By David Callahan. Author of Dangerous Capabilities: Paul Nitze and the Cold War, David Callahan is now working on a book about the future of U.S. national security policy.

The end of the Cold War has brought hard times to Washington's national security bureaucracies. Military spending is in a nosedive and large cutbacks of the intelligence establishment are considered inevitable. So far, however, foreign aid--also very much a legacy of the Cold War--has largely escaped the scrutiny of budget cutters. In FY 1993, the Bush Administration proposes to spend $15.7 billion on bilateral foreign assistance, a figure which includes all economic, development, and military aid given directly to other countries. This funding level, roughly the same amount spent in the previous few years, will likely be approved by Congress.

Foreign aid is among the most reviled of all U.S. government endeavors, disliked by the American public and a favored whipping boy for congressional orators. But it survives because it has a constituency that counts--and endures. Despite the end of the Cold War, despite the emergence of new isolationist strains in American politics, and despite pressures to control federal spending, foreign aid is still strongly supported by key Washington leaders and by the foreign policy establishment generally. A late 1990 Gallup poll of leaders in the public and private sector, for example, found that 91 percent of those polled supported foreign aid. It is also supported, at times grudgingly, by many in the business world and mainstream media.

It is not hard to see why. In the face of ominous global trends--economic, political, and ecological--foreign aid remains one of the few tools available to U.S. policymakers to shape the world beyond America's borders. At the same time, however, it is a tool which has yet to be refashioned for the new era. Much of the current foreign aid budget is badly misdirected, still geared toward a Cold War agenda on the one hand and to sustaining de facto national entitlement programs on the other. The present "rationale and structure of foreign aid is outdated and needs to be changed," summed up Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate's Foreign Operations subcommittee. A series of study groups has found fault with the foreign aid program as administered by USAID, with the latest attack coming from a presidential study commission that found USAID's mission is unclear and recommended the agency be folded into the State Department.

Foreign aid spending accounts for only 1 percent of the federal budget and is hardly an enticing target for budget cutters. Still, it seems only a matter of time before foreign aid comes under greater attack. A report last year by the Congressional Research Service warned of the "dwindling" constituency behind foreign aid. Pat Buchanan's presidential candidacy, which has featured a strong anti-foreign aid message, may be a portent of things to come. To maintain support for foreign aid, both in Congress and among the public, the Bush Administration must reconceptualize the purpose of U.S. assistance in a changed world.

New threats in a new era

In significant ways, the global problems that confront U.S. foreign policy officials today are far more serious and perplexing than anything faced during the Cold War era.

-- Over the next several decades the earth's population is expected to nearly double, increasing to 8 to 10 billion people. Simultaneously, the availability of arable land will decrease by as much as 20 percent, according to the Committee on Agricultural Sustainability for Developing Countries.

-- Environmental degradation is mounting rapidly in many parts of the world. Soil erosion, water scarcity, and forest depletion threaten to hobble economic growth in the Third World, which is now the destination of nearly 40 percent of American exports. "The repercussion for the United States of inadequate development in the Third World extend beyond the loss of markets and investments," observed Robert Myers, an independent scientist and consultant. "When economic growth slows or stops, social strains emerge and political systems become destabilized. All too often the result is civil turmoil and outright violence, either within a country or with neighboring countries."

-- In the former Communist bloc, the euphoria of 1989 is gone. CIA Director Robert Gates told Congress in January that, "Ethnic and territorial disputes in Eastern Europe have risen to the surface and threaten political instability and civil war, despite promising prospects for the development of democratic institutions and market economies." In the 15 new nations that comprise the former Soviet Union the situation is even more fragile, said Gates, with a possibility of "large-scale civil disorder."

-- The AIDS epidemic is worsening quickly. According to recent estimates by the World Health Organization, 10 to 12 million adults are now infected with HIV and there are 1.4 million cases of AIDS. By the year 2000, the WHO projects that there will be 25-30 million HIV infected persons and 5-6 million AIDS cases. In Africa especially, these numbers portend a social and economic catastrophe of enormous magnitude.

The interlocking problems which confront the world--and particularly its developing regions--cannot be ignored by a United States which may wish to turn inward. Growing global interdependence means that, more and more, "even distant disorder can have effects that hurt, influence, or disturb the majority of people living within the United States," argued Harvard political scientist Joseph S. Nye Jr. To deal with emerging global perils, continued Nye, writing last year in the Atlantic Monthly, "we will want to influence distant governments on a variety of issues." Foreign aid is one of the few means available for bolstering U.S. influence abroad and, ideally, for shaping a better world.

Skewed priorities

Unfortunately, the U.S. foreign aid budget has yet to be reconfigured for the post-Cold War era, and assistance dollars are not being stretched more effectively to cope with emerging global problems. In the administration's FY 1993 aid request, for example, spending on security assistance dwarfs development aid. Even with the Cold War's end, security assistance will continue, under current plans, to be the single largest item in the foreign aid budget for years to come.

Also, despite widespread agreement that aid to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union is absolutely critical, this year's foreign aid request asks for nearly twice as much money to assist Egypt--population 55 million--as it does to aid the 20 or so nations of the former Communist bloc, with 350 million people. A modern day Marshall Plan for the East may not be practical given America's fiscal constraints, but the United States can and must do more. "Fragile new democracies face daunting challenges," commented Secretary of State James Baker in early 1989. "They need, and deserve, from us more than mere words of encouragement." Baker's comments, made before the revolution of late 1989, could not be more appropriate today, when numerous new democracies are struggling to survive.

