For both: In 2009, in response to the stimulus bill, a top Chinese economic official said, ""We hate you guys. Once you start issuing $1 trillion-$2 trillion... we know the dollar is going to depreciate, so we hate you guys but there is nothing much we can do...." Brazil's finance minister, Guido Mantega, has accused the United States Federal Reserve of igniting a global currency war with its policies of quantitative easing. To what extent does the United States need to consider the international ramifications of its economic policies? Do you believe a strong dollar is in the U.S. interest? If so, what does that mean?

Kori Schake:

1. For both: What do you consider the top two national security threats to our country?

2. For both: How do you see increasing energy independence for the United States affecting our foreign policy?

3. President Obama, you have threatened to veto any changes to the 2010 Budget Control Act, yet both your Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff believe sequestration going into effect would be disastrous. How will you enact the Budget Control Act without damaging our national defense?

4. Governor Romney, you have committed to increase defense spending; where does the money come from to do that in year 1 of a Romney administration?

5. President Obama, Vice President Biden has said that your administration will withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanstan in 2014, whether or not the Afghan security forces are then capable of taking over the fight. Do you agree?

Paul Miller:

1. For both: Under what circumstances would you authorize military action against Iran's nuclear facilities? Will you intervene to stop the civil war in Syria? If so, what lessons have you learned from our recent experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya that will shape how you undertake an intervention? How do you plan to accomplish a responsible transition to Afghan leadership for security there? What should be the mission of U.S. troops in Afghanistan after transition, and how many troops will be required to accomplish it? Or do you envision a complete withdrawal of all forces?

2. For both: Should the United States support the spread of democracy abroad? What is the role of democracy assistance in U.S. grand strategy, and how does it relate to our overall national interests? How will you respond to future peaceful uprisings like the Green Revolution or the Arab Spring?

3. For both: Some Americans are concerned that the government has accumulated too much power over the last decade in its effort to develop a robust counterterrorism capability. Others believe we need to keep those powers because the terrorist threat has not abated. Do you plan to sustain the government's new, post-9/11 war-time powers, reportedly including targeted killings and indefinite detentions, indefinitely? If not, will you publicly and explicitly commit to defining a clear end-state to the war against al Qaeda, the achievement of which will terminate the new powers?

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Juan Forero's article, "Latin America's New Authoritarians," in the Washington Post on Monday is in many ways an excellent piece. It sheds light on the kinds of authoritarian regimes that have come into being in the region over the last decade or so. But in his reporting and in some of the experts he quotes, there is a use of language that shies away from calling these regimes exactly what they are: undemocratic, dictatorial, and arguably, tyrannical. In several places in the article these new regimes are contrasted with the former Latin American dictatorships (presumably of Pinochet, the Argentine junta, and others), leaving readers to draw the inference that the new forms are worrying but not as bad as the old forms. It is as though there is a form of authoritarianism that is obviously bad and must be dealt with, and then a new form that should cause us concern, but is not yet the threat or the evil that the old form was.

As an academic and former official at USAID in charge of programs that supported democrats around the world, I find this kind of talk and the implications it leaves troubling. We cannot support democracy and the brave people who seek our help if we quibble about who is and who is not "really" a dictator. While both diplomats and political scientists have to be subtle and use nuance sometimes, fundamentally we should be clear in terms of the objectives our interests compel us to work towards. So even to suggest that Hugo Chavez is somehow better than Pinochet is missing the point -- and risks giving aid and comfort to him and causing despair for his democratic opposition.

As a congressional staffer in the late 1990s when Chavez was coming to power, I agreed with a number of congressmen and staff who noted that the general attitude in the U.S. government was unrealistic when it came to who Chavez was and what he intended. We were right.

We are now in the 13^th year of "Bolivarian democracy" in the form of Hugo Chavez's Venezuelan regime. Over the years, a few more have joined him (with his aid) in Latin America by creating their own modified "democracies." Correa's Ecuador, Morales's Bolivia, and Ortega's Nicaragua all count as non-democratic states in my view if we are trying to be honest about the essence of democracy. (We dodged a bullet with Lugo's Paraguay and Humala's Peru since they have proved to be too weak -- or smart -- to go full-on Chavez.) It is worth noting that this is not a region-bound phenomenon; witness Putin's "controlled democracy." Nor is it time-bound. Robespierre's French republic was not a democratic state as I understand the term when the guillotine was the state symbol and when more liberty caps than powdered wigs adorned the heads plopping into the basket. Dictators have been putting adjectives in front of their use of the term democracy to dress up their authoritarian regimes for a long time. Thank you Jean-Jacque Rousseau, among others.

But we should be clear: Such regimes as Chavez's are an offense to the idea of democracy (constitutional republicanism, if you will) and mushy linguistic constructs and semantics are an offense to the English language -- or any other language in which it is written that a regime is an "authoritarian democracy," a "people's democracy" or a "revolutionary democracy." If you have to modify it, it isn't really a democracy. In Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, the citizens simply do not live under democracy. They are not living in a constitutional republic. Yes, there are constitutions, yes, there are regular elections according to codified rules (most of the time). But much intervenes that is intimidating, repressive, and sometimes violent, so much so that the meaning of democracy is voided.

