Joel Shin: "On the March: In Defense of Foreign Aid"

In 1960 — during the height of the Cold War, as the Soviet Union appeared to be winning hearts and minds in the developing world — the American essayist E. B. White observed:

"Must we in the West leave the marching to our opponent? I hope not. Not until free men get up in the morning with the feeling that they, too, are on the march will the danger to Western society begin to subside."

White meant "march" in a figurative sense — arguing for the need to supplement military containment of the Soviet threat with a political destination that would lead to more unity in the West and greater order in the international system.

A generation later — in the aftermath of September 11, when freedom's adversary is not totalitarianism but terrorism with a global reach — White's proposition is equally valid.

Militarily, the United States and it allies have been on the march since they began to dispense justice to al Qaeda and the Taliban. But by announcing last month — in speeches at the Inter-American Development Bank and at the U.N. Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico — an innovative development strategy that not only increases foreign aid but also seeks to reform it fundamentally, President George W. Bush has made clear that America and the coalition it leads are on the march politically as well.

The proposal President Bush recently unveiled includes an additional $10 billion in assistance for developing nations that have adopted political and economic reforms. The president's New Compact for Development responds to the need for greater funding to help the poorest nations achieve the most basic health standards and other development goals, as embodied by the U.N.'s Millennium Declaration. Those are intrinsically worthy aims, made increasingly realistic by the availability of cost-effective preventive health measures, such as vaccines.

But President Bush's initiative also has significant extrinsic value insofar as it is likely to promote political unity among the United States and its friends and allies — by emphasizing an additional basis for international cooperation, beyond eradicating terrorism. It should help further to rally the worldwide coalition that the president has so skillfully assembled and maintained since September 11 — by clarifying what we are fighting for as much as what we are fighting against.

For while the coalition is an instrument to an end — combating terrorism — it is also valuable in and of itself. Looking back on the Cold War, the grand prize was as much a political revolution in the international system — the emergence of a Europe whole, free, and secure — as it was the liquidation of the Soviet and Warsaw Pact conventional threat. In the present era, reinforcing the habit of cooperation among free nations through a common cause — to promote what President Bush has called "the permanent hopes of humanity" — would be its own reward.

President Bush's renewed commitment to developing nations should help to assuage fears about American unilateralism from various quarters overseas and at home. Will it satisfy the most ardent advocates of increased foreign aid? That remains to be seen. The president has tasked the state and treasury departments with developing criteria for measuring progress. Their efforts to implement his intentions will be crucial to the success of the administration's new development strategy. But it should already be clear that President Bush has taken an important first step by providing a vision of the way to make globalization work for everyone. In doing so, he has further reinvigorated the debate about foreign aid.

It is not the usual historical course for a nation's leadership to define the shape of a post-war world a few months after a war's commencement . To put what President Bush has proposed into perspective, it is as if Franklin Roosevelt had announced elements of the Marshall Plan after the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942. That should provide no small comfort to the American people, for there can be no stronger evidence of the commander-in-chief's confidence about ultimate victory on the battlefield than that he has begun to address how to reinforce that outcome in the politics among nations.