Foreign Aid Essay

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Recommended: the importance of foreign aid

American politics, specifically, American foreign policy is a very controversial topic of study and subsequent discussion. Foreign aid, defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “the transfer of capital goods from one country to another”, is crucial to U.S. foreign policy. But how can foreign aid, which represents only about 0.2 percent of Gross National Product and less than 1 percent of the federal budget , be important to something as crucial as foreign policy? A few questions must be asked in order to shed some light on this. First, how does the donating nation (for the purpose of this paper, the U.S. and donor/donating country/nation will be used interchangeably) determine how much aid to give? Second, who actually gets the aid? And third, how much aid do the recipient nations receive? Looking back on history and within modern times, the neediest of nations are the not the ones, which receive foreign aid (McKinlay and Little, 1977). In fact, foreign aid can be described as a trade for specific political concessions, which benefit the donor country. How the determination of which country receives foreign aid is usually dependent on the strategic importance to the donor country (as a modern example let us use Egypt, which is in the top five of the countries, which receive the most U.S. foreign aid. Egypt is in a strategic location, in close proximity to Israel). How much aid is actually given will depend on a number of factors, including the current state of affairs in the donor country and any prevailing fears of the time (i.e. the spread of communism during the Cold War, terrorism, etc.). In order to determine how much aid is given, I will draw from the selectorate theory, particularly, from the winning coalition, which is...

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...obally, it is done in a extremely strategic manner, which not only assists in promoting better living standards and policies, which make recipient nations more accountable and transparent, but it dramatically increases national security by ensuring that countries adopt policies, which are beneficial to the U.S. but it also creates allies and in instances strengthens allies in turbulent regions. Foreign aid continues to be one of the most important elements of U.S. foreign policy just as it was as far back as the conclusion of the Second World War and as current as our concentrated efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. So the next time someone dismisses foreign aid as being something unnecessary and irrelevant to our benefit and foreign policy, consider that without it the U.S. wouldn’t have many allies and could possibly not be anywhere near the superpower it is today.

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