The economic rationale for aiding the former Communist bloc is equally compelling. "By failing to act, the United States may be locked out of the most important new market and source of raw materials of the 20th century," warned House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt in early February, referring specifically to the Soviet Union. In Eastern Europe, healthier economic conditions make aid an even more promising investment.

Not long after the collapse of Communist rule in Eastern Europe, Senator Bob Dole made a reasonable proposal: Washington should cut aid to the top five recipients--Egypt, Israel, Pakistan, Turkey, and the Philippines--by 5 percent to free up new money to help newly democratic nations. "To me, it boils down to this," said Dole in January 1990. "Are big gains for freedom worth a small cut in a few huge foreign aid programs? I say yes." Dole's colleagues, however, said no. His proposal touched off a firestorm of criticism and was never seriously considered.

Two years later, the basic problem identified by Dole remains unchanged: since the foreign aid budget is not likely to increase anytime soon, the United States must cut existing programs if it wants to substantially fund new initiatives. With the Cold War long over, it is time to reslice a foreign aid pie which was baked during an earlier era. Two principles should guide policymakers in this task: first, those elements of the foreign aid budget which reflect a cold war agenda should be rapidly phased out. Second, U.S. assistance to the Third World--the bulk of which now goes to a few allies--should be distributed more widely to cope with mounting developmental problems.

A new aid agenda

Without question, the key to foreign aid reform lies in the area of security assistance. Nearly a third of U.S. bilateral aid is spent on the Foreign Military Financing program, while another 20 percent goes for Economic Support Funds, which is often just another form of security assistance. The State Department's FY 93 request for "international security assistance" is $7.4 billion--a figure which includes both the FMF and ESF programs.

During the Cold War, U.S. security assistance served to bolster key anti-Communist allies and to secure American access to overseas bases. Today, despite the Soviet Union's collapse, many of these aid programs live on. Turkey, Greece, and Portugal, for example, are slated to receive 22 percent of this year's FMF funding, or nearly $1 billion. Whereas the aid to Portugal is essentially rent money for U.S. access to Lages air base in the Azores, the rationale for aid to Greece and Turkey has long been to shore up the military position of less healthy members of NATO. In justifying last year's $350 million in military aid to Greece, for example, Reginald Bartholomew, the under secretary of State for International Security Affairs, said: "We have a continuing interest in assisting Greece with the modernization of its military to support fulfillment of its NATO roles." The expensive and endless U.S. project to modernize Turkey's large military forces had long been justified on the same grounds.

Amid Cold War tensions, a strong case could be made for bolstering NATO's southern flank. These days, however, it is becoming difficult to make a case for NATO itself. Common sense suggests that there is room for big reductions in the Cold War military aid programs to Greece and Turkey.

The case of security assistance to Israel and Egypt is more complex. These two countries receive nearly 70 percent of FMF funds and the lion's share of ESF monies. Together, they account for nearly a third of the entire FY 1993 foreign aid budget. In the words of Lieutenant Teddy Allen, head of the Defense Security Assistance Agency, the overall purpose of this vast expenditure is to "preserve Middle East peace and security." Given the volatility of the Middle East, few can take issue with such a goal. But in pondering foreign aid in an era of austerity, a few questions seem worth asking: Does Israel still face the kind of grave external threats it did when the U.S. aid program began? Is massive U.S. aid to Egypt still required to secure its regional cooperation? In short, are the original rationales for the aid programs to Egypt and Israel still as compelling as they once were, or have they turned into entitlement programs--automatically renewed each year without much thought? These questions do not have easy answers. But what is so worrisome is that nobody seems to be asking them.

Ultimately, security assistance must be evaluated in the larger context of U.S. foreign policy goals in a changing world. As noted above, the greatest challenges confronting U.S. policymakers are no longer security-related. At the core of a new foreign aid agenda, then, must be the recognition that shoring up a handful of allies, primarily through security assistance, is not the best way to spend the bulk of scarce foreign aid dollars. The foreign aid budget must be stretched further, and more widely, in an effort to reverse global trends which could produce chaos and economic decline by early in the 21st century. Several new spending priorities seem self-evident:

-- Population: A world of 10 billion people is difficult to imagine given the strains which many Third World countries are already under. U.S. population aid, hovering around a quarter billion dollars annually for the past few years, should be at least doubled, in accordance with the guidelines of the U.N. Amsterdam Forum on Population in the 21st Century.

-- Agriculture: "The environmental degradation of the planet is starting to show up at harvest time," observed Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute. "The cumulative effects of losing 24 billion tons of topsoil each year are being felt in some of the world's major food-producing regions." The implications of this trend cannot be underestimated. At a time that world population is increasing by 90 to 100 million people a year, the availability of arable land is rapidly decreasing. The United States should lead a massive international effort to stem this ominous development, as has been suggested by numerous experts and organizations.

-- Environment: Environmental degradation, it is now widely recognized, poses a profound threat to growth and stability in the Third World. In recent years, USAID has shown a new awareness of this reality. "Development that depletes resources is not development at all," stated USAID Administrator Roskens in 1990. This awareness, however, has yet to translate into bold new U.S. programs for dealing with environmental degradation in the Third World, which continues at an ever accelerating pace. Formulating such programs should be near the top of the U.S. aid agenda.

The list of new foreign aid priorities could go on and would include, as already mentioned, greatly increased spending in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It bears repeating once again, however, that none of these initiatives is possible without a major overhaul of the foreign aid budget. That overhaul should begin sooner rather than later. And if the State Department wishes to avoid more stringent congressional earmarking of the foreign aid budget, as its officials often state, it must take the lead in setting the new aid agenda.