Here is a listing of the sins against democracy that occur in each of these states (as is the case in Russia, it is worth noting):

Intimidation of voters by using technology to nullify the secret ballot and to tie a person's vote to her employment.

Intimidation of the press by blackmail, repressive regulation, forced bankruptcy, and unfair prosecution.

Intimidation of business people by forcing them to serve the state's interests or lose their enterprises, thus putting the economic well-being of many citizens solely in the hands of the regime.

Manipulation of electoral law and use of the state's purse to provide the regime with a compliant legislature.

And finally, what might well be the worst tactic of all, intimidation of judges and the judicial branch. Democracy is not simply about people being allowed to vote, which is why I earlier referred to constitutional republicanism. It is about individuals being treated as citizens who live under law, not the rule of men. For that to occur, the law must be inviolate and the judges must be free to make impartial rulings without having to prefer the regime's interests. When the judges are intimidated into compliance, or simply removed and replaced with party hacks, the safeguard of democracy is gone, and I would argue, so is democracy in all but name.

Those oppressed by the forgoing means number in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. So what if in some cases they aren't poor? They are citizens, and they deserve all the rights provided in a democracy.

Just because there are currently few or no desaparecidos or violent suppressions in South America does not mean there is no dictatorship à la Pinochet or the Argentine junta. Just because Chavez or Morales have killed fewer people when suppressing protests than the authoritarians of the 70's and 80's did does not mean they are not running a dictatorship. Just because Ortega has not assassinated opposition figures or declared martial law does not mean he has not just as effectively silenced his opposition. He gets no laurels for having forced them to withdraw from politics -- or to Miami.

As a political scientist, I can appreciate the need to be as descriptive as possible and to define terms with granularity. As one who was formerly responsible for supporting U.S. diplomacy as a development official, I can appreciate that sometimes nuanced language in formal settings is appropriate. But U.S. policymakers (and the Europeans and a growing number of other countries) don't have the luxury of being academic about their work if they expect to clearly articulate that our interests include a world with more real democracies and prospering free peoples. Mr. Feroro is right to point out that the U.S. and the Brazilians, to name two, could do more regarding the new authoritarians. But no one who purports to promote democracy and to support democrats around the world should kid himself: If policy is founded on a muddled view of what democracy is and isn't, then democracy and democrats around the world will suffer. Let us settle at the outset that democracy means real freedom, not pretended freedom, and craft our policy that way.

Yesterday, Josh Rogin highlighted testimony given by Peter Lavoy, acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asia and Pacific Security Affairs before the House Armed Services Committee about U.S. plans to not move forward with the 240,000 tons of North Korean food aid it had promised during recent meetings in Beijing. This decision was made as a result of North Korea's plans to launch a satellite into space, violating the moratorium they recently agreed to.

I have said previously that linking a U.S. humanitarian assistance program to the resumption of six party talks is a bad precedent. This type of action will lead many to believe that this would be a U.S. attempt to bribe the North Koreans to the table by taking advantage of a dire humanitarian situation.

Reports by U.S. non-governmental organizations working in North Korea are again saying that North Korean people are suffering from a severe shortfall in food supplies. This is not a new scenario for North Korea. The regime has continually struggled to feed its people since the famine of the mid 1990s, when over one million people lost their lives.

What is more shocking is the effect the many years of living on less than 1,700 calories a day have had on the general population. I saw this first-hand in a Pyongyang park in 2008 where some elderly people were quietly harvesting grass so they could supplement a meal. Today, a North Korean child can expect to be up to 7 inches shorter than his/her South Korean counterpart and 20 pounds lighter by adulthood.

Those in the NGO community with access to remote areas of the country have confirmed many in North Korea suffer from malnutrition and infection. In many cases, people outside of the capital are on the brink of fatal starvation.

Recently, five U.S. non-governmental aid agencies urged the U.S. government not to delay the provision of food aid, stating that "delay or potential cancellation of this program would violate humanitarian principles which hold that lifesaving assistance should not be used to achieve political aims." I couldn't agree more.

These five organizations have been working in North Korea for years, have first hand knowledge of the situation in-country, and have proved their ability to work alongside the World Food Programme to assure food assistance reached those most in need.

Where is Special Envoy Robert King in this scenario?

Why has the administration allowed the Department of Defense to announce food assistance has been halted?

It was Special Envoy King and a senior representative from USAID who were responsible for negotiating the resumption of food assistance during the March meetings.

It begs the question -- who is in charge of U.S. humanitarian policy in North Korea and what is the Obama administration's overall strategy?

Until a coherent strategy is articulated, questions will continue to be asked about the philosophical and practical origins of this administration's approach to humanitarian assistance and the need for North Korea to halt its nuclear agenda. These are, and should remain, separate issues.

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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