Foreign Aid: a Declining Commitment

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Introduction

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Overview

In 1988, one theme seems to dominate every debate over foreign aid: America can no longer afford to keep doing all the things it has been doing in the world. The difficult and controversial choices facing the next administration and the next Congress are likely to involve discarding commitments to some countries and reducing others. “We've got to look at what's working, what's not working and set some priorities,” says Rep. Dante B. Fascell, D-Fla., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

From its inception more than four decades ago, at the close of World War II, America's foreign aid program has served dual purposes—containing communism and helping needy countries. Sometimes the aims coincided, sometimes not. Public opinion divided over which goal should be supreme. “We became confused, in short, by our own rhetoric,” say Stanley J. Heginbotham and Larry Q. Nowels, authors of a recent Congressional Research Service study on foreign aid. And that confusion over goals, they observe, often resulted in disillusionment with the results of foreign aid.