U.S. Foreign Assistance is woefully out of date. It’s crucial to our security and relations with the rest of the world to have a strong foreign assistance program. As CGD Research Fellow Stewart Patrick said in a 2006 speech on foreign assistance, “economic stagnation, authoritarian misrule, and weak institutions are closely linked with political instability, extremism, and violent conflict.” We know by now that global development makes us richer and safer. So how do we modernize U.S. foreign assistance?

CGD Senior Fellow Steve Radelet outlines an updated foreign assistance agenda for the future president in his recently published essay, “Modernizing Foreign Assistance for the 21st Century: An Agenda for the Next U.S. President.” Here are his five to-dos for America:

1. Develop a National Foreign Assistance Strategy that elevates global development as critical to our national interest and lays out the principal missions and mandates for foreign assistance;
2. Reform the organizational structure by merging most foreign assistance programs and related development policy instruments into a new Cabinet-level department, and strengthening the organization by expanding and deepening the professional staff, revamping delivery mechanisms, and building a serious monitoring and evaluation system;
3. Rewrite the outdated and unwieldy 1961 Foreign Assistance Act in order to streamline procurement rules, earmarks, and restrictions, and to reestablish a strong partnership between the Executive Branch and Congress that allows greater flexibility to the former provided there is greater accountability and responsiveness to the latter;
4. Place a higher priority on multilateral channels of assistance; and
5. Increase the quantity and improve the allocation of assistance, since even with recent increases U.S. foreign assistance is not large enough or unencumbered enough to meet our major foreign policy goals.

We here at Global Development Matters urge our future president to use this road map to prepare us for the 21st century and beyond, repairing our global leadership so we can better field environmental and security crises as well as advance our efficacy in helping the billion people that live on less than a dollar a day.

Watch this speech by USAID Administrator and Director of Foreign Assistance Henrietta Fore for a quick overview about why foreign assistance is important and what we can do about it.

As you’ve probably heard, Obama and Huckabee were the winners of last night’s Iowa Caucus.

In Obama’s victory speech, he gave a nod to climate change and poverty as some of the topics he would address as president. In December, Obama committed to strengthen our security through a global development strategy.

Watch his speech:

Huckabee also mentioned some global development issues when he appeared on the “Early Show” the morning of the caucus. He said people “in the Republican establishment think I’m a little too liberal for them because I actually care about hunger, poverty, disease and the environment.”

Watch the segment:

The race for nomination is far from over—make sure to check out the rest of the candidates’ stands on global development issues on our candidate page and on One.org’s On the Record page.

ABC news and the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, hosted a panel of political analysts and foreign policy experts at UNLV on November 16th. They explored the tough issues the next candidate will have to face, especially concerning national security and foreign policy. Here’s an excerpt from Carlos Pascual, a vice president and director of Foreign Policy at Brookings, speaking about the importance of fostering partnerships with other countries:

“I think for the next U.S. president the biggest central challenge is going to be to restore American credibility and leadership in order to establish effective global and international partners. And that is going to be fundamental to securing American national security interests overseas….

Whoever the next president is is going to face a series of crises….They’re going to face a whole series of geopolitical challenges….Then there is a series of wider, almost existential structural systemic questions that we face in the world that we live in today, issues of energy security and climate change, non-proliferation, proliferation of nuclear weapons in particular, transnational terrorism, global poverty. And there is no way the United States alone can deal with these issues.

The only way we can do this is to effectively establish the kinds of partnerships with an international community that trusts one another and works by a rule-based system….
I think that whoever that president is, they’re going to have an aggressive agenda that demonstrates a change in American behavior…Because it is by acting in a way that starts to demonstrate that the United States, one, has values, and two, is committed to a rule-based international system that we’ll start to convince the international community that we are not unilateralists.”

Read the article for more transcripts from the panel.

Our world is more interconnected than ever—we need to take steps to make sure it stays that way. A new report underscores that how we treat our environment impacts national security.

Relations between countries will be severely strained due to scarcity of resources and people fleeing droughts and rising sea-levels. Nations may turn inwards and globalisation could be threatened.

Poor countries are the hardest hit in terms of environmental consequences. At a forum to release “The Age of Consequences” report, Leon Fuerth, national security adviser to former Vice President Al Gore said that the more fortunate countries could “go through a 30-year process of kicking people away from the lifeboat.” He continued, saying that this would be “extremely debilitating in moral terms” and “it also suggests the kinds of hatreds that build up between different groups will be accentuated as these groups attempt to move to more clement locations on the planet.”

John Podesta, President Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, president of the Center for American Progress think tank, and contributor to the report, spoke about an inevitable scenario “in which people and nations are threatened by massive food and water shortages, devastating natural disasters and deadly disease outbreaks.”

As early as this week in the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, a bill is up for debate regarding limiting carbon emissions. Let’s hope that we can take some steps to shape our policy in order to minimize our harmful impacts on the environment.

We want to continue to support the flow of good will and resources between nations. Each of us can take steps to reduce our own carbon footprint. We can also tell our candidates how important it is to us to contribute to the stability of our planet and the people on it.

Read the article for more information.

You can also download portions of the report (or the whole thing if you have a lot of time on your hands!) to learn more.